Outside the Beltway

Zealots and Pluralists

A moderate Republican almost diagnoses the problem.

James Joyner · Tuesday, January 3, 2023 · 19 comments

Outgoing Nebraska Senator and incoming University of Florida president Ben Sasse argues, “America’s True Divide [is] Pluralists vs. Zealots.”

The most important divide in American politics isn’t red versus blue. It’s civic pluralists versus political zealots. This is the truth no one in Washington acknowledges but Americans must realize if we’re going to recover.

Civic pluralists understand that ideas move the world more than power does, which is why pluralists value debate and persuasion. We believe America is great because it is good, and America is good because the country is committed to human dignity, even for those with whom we disagree. A continental nation of 330 million souls couldn’t possibly agree on everything, but we can hash out our disagreements in the communities where we live and the institutions we build. The small but important role of government, for the civic pluralist, is a framework for ordered liberty. Government doesn’t give us rights, or meaning, or purpose or permission. It exists to protect us from the whims of mobs and majorities.

Political zealots reject this, holding that society starts and ends with power. Government in their view isn’t to protect from the powerful or the popular. More than anything else, zealots—on the right and the left—seek total victory in the public square. They believe that the center of life is government power. They preach jeremiads of victimhood and decline. On the left, they want a powerful bureaucracy. On the right, they want a strongman. But they agree on a central tenet: Americans are too weak to solve problems with persuasion. They need the state to do it.

He blames the usual suspects, social media and cable news, but believes we’ll come out of it because Americans are so awesome.

Americans can and will break the outrage cycle by building institutions. The zealous central planners don’t own America’s future. This country belongs to the optimists, the innovators and the builders. The places where we’ll figure out what comes next are churches, schools, businesses and neighborhood associations.

America can’t do big things if we hate our neighbors. Americans have always done big stuff: winning world wars, walking on the moon, beating the Soviets. None of these would have been possible if tribalism and hatred of our neighbors had defined us. As we did with urbanization and industrialization in the 19th and 20th centuries, in the 21st century we have to build big. We must navigate technological disruption, relaunch a post-pandemic economy and win the tech race against the Chinese Communist Party. Political zealots can’t do these things. Only pluralists can. Recovery is possible.

But if recovery is to come, here’s what it will look like: Senators will have to acknowledge that a politicized echo chamber is unworthy of the world’s greatest deliberative body. Citizens will have to see that recovery means resisting the temptation to reduce fellow Americans to caricatures of their political affiliations. Recovery requires investment in things that will outlast partisan preferences. We must steward the present age, and play our small but vital parts in the work of self-government.

This is what Americans have always done, and why people from all over the world still yearn to join this crazy, beautiful experiment in liberty. America was the best home freedom has ever had, and it still is. Let’s build together anew.

Little of this rings true. While I’m a civic pluralist by this description, I’m skeptical that this is the real divide in our country or its politics. While there are indeed political zealots on the left and right who want to win at all costs, I don’t know of a time when that wasn’t the case. Sorting and polarization have perhaps exacerbated the problem, by making those who disagree politically “the other” to a greater degree than they have been in recent generations.

But the zealotry that matters right now* is almost exclusively coming from Sasse’s political party and I’m pretty sure he knows it. Whatever their faults, AOC and “the Squad” are backbenchers who have mostly gone along with whatever compromise Speaker Pelosi could wrangle. They’re simply not driving policy in the Democratic Party in the way the Freedom Caucus is in the GOP. If there’s a Democratic analog to Donald Trump, he’s not going to be the party’s presidential nominee.

Paul Krugman goes perhaps a wee bit too far on this score in his column “We’re Going to Miss Greed and Cynicism,” but he’s not off by much. The setup is a bit cartoonish:

As late as 2015, or so I and many others thought, we had a fairly good idea about how American politics worked. It wasn’t pretty, but it seemed comprehensible.

On one side we had the Democrats, who were and still are basically what people in other advanced nations call social democrats (which isn’t at all the same as what most people call socialism). That is, they favor a fairly strong social safety net, supported by relatively high taxes on the affluent. They’ve moved somewhat to the left over the years, mainly because the gradual exit of the few remaining conservative Democrats has made the party’s social-democratic orientation more consistent. But by international standards, Democrats are, at most, vaguely center left.

On the other side we had the Republicans, whose overriding goal was to keep taxes low and social programs small. Many advocates of that agenda did so in the sincere belief that it would be best for everyone — that high taxes reduce incentives to create jobs and raise productivity, as do excessively generous benefits. But the core of the G.O.P.’s financial support (not to mention that of the penumbra of think tanks, foundations and lobbying groups that promoted its ideology) came from billionaires who wanted to preserve and increase their wealth.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that Democrats were pure idealists. Special-interest money flowed to both parties. But of the two, Republicans were much more obviously the party of making the rich richer.

But this strikes me as mostly borne out by events:

The problem for Republicans was that their economic agenda was inherently unpopular. Voters consistently tell pollsters that corporations and the rich pay too little in taxes; policies that help the poor and the middle class have broad public support. How, then, could the G.O.P. win elections?

The answer, most famously described in Thomas Frank’s 2004 book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?,” was to win over white working-class voters by appealing to them on cultural issues. His book came in for considerable criticism from political scientists, in part because he underplayed the importance of white racial antagonism, but the general picture still seems right.

As Frank described it, however, the culture war was basically phony — a cynical ploy to win elections, ignored once the votes were counted. “The leaders of the backlash may talk Christ,” he wrote, “but they walk corporate. … Abortion is never halted. Affirmative action is never abolished. The culture industry is never forced to clean up its act.”

Now, there were certainly True Believers in the culture wars. That’s partly why so much emphasis was put on taking back the Supreme Court. But it’s true that tax cuts and the like was the part of the agenda being enacted into policy.

These days, that sounds quaint — even a bit like a golden era — as many American women lose their reproductive rights, as schools are pressured to stop teaching students about slavery and racism, as even powerful corporations come under fire for being excessively woke. The culture war is no longer just posturing by politicians mainly interested in cutting taxes on the rich; many elected Republicans are now genuine fanatics.

As I said, one can almost feel nostalgic for the good old days of greed and cynicism.

Oddly, the culture war turned real at a time when Americans are more socially liberal than ever. George W. Bush won the 2004 election partly thanks to a backlash against gay marriage. (True to form, he followed up his victory by proclaiming that he had a mandate to … privatize Social Security.) But these days, Americans accept the idea of same-sex marriages almost three to one.

And the disconnect between a socially illiberal G.O.P. and an increasingly tolerant public is surely one reason the widely predicted red wave in the midterms fell so far short of expectations.

Yet despite underperforming in what should, given precedents, have been a very good year for the out-party, Republicans will narrowly control the House. And this means that the inmates will be running half the asylum.

True, not all members of the incoming House Republican caucus are fanatical conspiracy theorists. But those who aren’t are clearly terrified by and submissive to those who are. Kevin McCarthy may scrape together the votes to become speaker, but even if he does, actual power will obviously rest in the hands of people like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

We’re seeing a preview of this in the battle for the Speaker position, with the cowardly McCarthy kowtowing to the crazies in order to secure their votes. Again, AOC and company are not only not comparably crazy but their power is mostly confined to social media likes and retweets.

And what I don’t understand is how the U.S. government is going to function. President Barack Obama faced an extremist, radicalized G.O.P. House, but even the Tea Partiers had concrete policy demands that could, to some extent, be appeased. How do you deal with people who believe, more or less, that the 2020 election was stolen by a vast conspiracy of pedophiles?

I don’t know the answer, but prospects don’t look good.

So, Sasse is right that the pluralists are fighting against the zealots. But pretending that this is a both-sides phenomenon is simply disingenuous. Sasse is principled enough to have voted to convict Trump in the post-Capitol Riot impeachment trial. But not quite enough to join Liz Cheney in calling out the party itself for enabling the problem.

