What Cracked Up Conservatism in the 1990s, and What Can Recover It Today?
Left-wing journalist John Ganz has written a new book, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early Nineties, to answer the question we all want to know: “How did we get to today’s sour politics?” He blames it on the Right, and, for this, he has received wide praise in today’s mainstream media and even receiving some limited respect from the Right.
The nonfiction book critic for the Washington Post, Becca Rothfeld, somewhat lets the cat out of the Left bag by noting: “Devotees of Ganz’s pugilistic writing on Substack may be surprised by the restraint he displays describing the [Right] crack-up in his first book.” He is:
strangely silent on the question of [Donald] Trump. Even when the parallels between past and present are most glaring, Ganz leaves his readers to make them out. Still, even though its claims about present-day America are largely implicit, When the Clock Broke is leagues more insightful on the subject of Trump’s ascent than most writing that purports to address the issue directly.
Rothfeld is not subtle in defining Ganz’s 1990s crack-up precursors: “Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, thinly veiled white supremacist and all-around reactionary Pat Buchanan, and kooky populist maverick Ross Perot, all of whom ran for president in 1992.” At a lower level, the precursors included late-in-life anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard, and old Chronicles magazine paleoconservative Samuel Francis. These are the “rejects of what President George H. W. Bush rather menacingly termed the New World Order,” who “felt betrayed by their leaders” in 1992 and provided all of the real political “options in that year’s primaries.”
Ganz is correct that Trump is a continuation to some extent of Buchanan, but this was only as one faction among important others, while Duke and company represented minuscule fringes. In 1992 and 1996, Buchanan was a serious candidate representing a nationalist faction, but he only won about a fifth of the primary vote, and in 2000 ran poorly as a third-party candidate. Moreover, Buchanan had supported mainstream Gerald Ford over Ronald Reagan in 1976.
It so happens that I wrote a book titled Reagan Electionomics: 1976-1984, covering much of the same period, that presented a rather different view. Ganz is not wrong in identifying the Right “crack up” cause with H. W. Bush since conservatives certainly did believe he betrayed them as president, especially on taxes. But as far back as 1972, conservatives opposed President Richard Nixon in a primary for betraying conservative principles. But his opponent was not a “kooky” candidate but Rep. John Ashbrook, who was also chairman of the American Conservative Union. While the American Conservative Union board symbolically supported Buchanan in the 1992 primary, it was not to win the nomination but to show mainstream conservatism’s dissatisfaction with Bush.
To fully explain the ’90s Right crack-up, one must start even further back, at least with Ronald Reagan’s speech for Barry Goldwater’s presidency in 1964, and to the 1976 Republican Convention when Reagan ran against President Ford to represent conservative dissatisfaction with Ford’s status quo Republicanism. Reagan called his own conservatism Main Street, as opposed to the Wall Street variety, Neighborhood Conservatism rather than Country Club conservatism.
My major job for the ’70s was to produce the plan for campaign manager John Sears to identify policies and issues to attract working-class cultural and religious voters for Reagan’s nomination and election. The plan specifically targeted Main rather than Wall Street. Campaign committees were set up and staffed to emphasize small business, blue collar, ethnic and religious issues, especially to attract Catholic and evangelical Democrats and non-voters. As a later field operations director in 1976, it became clear that recruiting supporters when running against a sitting president would come from neighborhoods rather than country clubs.
The first two Republican delegate victories for Reagan in 1976 were won not with national campaign funds but with grassroots operations. Main Street, religious, American Conservative Union, and local conservative entities and volunteers won North Carolina by themselves. Similar means that I am too modest to mention were used to win Missouri, and later, other states. The Main Street cause made it to the 1976 National Convention, but lost to the Country Club. A repeat contest was run in 1980 but, with a purer clubber in H. W. Bush, it was a victory for Main Street. But walkout threats by Bush leaders required choosing him as vice president, setting up the real 1990s “crack up.”
