NOW is the winter of Republican discontent, and it won’t be made glorious summer by dumping Newt Gingrich. Nor, in truth, will it be made glorious summer simply by rallying behind Gingrich, though such a show of political courage would help. For the true cause of Republican discontent is the party’s lack of a compelling national agenda. Fix that problem, and Republicans will do fine. Fail, and the prospects for fundamental Republican realignment could be dealt a devastating blow.
An agenda is an ideological impulse made practical and concrete. Vigorous, successful political movements always have agendas. For two generations, from the New Deal through the Great Society — even for a couple of decades thereafter — the liberal wing of the Democratic party had many things it wanted to do. As a result, America experienced a lengthy period of liberal dominance. Sometimes the liberals tried to do too much, and often they tried to do things that were politically foolish. But try they did.
Republicans, too, have made mistakes these past two years. But you can’t move forward if you don’t try, and if the country is basically with you, you usually succeed — or make some progress, at least. There is nothing in politics more startling today, a mere two years after the huge Republican breakthrough in 1994 and a couple of months after the sustaining election of 1996, than the spectacle of Republican timidity and defensiveness now evident on Capitol Hill.
These weaknesses are sometimes disguised as shrewdness and self-confidence. “Let Clinton go first,” Republicans on the Hill advise. “Make him submit his budget, which will entail ‘cuts’ in Medicare that approach the proposals of the last Republican Congress. Let Clinton stew in his own juices for a while, and then we’ll take the credit.”
This approach is not without appeal as a short-term tactic. But as a real strategy, it reflects a dangerous underestimation of Clinton and an overreaction to the errors of 1995. The fact is that hanging back could simply help Clinton move ahead in his project of building a New Democrat majority. At best, it would preserve the political status quo. But stasis is bad for an insurgent, newmajority party. Republicans lack the entrenched institutional advantages enjoyed by the Democrats, and so they need to be constantly on the move. We are debating Newt Gingrich’s ethics today in part because we are not arguing about 20 different Republican assaults on the welfare state. As one Republican strategist acknowledged to me last week, ” Right now, we’re saying nothing to the American people.” But there is plenty to say, and plenty to do.
One of the things Republicans should not say is that they are going to govern America from Capitol Hill. They cannot. One true lesson of the 104th Congress is that you can’t govern against the president with a narrow majority in Congress. You can govern in tandem with the president, but if you do only that, you risk muddling what should be a stark political and ideological contrast. Congressional Republicans will obviously have their successes, and that’s well and good, but they should let the 32 Republican governors show how Republican governance really works.
What the Congress can do, above all, is frame key differences between the two parties, thereby laying the groundwork for a big victory in 1998 and a governing mandate in 2000. I suggest three areas of focus: the courts, school choice, and China. All three are important. All three have the advantage of sharply differentiating the Republican position (or what ought to be the Republican position) from the Clinton administration’s. All three relate to basic American principles — self-government, opportunity at home, and liberty abroad. And all three bring together the various strands of the conservative coalition — except for big business, whose reaction to a conservative offensive on these issues will range from unenthusiastic to horrified. But then, what winning Republican issue in the last two decades has had the support of the business community? Not supply-side tax cuts, not Reagan’s reversal of detente, not opposition to gays in the military, not unequivocal rejection of the Clinton health-care plan. Business discomfort will be a sign that the GOP is behaving as a majority party, and not simply as a vehicle for commerce.
The Courts
In the past two years, the pace of judicial abuses and usurpations has picked up, and matters will only get worse unless a vigorous counterattack is launched. Having lost popular support, liberalism now seeks to advance by stealth, under cover of tendentious constitutional interpretation. With four more years of Clinton judicial appointments on the way, it is time for a serious political effort aimed at putting the courts back in place. On this, virtually all conservatives agree, and the issue will allow Republicans to rally popular support on behalf of the elevated principle of self-government- indeed, the constitutional self-government that the courts now frequently subvert.
An effort to curb the courts would unite all of those who have been affronted by judicial decisions on abortion, gay rights, term limits, quotas, crime, assisted suicide, and other areas of political and social engineering. While many of these issues will have to be fought on their own substantive grounds, a comprehensive attack on the courts is a way to frame the issues — the social ones particularly — in the context of self-government. It is a way to channel moral fervor into an agenda both populist and constitutional.