Interestingly, a column last September by one-term Vermont Congressman Peter Smith (suggested to me by the sidebar of Krugman’s piece), “Moderate Republicans No Longer Have a Home, and It Started With My Defeat,” diagnoses the problem nicely:

Over the last 30 years, the Republican Party has effectively eliminated its moderate and liberal voices — as well as the conservative voices that put country over party. The consequences of this takeover by an increasingly right-wing faction include the threats to democracy that have become increasingly prominent since the Jan. 6 riots.

For those, like me, who have forgotten Smith’s backstory:

When I lost my seat in Congress in 1990, I knew it was because I had co-sponsored a bill to ban assault weapons. The National Rifle Association and conservative Republicans in Vermont and elsewhere united to defeat me, calling the independent challenger, Bernie Sanders, the “lesser of two evils.” First, a right-wing candidate challenged me in the Republican primary, then many of his supporters aided the Sanders campaign in the general election.

Their plan: Elect Bernie Sanders for one term, then defeat him the next time around. The only problem: They couldn’t weaken him in a primary the same way and consistently failed to beat him in a general election. And the rest is history.

But back to the larger analysis:

I didn’t realize it at the time, but my defeat was an early step in the elimination of the moderate and liberal wing of the Republican Party. That process, aimed at members of Congress and state-level officials, began with the ascent of Newt Gingrich’s style of full-throated partisanship and has continued to this day. When moderates like Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine retired, the party typically nominated more right-wing candidates to succeed them. Over the years, the party’s capture by hard-line activists — and now, as seen in New Hampshire’s primaries last week, election deniers — has resulted in ever more extreme nominees.

When Mr. Gingrich was elected Republican minority whip by a single vote in 1989, he and his supporters seemingly had one goal: not to govern, but to control, stifle and stymie Congress. They got less actual governing done as they frustrated Congress’s work, and in many ways their strategy worked.

Now, in fairness to Gingrich—who I also blame for turning the GOP into what it would become—obstructionism is a reasonable tactic for a long-term minority party. Recall that, when Gingrich and company took control pursuant to the 1994 elections, it was the first time Republicans held a House majority since 1955. Further, they actually ran on a rather robust legislative agenda.

Still, this is dead on:

The long-term consequences of their scheme led to the election of Donald Trump and the rise of today’s hard-right extremism. It has also weakened and undermined the Republican Party and multiparty government in states where more liberal general election voters reject hard-liners who become Republican nominees.

About three weeks after his election as whip, Mr. Gingrich called me into his office. He asked whether I was having dinner with Democrats. I was, I said: A colleague from Tennessee and I were hosting fellow freshman members for dinner regularly to share experiences. Mr. Gingrich demanded that I stop; he didn’t want Republicans consorting with Democrats.

I responded — not overly politely — that I was from Vermont and nobody told me what people I could eat with. But his demand was a harbinger of the decline of moderate and liberal Republicans. (Mr. Gingrich told The Times he did not recall the meeting, but noted that he was working to unify the Republican caucus at the time.)

What followed over the next few years was the deliberate quarantining of Republicans from Democrats: separate orientations for new members, a sharp curtailing of bipartisan activities and an increasing insistence that members toe the party line. The very idea of “voting your district” — which was alive and well when I was elected — became anathema within the Republican caucus. Simultaneously, the weaponization of the evangelical religious right and the organization of wealthy conservative donors was going on, largely behind the scenes, with money and organizing often used against moderate Republicans as well as Democrats.

Now, there’s a bit of a chicken-egg situation here. The take-no-prisoners style is absolutely a big part of the problem. But it was accompanied by the aforementioned sorting. The roots of the Republican “revolution” in 1994 were multiple but it marked a dramatic realignment of the parties, particularly the almost complete demise of the Southern Democrat. (It would take a bit longer for the Northeastern Republican to go away but the Southernification of the GOP made that inevitable.) Voting your state and voting your party were much more hand-in-glove than they had been before the sort.

