Political ideas have consequences. But political consequences don’t always have ideas. Not very big ones, at least. Sometimes in politics things just happen, almost at random, products of unconnected choice and chance that only remotely involve The Issues. This naturally unsettles the serious people who explain and practice politics for a living. So they struggle against it, attempting to superimpose theoretical depth and practical logic on events that often aren’t very deep or logical at all.
This year’s Republican presidential race is a chaotic case in point. The campaign is going very badly. It has so far been a rancorous multi-candidate stalemate. Its principal effect has been to boost the standing of Pat Buchanan, a man whose style and substance many American voters find more than a little unpleasant and spooky. The longer this battle continues, the weaker it will make the GOP’s eventual nominee, and the more it will thus limit prospects for a November presidential outcome that might help seal the rightward realignment of American politics.
So what does this mean about the ideological coalition that not 15 months ago swept the Republican party to national majority status? Have big, radically different ideas gained sudden currency, ideas that threaten the conservative realignment? Have forces that may fracture the Republican coalition been unleashed? And is there anything anyone can do to alter the current script and guarantee a happy ending?
American journalism now does its sober, professional best to discern the underlying political currents that have propelled Pat Buchanan’s recent success. His economic platform is a collection ofphobias about foreign eign trade, immigration, and heartless corporations. People are voting for him. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc, the pundits argue: We are witnessing an eruption of economic populism at the Republican grassroots.
Are we, though? One searches the exit polls in vain for evidence that economic populism has determined more than a tiny fraction of Republican primary votes this year. On February 27, for example, Buchanan beat Bob Dole more than four to one among Arizonans who ranked immigration as the “most important issue.” But only 10 percent of Arizona Republicans did rank immigration highest on the list of their concerns. Fewer still–a barely visible 4 percent–were primarily motivated by questions of “foreign trade.” And, oddly enough, a plurality in this latter category preferred Dole, not Buchanan.
There is one, indisputably significant group of issue-driven Republicans for whom Pat Buchanan now holds special, vote-generating appeal: religious conseratives. They are supporting him by wide margins: 48 percent of them in New Hampshire and 54 percent of them in Arizona. But is that because they suppose that President Buchanan might realistically accomplish something more about abortion or school prayer than could, say, President Dole? Doubtful. Religious conservatives probably like Buchanan for a simpler (though no less salient) reason He is now the national political figure who voices their convictions with greatest passion and candor.
Passion and candor matter a lot at the moment. The public reaction against Bill Clinton’s feckless inconstancy now places a special premium on non- Clintonian “authenticity” in candidates for public offce. In this year’s presidential campaign, Democrats do not have much choice in the matter. But Republicans do. Asked why they voted as they did, Republicans in the New Hampshire and Arizona primaries–all Republicans, not just religious conservatives–said they wanted a man who, more than anything else, would ” stand up for his beliefs.” Republicans this year are voting not so much for any particular set of legislative proposals, in other words, but for a mood. And Buchanan’s is the most vivid and vigorously expressed mood in the field.
It’s not clear, after all, that many of his ideas really are so “extreme” in the textbook sense of the word. This magazine doesn’t agree with some of those ideas. But more than a few people, in both parties, do. What is arguably “extreme” about Buchananism is Buchanan himself. He is constitutionally opposed to the pieties that help make civil discourse civil. He has a natural, voracious, and often frightening appetite for the farthest edges of acceptable public debate. “I’m the bad guy,” Buchanan gleefully informs the New York Times. And he plays that role with gusto, deliberately enraging and expanding the ranks of his enemies, and delighting (and isolating) his supporters in the process — a manner and strategy that have never once in history won an American presidential campaign.
So Buchanan represents current conservatism’s least practical, most romantic ultra temperament. And unless Lamar Alexander’s calculated “just plain folks” routine soon wins better reviews from actual voters, Republicans are left only two other moods to choose from. There’s the gee-whiz libertarian futurism of Steve Forbes, whose unconcern for cultural conservatism is barely disguised. And the stolid, decent, painfully inarticulate Republican orthodoxy of Robert Dole.
Senator Dole’s is the conservatism with broadest Republican and national appeal. He is also, at least by dint of experience in lective offce (dare we utter such an “elitist” thought?), the best qualified of the three to manage the roller-coaster politics of the presidency. So why, with such advantages, his candidacy should be proving so obviously feeble — why he should be dead- locked in the race for a major-party presidential nomination with two journalists — is an interesting question. There are many answers. Few of them have much to do with big ideas.
The “revolutionary” rhetoric employed by Republcan congressional candidates to such great effect in 1994 has worked to discredit American political orthodoxies of every stripe. And mainstream Republican conservatism, in particular, has been undermined in 1994’s Washington aftermath. The revolution was over-promised. In legislative terms, it could not be achieved by narrow Republican congressional majorities over the obstructionism of a Democratic White House. And so if “revolution” is what’s needed, and ” insiders” like Bob Dole haven’t managed to produce it, why not Pat Buchanan or Steve Forbes?
Less complicated, more obvious factors have also worked to elevate ” outsider” Republican candidacies this year. Talent matters, as always. Buchanan, in particular, is a superb campaigner. Dole isn’t. Money matters, too. Unburdened by fund-raising requirements and legal spending limits, a reasonably competent wealthy person can go quite far, even in a presidential primary campaign. Steve Forbes proves that.
And then there is workaday accident and happenstance. Several plausible and attractive mainstream conservatives declined to make the presidential race this year. A switch of just 1,000 or so votes in Louisiana and New Hampshire would have given those races to Phil Gramm and Bob Dole, which might have sharply shifted the campaign’s momentum. Phil Gramm’s campaign — and Pete Wilson’s, for that matter — ran aground, unexpectedly, before the primaries even really began. And so on. Thus we have the field we’ve got.
No one can predict how or when the Republican nomination will finally be resolved. We won’t even try. By the time the next issue of this magazine appears, voters in South Carolina, the New England states, Colorado, Georgia, and New York will all have cast their ballots. Those results will inevitably alter the already fragile, manic psychology of the campaign. It’s a nerve- wracking spectacle for anyone who hopes for the defeat of the Clinton administration. Republican operatives and conservatives who prefer to win are pulling their hair with worry, and desperately hunting for a way to “clear the field” in favor of a candidate who could unite the party well in advance of November.
But, look: That’s probably not going to happen anytime soon. To date, Steve Forbes leads the race where delegates to the August Republican national convention are concerned. He can afford to go on. Why on earth, then, would he drop out? Why, for that matter, should Pat Buchanan ever let another candidate beat him into silence? He doesn’t need much money to continue. He has a core of committed supporters suffcient to keep him in the running for the rest of the year. And, truth be told, winning the race (or managing the race so as best to help the party beat Clinton) isn’t an overriding Buchanan concern. He’s the “bad guy,” remember.
On the other hand, we’re not prepared to concede November’s general election, either. Much of the current Republican morass could be long forgotten by then. Early Republican primary results have been over- interpreted in our view, to conservatism’s unwarranted disadvantage. In Congress, and especially at the state level, the GOP’s winning 1994 coalition still seems reasonably coherent. The tidal waves of partisan and ideological alignment in America — population shifts to the West and South, congressional retirements and redistricting, and liberalism’s general exhaustion and unpopularity — still work in favor of the GOP.
Just the same, as the presidential race unfolds, there’s no reason to think things won’t get worse before they get better. It didn’t have to be this way. It’s in some significant measure an accident that it is this way. But in politics, accidents sometimes count just as much as big ideas. And accidents have consequences, too. Alas.
David Tell, for the Editors
