With all the discussion of the Democrats' cultural divide, it's easy
to overlook the cultural chasm that has been opening in the Republican
Party for the last quarter-century. Because it has been so one-sided and
because it has left the bones of moderation in the tar pits of its past,
the rightward seismic shift of the Republicans had come to seem like an
irreversible law of nature. Until Jim Jeffords' stunning abandonment of
the Republican Party last May, that is.
Jeffords is the U.S. senator from Vermont who decided he'd had enough
of lockstep conservatism and opted to become an Independent instead, while
voting with the Democrats on procedural matters in the Senate. His decision,
and the resulting shift in party control of the U.S. Senate, touched off
a variety of journalistic observations about the decline and fall of moderates
in a party now dominated by the rigorous Right. These ranged from misty-eyed
nostalgia for the sensible centrists of yore among the Eastern Seaboard
press -- once the ancestral homeland of "progressive" Republicans
-- to angry good-riddance imprecations from conservative media.
In an anthropological search for the vanishing
moderate Republican senator, I consulted dusty journals from a quarter-century
ago and discovered such creatures then walked the earth in multitudes.
If 1976 seems a long time ago, remember that most of today's dominant
baby boomers were then leaving behind their bangs and bongs and entering
the early phases of responsible adulthood, and remember that most of today's
revival rock bands and energy policy experts were then at their prime.
In the summer of America's bicentennial, there were 38 Republican members
of the U.S. Senate. Nearly half of them -- 17 -- were considered moderates,
if not liberals, by the prevailing community standards: Ted Stevens of
Alaska, Lowell Weicker Jr. of Connecticut, Hiram Fong of Hawaii, Charles
Percy of Illinois, James Pearson of Kansas, Edward Brooke of Massachusetts,
Robert Griffin of Michigan, Clifford Case of New Jersey, Jacob Javits
of New York, Robert Taft Jr. (the Younger) of Ohio, Mark Hatfield and
Bob Packwood of Oregon, Richard Schweiker and Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania,
J. Glenn Beall Jr. and Charles Mathias of Maryland, and Robert Stafford
(Jeffords' predecessor) of Vermont. Others, like Howard Baker Jr. of Tennessee
and Milton Young of North Dakota, were close to the hazy line that separated
conservatives from moderates. (Still others, like Bob Dole of Kansas,
were future "moderates" in the GOP conservative demonology.)
And to top things off, the presiding officer of the U.S. Senate was none
other than Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller, long the bete noire
of conservative Republicans and chief representative of the legendary
Eastern Liberal Establishment.
That same summer, Ronald Reagan's insurgent candidacy to topple moderate
Republican President Gerald Ford was heading toward defeat, and many conservative
activists were considering the possibility of abandoning the GOP to create
a third party. Evangelical Christians were being stirred into political
activity by the campaign of Democratic candidate Jimmy Carter, and Ford
nearly beat him by successfully appealing to cultural liberals and moderates
uncomfortable with Carter's "born again" status.
The later history of the conservative-moderate
fight for the GOP is better known, but it's often forgotten that the outcome
was uncertain at least through 1980 and, in some respects, through 1988.
Ronald Reagan's crowning victory for the conservative movement was nearly
derailed by the primary candidacy of one George Herbert Walker Bush --
at the time considered a moderate, deploring Reagan's "voodoo economics"
and fairly fresh from his stint on the national board of Planned Parenthood
-- and the independent general election candidacy of John Anderson, a moderate
Republican congressman from Illinois.
It's the Bush family saga that best represents the declining status of
Republican moderates since 1976. After he was added to the Reagan ticket
in 1980, Bush quickly abandoned his economic and social-issues deviations
from conservative orthodoxy, winning the nomination in 1988 as the candidate
of anti-tax absolutists and the Christian Right. He then lost the presidency
in part because he offended his conservative "base."
Without casting any aspersions on his personal beliefs, it must be noted
that President George W. Bush has continued his family's Long March to
the Right by rejecting everything about his father that made conservatives
fear he was secretly a Jim Jeffords Republican. He espoused good-old-boy
resentment of his own preppy education at Philips Andover and Yale. He
traded in his father's Yankee twang for an authentic Texas drawl. He abandoned
elite Episcopalianism for Main Street Methodism. He joined the tax-cutting
Church of Supply-Side Economics so fervently that he almost handled snakes.
Nothing of the old-fashioned Liberal Establishment Republican doctrine
remained other than a rhetorical commitment to "compassion"
that smacked of noblesse oblige.
Even as Jim Jeffords-style moderate Republicanism
became eclipsed in the GOP, a new and unexpected centrist impulse has
emerged through the agency of Arizona Sen. John McCain, long considered
a Goldwater conservative. The thrust of McCain's 2000 presidential campaign
was not really ideological: It represented a revolt against the interest
and advocacy groups -- ranging from the K Street business lobbyists to
the National Rifle Association, the National Right To Life Committee,
and the Christian Right -- that seemed to dominate the GOP and the Bush
candidacy. The McCain appeal hit pay dirt mainly among political independents,
especially those who supported Ross Perot's two campaigns for the presidency.
But the vicious reaction to his campaign and its declaration of independence
from the coalition politics of the Right has led him steadily into cooperation
with Democratic centrists in the Senate and in the country at large.
The real lesson of the McCain campaign is that the old Republican moderates
have not disappeared in the electorate as they have in the Senate: They
or their descendants are becoming Independents or even New Democrats.
The real lesson of the Jeffords defection is not that one Republican moderate
has finally gotten fed up and voted for Democratic control of the Senate.
It's that moderates are up for grabs but Democrats, whose moderate faction
is far stronger than is the one on the other side of the aisle, have the
chance to seize the center if they will. The political ghosts of Percy,
Scott, Rockefeller, Brooke, and all those long-lost Senate Republican
moderates stalk the no man's land that will determine the future landscape
of American politics.
