There aren’t many concepts as beloved by conservatives as the great economist Joseph Schumpeter’s notion of creative destruction. Capitalism is superior to socialism because it is dynamic: Old forms and structures have to change or give way — or be destroyed — so new ones can prosper. Government shouldn’t get in the way and try to prop up faltering businesses and industries. But Schumpeter’s concept doesn’t apply only to economics. It applies to politics as well.
These days it applies to the Republican party. To stay with business terminology, the Republican party has been losing market share. In 1984, Ronald Reagan beat Walter Mondale by 18 points. In 1988, George Bush beat Dukakis by 8 points. Four years later Bush lost to Bill Clinton by 5 points and four years after that, Bob Dole lost to Clinton by 8 points. On the congressional level, the Republican party had a great anti-Clinton triumph in 1994, but failed to translate it into a governing conservatism. The Gingrich revolution petered out, and the GOP lost seats in each of the last two congressional elections.
Just as important, the party has been losing ground on policy matters. The Democrats essentially set the agenda for the last Congress, with issues like the minimum wage hike and the patients’ bill of rights. Pathetically, Republicans were left to boast, in their response to the president’s State of the Union address, that they want to spend $ 500 million more on the Department of Education than Bill Clinton asked for. Survey data make it clear that voters trust the Democratic party to address key issues like education, health care, crime, and the economy more than they trust the Republican party. And over the last few years, the Democratic party has reopened a lead over the GOP in party identification.
If the Republican National Committee called in a team from McKinsey, the consultants would say it’s not terribly surprising that the Republican party should be faltering. The GOP has been following a strategy laid out over a quarter century ago, back when Sears and GM and AT&T dominated the economy. No wonder it’s not working too well in the age of Yahoo! and Qualcomm.
The GOP coalition as we know it was shaped between 1964 and 1980. Religious conservatives, largely from the South, and economic libertarians, largely from the West, teamed up and took control of the GOP, overcoming — and to some degree jettisoning — the Northeastern liberals. The two ascendant groups had a common foe — big, intrusive government. In those days, New Right Republicans were the agents of creative destruction. Against a drifting and reactive GOP establishment, they stood for bold tax cuts, deregulation, and opposition to both liberal social engineering projects, such as busing, and liberal cultural projects — amnesty, acid, and abortion. They understood that to prevail they first had to challenge and even destroy what stood in their way. Ronald Reagan challenged an incumbent Republican president, Gerald Ford, in a primary fight in 1976. Jeffrey Bell defeated Republican senator Clifford Case in a primary in 1978. And Al D’Amato did the same to Jacob Javits in 1980.
And in 1980, Reagan was elected despite — or because of? — the defection of part of the old GOP establishment, in the person of liberal Republican John Anderson, who ran as a third party candidate. Conventional wisdom has it that nothing could be worse than for part of your coalition to split off and oppose you in November — and in the summer of 1980, many expected Anderson’s defection to damage Reagan’s chances. It didn’t.
Reagan won, and created a new governing majority, bringing the now famous Reagan Democrats and independents into the fold. That majority has served the country well. But times and issues change. Busing is gone. Crime is down. Soviet communism is dead. It’s hard to argue that the country is being strangled by taxes and regulation when the economy is chugging along at nearly 7 percent growth. And though it took them three presidential defeats to do so, the Democrats finally reengineered themselves, and they started winning. In the last two presidential elections, the Republican candidates were left with about 40 percent of the vote — the Republican base and little more.
Along comes John McCain. Either by accident or by design, he has become an agent of creative destruction. He has the temperament — to say the least — to challenge the old order. He has attracted support from a diverse group of people — independents, Democrats, and reenergized Republicans — who are largely unmoved by old Republican themes. It’s fair to say that the McCain campaign has done a poor job of persuading members of the old structure that it is in their best interest to change, and it’s also true that the destructive effects of the McCain campaign have been more evident than the creativity. But it is always that way at first. The iconoclastic phase of creative destruction comes first; only then does something new have space to bloom and prosper.
On the destructive side, McCain has run directly at two pillars of the old Republican coalition. For the past two decades, economic conservatives have championed across-the-board tax cuts. John McCain proposed more modest tax cuts, and said he’d rather pay down the debt. Two of the most prominent social conservatives of the old coalition are Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. McCain attacked them.
On the creative side, McCain has groped his way toward two basic innovations. He would replace the old mostly libertarian attitudes toward government that characterized the “Leave Us Alone” coalition with an appeal to citizens committed to conservative reform. McCain doesn’t say that government is oppressive and just needs to get out of the way. He says he wants to reform government to make us proud. He’s proposed campaign finance reform, education reform, Social Security reform, a campaign against lobbyist-driven pork-barrel spending. Far from calling government an evil that needs to be dismantled, he says that public service is the noblest calling.
