The Rise and Fall of the Christian Soldiers

            

            Whatever else Donald Trump may be, he is not a Reagan conservative.  That is why movement conservatives have not piled onto his bandwagon after his decisive primary win in Indiana last week.  In fact, movement conservatives are running in the opposite direction.

            Trump’s capture of the Republican nomination has subjected conservatives who care about policy to a moment of truth.  I hope that conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin’s remarkable May 6 column in the Washington Post is the shape of things to come.

            For once, Rubin had the courage to say what should be apparent to all: There is no majority supporting the Reagan agenda people like Paul Ryan have been attempting to foist on the rest of us.  The collapse of Ted Cruz’s campaign should tell us Americans in general and Republican voters are not looking for a reprise of the policies that Ronald Reagan championed to address the problems of the 1980s.

            What conservatives need instead, she argues, is a platform that does not included

•        Opposition to gay rights
•       Large tax cuts for the rich
•       Protectionism in trade
•       Expelling women from combat in a volunteer army
•       Rooting gays out of the military
•       Obsessing over bathroom assignments
•       Fixating on local ordinances about wedding services
•       Keeping the status quo on entitlements
•       Cutting out (as opposed to reforming) the safety net
•       Never, ever raising taxes on anyone
•       Mass deportation

            She also insists that conservatives must change their tactics by telling the truth.  Conservatives can no longer insist that climate change is not happening.  They have to stop telling working class whites that their problems stem from immigration or that millions of jobs went to China.  All of these things, she says, are “lies.”

            And they also have to “end their infatuation with phony news, crank conspiracy theories, demonization of well-meaning leaders and mean rhetoric.”  Says Rubin “It’s time to grow up, turn off Sean Hannity, get off toxic social media and start learning about the world as it is. (Read a book authored by someone without a talk show, spend time with non-Republicans, take an online course in economics.)”

            All of this is positively breathtaking, particularly coming from someone as partisan and sharp-tongued as Rubin.  For now, it’s not clear that anyone from else from the right buys her prescription.

            And yet . . .

            Rubin’s column is both a brave acknowledgement by a conservative that the Republican party has been tainted by xenophobia, homophobia, and anti-intellectualism as well as a call to abandon these things as foreign to political conservatism.  And she also acknowledges that aligning itself with the rich by continuing to insist on tax cuts that lead to cuts in spending are ultimately not in her party’s interest. Conservatives she says, must stop “imagining that there is a market for pre-New-Deal size government.” 

            Instead, she argues, Republicans should try to develop a “comprehensive approach to poverty and focus on upward mobility.

            All of this is a repudiation of deal with the devil Republicans made in 1964 when it invited southern moral and racial traditionalists into its tent.  In return for supporting its business and neoconservative wings, these new “Christian Soldiers” would get support for their views on race and morality.  But for the need to keep the Christian Soldiers in the coalition, there is no reason that concerns about abortion, gay rights, and immigration naturally go with concerns about economic policy or national national defense.

            What Jennifer Rubin sees in the Trump candidacy is the revolt of the Christian Soldiers.  They’re no longer willing to settle for the lip service establishment Republican politicians have been giving them since they struck this bargain.

            A discerning look back over the last 40-50 years suggests that much of the intractability that makes our politics so toxic flows from the tensions inherent in that coalitional bargain.  There is an argument that Republican concern about social issues such as race, abortion, gay rights, women’s rights and religious rights were attempts by what would otherwise have been a more libertarian Republican party to appease the Christian Soldiers.

            And though keeping taxes low and size of government small were part of the Republican cannon before 1964, it would not be unfair to say that part of what has energized Republican policy on federal spending, particularly on safety net programs, has been a determination to prevent redistributions to the “undeserving poor” (non-whites, as Martin Gilens argues). 

            So what would Republican politics look like were the business and neocon wings of the Republican party to separate from the Christian Soldiers.

            Without the anti-intellectualism that emanates from the Christian Soldiers, it will be much harder for business interests concerned about regulation to obscure their policy preferences under nonsensical appeals to some abstract notion of liberty.  Rubin, for example, suggests that without their “intellectual isolation and self-delusion,” the “extent and the proposed solutions” to climate change “can be rationally discussed.”

            Without the racism and xenophobia that animate the “lies” about immigration, it might be possible for the political parties to come together in order to fix an immigration system that everyone believes is broken. 

            We can also begin to have sensible discussions about how much of a safety net we should have in a dynamic and entrepreneurial economic system that thrives on creative destruction but often leaves some people, through no fault of their own, behind.   Instead of arguing about the low wage jobs that left the U.S. over the last 40 years—and are now leaving China for other low wage destinations—we could find a way to encourage the creation of high wage knowledge-based jobs and help our population train for them.

            Without having to worry about redistribution to the “undeserving poor” we could have a sensible discussion about the fairest way to allocate the tax burden.  And without a Republican party adamantly committed to a flat-out ban on abortion and opposition to LGBT rights, we might even be able to confirm a Supreme Court justice or two.

            It’s time for everyone to recognize that we’ve had the debate about racial and moral issues that the Christian Soldiers thought they could win by allying themselves with the business conservatives and the neocons.  They lost, and now it’s time to move on.   It’s also time for conservative politicians to put their economic and national defense policies, shorn of the trappings of racial and moral traditionalism, into the marketplace of ideas to see if anybody is willing to buy them.