There is a whole menu of possibilities for curbing the courts, from the very broad (constitutional amendments) to the relatively narrow (technical modifications of law and jurisdiction). What is needed first is a serious political and strategic discussion of the possibilities.
But a broader debate on judicial overreach is also necessary, for it offers an opportunity to define something like a conservative vision for America — one strikingly different from liberalism’s vision. As Justice Antonin Scalia noted in Romer v. Evans, the effect of judicial intervention in recent cases has been “to take the victory away from traditional forces” in society. An attempt to tame the courts would allow Republicans to make clear they are confident that such self-government would lead to a better America — one with fewer abortions, stronger families, term limits for politicians (if the states so decide), no racial preferences, and a legal system that deals effectively with crime.
Given that there will be a rash of judicial activism to combat, scores of nominations to scrutinize, and a Clinton Justice Department to oversee, there will be no shortage of opportunities to highlight the Republican judicial stand, and a myriad of chances to pick the ripest fights and advance the cause.
School Choice
Nothing was more appalling in the recent presidential campaign than the way Republicans lost the education issue to Bill Clinton. After all, the Democratic party is unambiguously the party of a failed education establishment, while Republicans are the advocates of education reform. Those reforms, as Chester E. Finn, Jr. recently argued in these pages, need to go beyond parental choice of schools to a broader agenda of standards and expectations. But school choice is the key, especially when it comes to offering opportunity to the poor. Many of us already have some school choice – – we buy houses in areas with decent public schools or we send our kids to private ones. But poor parents have no such alternatives, and the best thing government can do for them is to encourage competition by allowing parental choice, so that the schools in which the poor are trapped will of necessity get better.
When the president’s former domestic policy adviser, William Galston, writes (with Diane Ravitch) that big-city school districts are too often “job programs for adults at the expense of the children they are supposed to serve, ” Republicans should not hesitate to use this Democratic testimony to assail the defenders of a rotted status quo.
The most dramatic thing Congress can do is to address the problems of the one city over which it has constitutional jurisdiction. In Washington, D.C., the congressionally appointed financial control board has declared the school system a total failure, “an absolute F.” Congress can insist on fundamental reform in Washington, including choice. Let the Democrats explain why poor children in the nation’s capital should be stuck in unsafe and educationally disastrous schools simply because the teachers’ unions and the education establishment — bulwarks of the Democratic party — are terrified of change.
China
Here too the Republicans can capture the moral high ground. Relations with China now constitute what may be our most important foreign-policy issue, and the Clinton administration has embraced a policy of constructive engagement that is virtually indistinguishable from appeasement. It is hard for Congress to make foreign policy (and sometimes unwise), but Congress can at least assure real public debate on all aspects of the Clinton administration’s China policy — on issues ranging from Hong Kong to human rights, from China’s nuclear proliferation to her military build-up. Republicans have a chance to tie together moral and strategic arguments for a tougher policy on China, and thereby recreate a Reaganite foreign-policy agenda that has been sorely and conspicuously lacking over the last few years. Reestablishing such an agenda may require a raucous fight with business interests that seek profits by pandering to the Chinese Communists. But such a fight would be healthy for the GOP, just as the Reaganite assault on Kissingerian “realism” vis-a-vis the Soviet Union 20 years ago proved good for the party, the nation, and the world
As with the courts and school choice, Republicans can pick occasions and venues most advantageous to making their case on China. They will have to make tactical choices, for example about where and how to link trade and moral concerns. But here there will be some liberal allies in the fight, along with the refreshing opportunity to craft arguments that transcend expedience and allow Republicans to doff the green eyeshade for once and talk about freedom and international standards of morality
All three of these issues have the strongest elements of the Republican coalition and populist force behind them, and all provide the opportunity for genuine political leadership. It would be nice if Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich took the lead on these issues, but it is not essential for the titular heads of the Republican caucuses in Congress to do so. In the late ’70s, it was backbenchers Jack Kemp in the House and Scoop Jackson (a Democrat, no less) in the Senate — and for that matter Kemp’s colleagues Lott and Gingrich — who helped a then-out-of-office Ronald Reagan frame an agenda for conservatives and the Republican party. Are there not today comparable political entrepreneurs who understand Machiavelli’s teaching that, in politics, fortune favors the bold?
By William Kristol