As important but less obvious, at least until last week, McCain would redirect a religiously based moral conservatism into a patriotically grounded moral appeal. When McCain talks about remoralizing America, he talks in terms of reinvigorating patriotism. As his February 28 Virginia Beach speech shows nicely, when John McCain starts talking about religious faith, he ends up talking about patriotism. This passage of the speech comes right after an anecdote from his time as a POW, when a guard who had shown the prisoner kindness identified himself as a Christian by drawing a cross in the dirt:
That is my faith; the faith that unites and never divides; the faith that bridges unbridgeable gaps in humanity. That is my religious faith, and it is the faith I want my party to serve, and the faith I hold in my country. It is the faith that we are all equal and endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is the faith I would die to defend.
Notice the slide from religious faith to the Declaration of Independence, from the cross to America. Similarly, in a statement Wednesday designed to reassure religious conservatives that his attack on Robertson and Falwell was not an attack on them, McCain said, “I have always welcomed the support of millions of religious conservatives who share my convictions about the greatness of America and our Judeo-Christian values.” This conflation of religion and patriotism is very much in the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt and, for that matter, Ronald Reagan. It has been much less evident in the conservative rhetoric of the 1990s.
In policy terms, McCain is less likely to use government to combat sin or regulate family life. But he is more likely to use government power to combat those he thinks put private interest above America’s interest. His career can be seen as a series of crusades against people McCain thinks have behaved selfishly — tobacco companies, pork-barrel spenders, special interests, overreaching federal regulators.
Electorally, the McCain majority coalition would take in the independent voters who have grown more numerous in the information age. During the 1990s, two outsiders briefly (and remarkably) led in presidential preference polls: Ross Perot in mid-1992 and Colin Powell in late 1995. As a reformer, McCain aims to be the thinking man’s Perot. As a patriot, he aims to be a politically engaged Powell. The patriotic reform impulse, which flared up in 1992 and 1995, has reemerged in the McCain campaign. Even if that campaign now falls short, this sentiment could be at the heart of a new conservative governing majority.
This new majority — whether led by McCain or someone else — would include mainstream conservatives in the North and South, bicoastal independents, and the midwestern bourgeoisie. Whereas the Goldwater Republicans jettisoned the northeastern Republicans, McCain would jettison the most self-caricaturing leaders of the right. If forced to explain this in realpolitik terms, he’d probably say, you can’t win the large group of swing independents needed for electoral victory unless you disavow the Robertsons and Falwells (while striving to retain the religious conservative grass roots). By framing his moral crusade as a patriotic rather than a religious movement, McCain could create an alliance between the independents and most social conservatives. He might fail this time; some of his recent rhetoric was harsh. But general election match-up polls pitting both Republicans against Gore suggest that the potential McCain majority may be the only governing majority available to conservatives.
Naturally, the people who created, or benefit from, or are simply comfortable with the old Republican order have fought bitterly to block McCain. Like all defenders of old orders, they play up the destructive side of their opponent and deny the existence of any constructive side. McCain hurts his own cause with his occasional recklessness. But that is the nature of creative destruction. It is sometimes reckless. Destruction induces anxiety before creation can inspire confidence.
Furthermore, some McCain opponents insist there is nothing wrong with the status quo Republican coalition, at least nothing so wrong that it couldn’t be fixed by putting an attractive person like George W. Bush at the top.
In some ways Bush has as strong a claim to the reformer mantle as John McCain. He did achieve tort reform and education reform in Texas. But already in this campaign, he has been saddled with the old Republican coalition. If he is the nominee, Al Gore will be sure to hang its most inflammatory symbols around his neck. Bush has shown no inclination to rip out any part of the mansion he has inherited, and without that there can be no renovation.
Bush, then, is in danger of playing out the Michael Dukakis role in this election. After two presidential defeats, the Democratic party turned to a governor who attempted to run on competence, not ideology. But George Bush the elder, a sitting vice president, found it easy to slap the liberal caricature on a Democratic governor from the Northeast. Al Gore will certainly try to pin the same old right-wing tag on the southern Republican governor who spoke at Bob Jones University. It could end up taking the Republicans, as it took the Democrats, three presidential defeats before they embrace renovation.
This essay is being written a few days before Super Tuesday, when the Republican nominee will probably be determined. John McCain’s candidacy could be effectively finished off on that day. But the need for a period of Republican creative destruction will not end with his defeat, any more than the need to restructure the old GOP ended with Ronald Reagan’s primary defeat in 1976.
Either way, it is now clear that the Republican party has more to fear from stability than from change. Conservatives from Burke on have always emphasized that it is necessary to evolve in order to conserve. Conservatives should have the courage of their Burkean and Schumpeterian convictions. They shouldn’t fear the creative destruction that is now necessary to a healthy party and movement; they should join it and shape it.