In 1988, H. W. Bush won for his Brahmin faction by defeating the Russell Kansas Main St. center–fusionist Bob Dole faction, followed by the traditionalist Pat Robertson, a foreign policy-oriented Jack Kemp, and libertarian Pete du Pont. Contrary to Ganz, the Left, and mainstream media, the main GOP factional contests throughout this whole period were between the Brahmin Right that had dominated the GOP from its inception and the Main Street conservatism of Harding, Coolidge, Taft, Goldwater, and Reagan.
Contrary to Ganz and the Left, the ’90s crack-up on the Right was not hatched by third-raters but with H. W.’s acceptance speech at the 1988 GOP Convention. He promised a “kinder and gentler” presidency, leading Nancy Reagan to murmur “Kinder and gentler than whom?” George W. described his more fundamental fracture as a more “compassionate conservatism” — than whose?
Neoconservative columnist for Commentary magazine Matthew Continetti’s impressive history , adds that the Reagan factional coalition had been changing in the 1970s, with the moderate Left being “mugged by reality” to move to the Right under Irving Kristol, and others especially on foreign policy. Neocons moved first to influence anticommunists and centrists in both political parties and most did not support Reagan or the GOP until after his election. But several developed close relationships with H. W. Bush. Neocons became major players in his and especially in the W. Bush administrations — intellectuals Continetti later labeled as Reformocons.
Continetti and Ganz both emphasize the importance of the corruption of power in cracking up the Reagan coalition, but a H. W. Bush White House personnel officer explained the underlying difference between the two. When asked by a reporter whether H. W. would continue Reagan’s practice of hiring appointees based on ideological support of his programs, his response was that they would hire loyal experts.
But according to Continetti, the main cause of the crack-up of the Reagan right-led coalition was the fall of the Soviet Union and the loss of anticommunism as a unifying Right force. But that simply does not work since the 1988 Convention where H. W. made the break was before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Moreover, the one faction most affected by that loss — the Neoconservatives — were the last to be added to the GOP coalition and were not required to win in 1980. The other major factions were all opposed to communism, but they had wide varieties of positions on what to do about it, as Continetti’s own book makes very clear, causing factionalism as well as unity.
This misunderstanding explicitly leads The Right book from its inception into treating Reagan “as just one character among many” in its Right world. The Reagan coalition’s supposed anticommunist crack-up then led to power for the more centrist Bushes. But that culminated in George W.’s unpopular wars and a domestic economic “calamity.” This opened the way to “Trump, populism and the New Right.” That final crack-up, Continetti concludes, “retailored the fabric of conservatism.” He remains hopeful that this new fabric could become a “part of [true] conservatism” if it could recommit itself “to constitutional democracy and the American ideal of liberty under the law.”
Where does that leave us? Neither the broad Ganz Left view, in which the Right is evil, nor mere hope for a recommitment to old values broadly conceived, is very helpful. What is? In fact, Reagan’s influence did survive communism — even according to Continetti’s Right book. It did so by a change in label. Reagan-inspired groups like the Tea Party and leaders like Rush Limbaugh were deemed “populists” rather than the Reagan fusionists that they in fact said they were. Most Right leaders then and even during Trump’s presidency understood that some part of “populism” did come from Main Street Reagan.
Reagan held a sophisticated philosophy of conservatism by synthesizing different factional ideals rather than a simple rationalist political program. His “enduring tension“ methodology still inspires most on the Right, as Gallup surveys confirm.
All that is required for the Right to recover from both progressive and Brahmin crack-ups is by rediscovering the real Reagan as the practical way to apply his synthesized ideals to modern times and problems.
Donald Devine is a senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies in Washington, D.C. He served as President Ronald Reagan’s civil service director during his first term in office. A former professor, he is the author of 11 books, including his most recent, The Enduring Tension: Capitalism and the Moral Order, and Ronald Reagan’s Enduring Principles, and is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator.
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