Have y'all been looking at Rush Limbaugh's CPAC performance on Sunday? It was rather illuminating. Limbaugh is being touted by Democrats as the de facto Republican leader, and Republicans wary of his power seem disinclined to agree. What struck me about the new Republican Pope is how intellectually hollow his address was. Philosophical statements are thrown around and are not argued or defended, merely asserted, as though the act of saying something along the lines of "the war on poverty has made America worse off" were enough to make it so. There was the standard-issue slurring and mudslinging at the left--why many on the right can't just admit that liberals are decent people who want much of the same things as they want is beyond me. Reagan could actually do that--he could speak about the failures of the left at the time without malice, and it spoke well to his essential decency (his managerial ability, though, ensured a steady stream of corruption within his administration).
This is Limbaugh's party, though. At least, it is for now. It's not like there are tons of other plausible leaders of conservatism out there. Still, for a party that has suffered back-to-back humiliating losses his advice is almost singularly unhelpful. Clearly, the quote getting the most attention is his injunction that better policy ideas won't save the Republican Party. It's true that better ideas wouldn't help the GOP get back into power, necessarily, though the point of said ideas is to actually govern well so that you don't get kicked out within a few years of regaining power. Limbaugh's speech doesn't represent a revolution in Republican thought so much as the end of conservative thought--principles are asserted and not debated. Arguments go unmade. People who need to hear arguments are not true believers, and do not deserve to be in the movement. I live in California, where the state GOP has been in a similar suicide spiral for a few years now, so it has been interesting to see my state's politics come to represent the nation's as well. Yet another way that Cali has been ahead of the curve. We invented jogging, bans on public smoking, seatbelt laws, and dammit we deserve our due.
But it seems to me that what the Republican Party could use most of all is less invocations of Reagan and more Reagan--at least, more of a Reagan-like awareness of the political scene of his day. You see, Reagan was a far right-winger--even to the right of Barry Goldwater. He wasn't particularly compromising in his beliefs, and even though his 1980 campaign dropped his demands to trash Social Security and Medicare I doubt it was because he suddenly became a convert to those programs' benefits. Reagan was a Goldwater conservative but it seems to me that he realized that he couldn't govern like one. Even during the much more conservative 1980s it wasn't as though old folks decided they'd had enough of the government's checks, or poor people decided that they didn't like the government's intrusion into their personal freedom by offering them free healthcare. And middle class families didn't stop liking the free public education that the government offers them.
One suspected that Reagan understood all these things. Don't get me wrong, I think he screwed up the country big time by tweaking the tax code in a way that eventually exploded income inequality, which was further hurt by his disempowering of unions--ostensibly because they were communist fronts, though since communism died conservatives haven't bothered to articulate why they continue to hate one of the few institutions that improves income distribution across the spectrum. This is all not to mention the crappy debt he left us, as well as a legacy for blatant disregard of debt and deficits to a Republican Party that had earlier been keenly and rightly worried about such things. But Reagan never tried to gut Social Security--in fact, he tried to save it. And he never touched Medicare or Medicaid, or public education. Reagan fundamentally left America's infrastructure in place, he just added a few incremental tweaks to the machine to try to make it more conservative. I think those tweaks were really fucking bad but they nevertheless didn't change much in terms of what the government provided for the people.
What can one conclude from this? Only that Reagan is much smarter than the current crop of conservative "leadership", as he understood that the country, despite electing Republicans like himself, had never given him a mandate for Goldwaterism. Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam have argued--correctly, in my opinion--that Goldwaterism was never popular and that the GOP succeeded because it had a better pitch on issues like taxes, crime, foreign policy, welfare, etc. where Democrats had failed to deliver. I believe that Reagan understood this and proceeded to work incrementally in areas where he had been given a mandate, which is why the guy had any success at all. Compared to Margaret Thatcher he accomplished very little, but the American system of government is famously hostile to broad change.
This seems to be something that conservatives don't understand, but it is something that Barack Obama understands. Just as I don't believe that Reagan's election was tantamount to electing Barry Goldwater sixteen years later, I do not believe that Obama's election represents the election of, I don't know, Nancy Pelosi. America hasn't broadly endorsed American liberalism, but it has given Obama a mandate on the economy, healthcare, climate change, Iraq and foreign policy more generally. Because Obama, like Reagan, is an exquisite observer of political trends he has been moving incrementally to accomplish reforms in the specific areas in which he has won the argument. Unlike, say, Bill Clinton, who didn't really win a mandate at all and immediately got sidetracked by social issues that hadn't been a part of the campaign, Obama is sticking to what he was elected to do, and liberal wish list items like FOCA are off the table for the time being.
It seems to me that Obama and Limbaugh represent two extremes in more ways than one--Obama is a keen political observer who can sense why he won and what he has been empowered to change, while Limbaugh hasn't any clue what the public wants and, what's more, is hostile to the notion that people might want something other than "Reaganism" as he sees it. Of course, Obama was elected and Limbaugh wasn't, and Obama is an intellectually serious figure while Limbaugh isn't. One hears in his dismissal of "better policy ideas" a clarion call to an enhanced right-wing nihilism that will stubbornly refuse to change with the times. Indeed, Leader Limbaugh promises little else.
Update: The speech must have sucked if Hugh Hewitt liked it. John Cole observes that Romney is looking downright presidential compared to the rest of the GOP, and I cannot help but agree.
