John Boehner vs. the 'crazies': Should Republican Party let tea party win?

John Boehner is leaving as speaker because he can't control the tea party. Should the whole GOP give in? It has happened before.   

|
Chris Usher/CBS News/Reuters
Speaker of the House John Boehner (R) of Ohio talks with John Dickerson on 'Face the Nation' in Washington.

The Republican Party is barreling head-first toward a worst-case scenario – or is that a best-case scenario?

The tea party wing of the party has essentially toppled House Speaker John Boehner. His replacement will almost certainly need the tea party's stamp of approval.

Meanwhile, the Republican presidential campaign continues to confound the establishment. Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and Ted Cruz together have more support than all other Republican candidates combined, according to polls.

Is the Republican Party finally having its "Goldwater moment"?

When Barry Goldwater won the Republican presidential nomination in 1964, the base exulted. Here was a true conservative. Here was a man who would not compromise. Here was a man of rare vision.

Then he lost by 434 electoral votes, winning only 39 percent of the popular vote – the most lopsided loss in presidential history, by that measure.

To the Republican establishment, it was an unmitigated disaster. In 1968, the party nominated Richard Nixon – a moderate if not a liberal Republican – and retook the White House.

To arch-conservatives, however, Senator Goldwater's campaign laid the groundwork for America's conservative revolution. His doctrine of low taxes and limited government became bedrock ideals for Ronald Reagan, who campaigned for Goldwater before becoming governor of California. The conservative Heritage Foundation calls Goldwater "the most consequential loser in American politics."

Today, much remains to play out, and the establishment almost always has the last word. Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R) of California, a Boehner protégé, is a front-runner for the speaker's post. And the presidential election, in many ways, has barely even started.

Yet even if the establishment reestablishes some measure of control, does the Republican Party need a Goldwater moment?

With Mr. Boehner's departure, the tea party has outlasted a man of legendary political patience. In the presidential race, they have taken a process that the Republican Party designed specifically to help establishment candidates and emphatically done the opposite.

In other words, there is little evidence to suggest the Republican populist rebellion is going away, though seismic changes in the country since 1964 – partly as a result of the conservative revolution – mean that the underlying situation is in many ways dramatically different.

On its face, today’s Republican insurgency echoes the conservative groundswell for Goldwater in 1964. The Atlantic’s Matthew Dallek writes that “in the late 1950s and early 1960s conservatives were widely dismissed as ‘kooks’ and ‘crackpots’ with no hope of winning political power.” Today, the conservative base is looked upon even by the Republican Party as “crazies,” said Michael Needham of Heritage Action Sunday. Mr. Boehner, only somewhat more charitably, called them “false prophets.”

"Absolutely, they're unrealistic!" he told CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

The mainstream media also thought little of Goldwater’s conservative rebellion: “In 1962 a writer in the The Nation suggested that conservatives were more interested in thinking up ‘frivolous and simple-minded’ slogans than in developing intelligent proposals to meet the complexities of post-Second World War America,” Mr. Dallek writes.

Could today’s much-maligned conservative insurgents similarly be laying the groundwork for a new Reagan, as Goldwater did? Does the establishment need to yield in order to move forward?

Perhaps, but the lessons from the Reagan Revolution were different, some say. Reagan took something that was already a reality on the ground – the New Deal – and gave it Goldwater’s conservative spin, said Henry Olsen of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, to the Monitor. “He permitted a conservative interpretation of the New Deal’s development that moved politics rightward.”

Today’s Republicans, by contrast, appear to be working against political realities rather than looking for ways to massage them. Mr. Trump has made his mark by advocating for the deportation of immigrants in the United States illegally – a position at odds with the country as a whole. And the political crisis that precipitated Boehner’s decision to depart also goes against broader public opinion – shutting down government to defund Planned Parenthood, an abortion provider.

On a more fundamental level, Goldwater’s vision was a new vision for America. Coming while the country was in the throes of a deep and sustained period of unvarnished liberalism – still emerging from the New Deal and with President Johnson’s War on Poverty ahead – Goldwater’s brand of conservatism promised a novel rightward pivot.

Today, by contrast, the broad strokes of American politics are still largely in the mold Reagan made from Goldwater’s model. President Clinton, a centrist Democrat, said the era of big government is over. Tax rates are near historic lows. If anything, polls suggest the country could now be shifting back leftward somewhat, with Millennials showing strong liberal leanings on a host of social and economic issues.

For Boehner, the political realities are that the country has twice elected the president who gave America Obamacare – a program that is the very opposite of Goldwater conservatism. Shutting down the government to defund it was not standing on principle, it was the height of political stupidity, he said.

"We got groups here in town, members of the House and Senate here in town, who whip people into a frenzy believing they can accomplish things that they know – they know! – are never going to happen," he told CBS Sunday.

“Kooks,” you might call them.

Whether they are the vanguards of a new American conservatism or the last defenders of the old is what these elections – for speaker and for president – are all about.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to John Boehner vs. the 'crazies': Should Republican Party let tea party win?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2015/0927/John-Boehner-vs.-the-crazies-Should-Republican-Party-let-tea-party-win
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe