Four and a half years ago, during the Tea Party’s heyday and just after the G.O.P’s 2010 midterm success, Dave Weigel (then of Slate, now of Bloomberg) wrote a piece in which he asked various writers, myself included, who had argued that the G.O.P. needed a new domestic policy agenda to explain why Republicans had won back the House of Representatives while (seemingly) just doubling down on small-government rhetoric and offering little that could reasonably be described as new. I can’t get the link to the original Weigel piece working, but here is my follow-up, which includes a point with some relevance to Mike Huckabee’s just-launched presidential campaign: Namely, that there’s more than one way to operationalize the insights about American politics and working class voters that Reihan Salam and I tried to offer in “Grand New Party” many years ago, and that undergird what we’re calling “reform conservatism” today.
By which I mean, if you start with the premise that even many core Republican voters, to say nothing of (working class, especially) swing voters, aren’t enthusiastic about deep cuts to the welfare state or a return to the federal government of 1907, and if you then connect this reality to the public’s persistent anxiety (made manifest in Mitt Romney’s general-election defeat) that Republican policy ideas only benefit the rich, and if you layer these realities atop a socioeconomic landscape in which lower-income Americans were feeling insecure even before the shocks of the financial crisis and the Great Recession … well, you could end up where reform conservatism tries to end up, with a vision of center-right politics that aims to change the way we tax and spend and regulate to better serve the causes of upward mobility, personal thrift, family stability, and so on. You could end up, in other words, with a conservatism that sees itself as a change agent, and that promises anxious middle and working class voters that there are tax reforms and safety net reforms and education reforms and health care reforms that are at once conservative (market-oriented, decentralizing, fiscally responsible etc.) and friendly to their immediate economic interests.
But change itself can be a frightening thing, and the heart of the Republican base now consists of a demographic, senior citizens, that’s getting a pretty good deal relative to just about everyone else from the welfare state as it currently exists. And then of course even among non-seniors old-age retirement programs are very popular, both because they lift some of the burdens of caring for aging parents and because they offer a promise of future security to people struggling in the present.
Conservative reformers have tried to take these political realities into account, which is why their/our preferred entitlement reforms tend to be more moderate and gradualist than what some on the right have supported in the past. But in the end all of the plausible proposals floated to date, whether they involve some version of premium support for Medicare or a means-tested redesign of Social Security, do necessarily involve real changes to those programs, and reduced benefits over the long term for some people covered by them. Because those programs are expensive, and their projected costs are devouring so much of the budget, you basically can’t have a coherent right-of-center reform agenda if you just leave them alone.
But if you don’t care about having such an agenda, if you’re willing to eschew real reform entirely and and simply promise to protect Medicare and Social Security indefinitely while cutting spending on some unspecified range of “wasteful” government programs instead — well, then you can craft a message that in its own way speaks to precisely the socioeconomic anxieties that reform conservatives are trying to address, but does so in a much simpler and therefore perhaps more reassuring way. Instead of promising that conservative ideas can change public policy for the better, you can just exploit conservative instincts to hammer everyone else — the left in some cases, your rivals on the right in others — whenever they propose any kind of alteration to entitlements.
This is basically what a number of Republicans did with Medicare throughout the Obamacare debate. The G.O.P. crafted a message that was more explicitly responsive to middle class anxiety than a lot of right-wing policy talk tends to be: They attacked the president and the Democrats for making a “raid” on entitlements, for breaking faith with seniors, for skimping on retirement spending in order to achieve their universal health care dream … and while it wasn’t a winning presidential-level message, with the older whiter midterm electorate it worked out pretty well.
As a matter of policy, such a Mediscare strategy clearly makes any kind of actual conservative reform, to health care or entitlements or both, that much harder to achieve. But as a political matter, this sort of anti-reform conservatism no less (and perhaps sometimes more) than reform conservatism can speak to many anxious voters where they are.
Now it seems that Huckabee intends to run for president on what is basically an amped-up version of this strategy: Medicare today, Medicare tomorrow, Medicare forever, and keep your government hands off my Social Security too. I’ve written sympathetically about the Arkansas governor in the past, I enjoyed his ’08 campaign inordinately, and I’ve always regarded him as a kind of “reform conservative who might have been” — had he taken his populist impulses in a substantive direction, that is, and put flesh on the bones of his anti-establishment, working class appeal. And what you’re hearing from him now is, in its way, a reflection of precisely the things I’ve always liked about him: He’s a politician who really does get, for reasons of intuition and biography, why a lot of conservative-leaning, economically-stressed Americans support his party reluctantly, if at all.
But his apparent 2016 agenda looks like a cracked, evil-Spock mirroring of how Republicans ought to actually address that problem; an irresponsible, pandering answer to economic insecurity that will make better responses that much harder to pursue. Huckabee could have been a reformer. But instead he’s decided to play the Brezhnev of the entitlement reform debate, telling seniors and not-quite-seniors, Don’t talk to me about conservatism; what you have, you hold.
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