Republican Party leaders fueled the shift to the right by promising results to their conservative base that they could not deliver: banning abortion, eliminating the deficit, slashing federal regulations, cracking down on L.G.B.T.Q. rights and greatly cutting taxes. Mr. Gingrich’s “Contract With America” — and the government shutdown it caused — set the stage for decades of unkept promises and primed primary voters to turn against the moderate and liberal elected officials who had once been a critical component of the Republican coalition, especially in the Northeast, when those officials could be readily blamed for not sufficiently supporting the party line.

As Republican voters and nominees adopted an increasingly extreme agenda, even a Republican Congress could not produce the results they had promised. While Republican officials delivered significant tax cuts for the very wealthy and, under George W. Bush, put numerous conservatives onto the federal bench, they failed to meaningfully relieve the tax burden for working- and middle-class people or to fully realize any of their culture-war goals, instead seeing same-sex marriage become the law of the land.

These failures drove a further rightward shift that resulted in the rise of the Tea Party. And when the Tea Partyers failed to stop President Barack Obama and his Affordable Care Act, we arrived at the 2016 presidential primaries and the rise of Donald Trump. The base of the party had become angry and alienated because the Gingrich-era promises had not been delivered.

I would quibble with this at the margins but it’s mostly true. Crucially, the sense that the party elites were lying to the base, making promises they broke year after year, decade after decade, was crucial to the rise of the Tea Party.

But zealotry begat zealotry:

During this period, some Republicans in the Northeast swam against the tide. Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont, my predecessor in the U.S. House, became an independent before his retirement. In her last term, Senator Snowe cast a critical vote in committee to put the Affordable Care Act before the full Senate. She believed health care reform merited consideration by the full Senate, not a quiet death in committee. She favored “governing” over “controlling.”

But even in New England, long a bastion of liberal and moderate Republicanism, moderates are now losing in Republican primaries. This year, a Trump-backed candidate won the nomination for governor of Massachusetts; candidates endorsed by Donald Trump or who deny the validity of the 2020 election won races in New Hampshire; and Vermont Republicans nominated a right-wing figure for Senate. Increasingly, moderate candidates without a deeply established electoral history are unable to win nomination for major offices.

There have been a few moderate and liberal Republican success stories, but they are anomalies, peculiar to the person or the situation. In Vermont, Jim Douglas, governor from 2003 to 2011, and the current governor, Phil Scott, built long electoral careers and personal brands that made them more resistant to hard-right primary challengers. Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts developed a reputation as a competent administrator in the 1990s, long before he ran for office.

But the refusal by Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire to run for Senate this year speaks volumes about the culture and philosophy that the national Republican Party and its elected officials are enforcing in primary elections and in Congress. That doctrine has made a national political career less achievable and enticing, even for an extremely popular right-of-center governor like Mr. Sununu.

As we’ve discussed more than once recently, state-level elections are different from national-level elections for a whole host of institutional and attitudinal reasons. By definition, there are still Southern Democrats at the state level. Sometimes, they even win governorships in deep red states. Absent extraordinary circumstances, they’re not viable candidates for the Senate, where they were a vote for Chuck Schumer as Majority Leader. (The same is true even at the Congressional District level, as even the most conservative Democrat would have voted for Nancy Pelosi as Speaker.)

He concludes:

Mr. Gingrich’s style of politics has informed much of what has come since. Under Mr. Trump and his acolytes, the emphasis on power and control has remained, at the expense not only of governing but also of decency.

In 1950, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a moderate Republican from Maine, attacked McCarthyism and its “four horsemen of calumny — fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear.” Republicans today seem to use Smith’s warning as an inspiration, projecting their own worst excesses upon their opponents. There is little room left in the G.O.P. for any disagreement — indeed, of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump, only one appears very likely to be in Congress next January.

It may be too late for the Republican Party to again welcome moderate and liberal voices into its ranks. But the focus of moderate and liberal Republicans — both elected officials and the voters who supported us — was historically on governing to solve America’s critical problems, not on accruing control for its own sake. If the Republican Party cannot be an instrument of democracy, independent-minded moderates will do what we’ve always done: Vote our conscience, and vote for someone else.

So, again, the pluralist-zealot divide Sasse identifies is real. But it’s hardly the whole story.