Politics
A crabby Congress, cranky liberals and crunchy conservatives.
House of Ill Repute
It's 3 a.m. Do you know where your congressman is?
Chances are he's inside the Capitol, monkeying around with the nation's laws while the rest of us are sleeping. As Washington Post reporter Juliet Eilperin reveals in her well-reported Fight Club Politics: How Partisanship Is Poisoning the House of Representatives (Rowman & Littlefield, $19.95), the Republican-led Congress often pronounces on issues of importance just as Conan O'Brien is concluding his opening monologue. Votes to cut Head Start's funding (12:57 a.m.), slash taxes (1:56 a.m.), ratify the Central American Free Trade Agreement (just after midnight) and appropriate $87 billion for Afghanistan and Iraq (12:12 a.m.) all happened in the wee hours -- after seemingly endless rounds of debate, cajoling and strong-arming. What does this portend? Rep. Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat now running for the Senate, wrote in 2003 that such late-night politicking is a "subversion of democracy." Not quite. What these bleary-eyed votes actually prove is that members of Congress are horrible at time management -- and that the federal government is so complex and the task of managing it so overwhelming that our elected officials keep the same hours as insomniacs and dance-clubbers.
In her years reporting on the House, Eilperin discovered many of the institution's other dysfunctions, maladies that she describes accurately and admirably. Her book is also part polemic: Eilperin argues that congressional gerrymandering has created a nation of "politically safe, more ideologically tilted" districts. In turn, that fosters a climate of hyperpartisanship, insulates the Republican majority in Congress from moderating pressures and lets the GOP leadership conduct a punitive campaign against the Democratic minority. In today's Congress, she writes, "a typical House floor debate now is more Kabuki theater than genuine discussion."
Maybe she's right. Yet, reading Fight Club Politics , I kept wanting more of a historical perspective. Eilperin repeatedly harks back to a golden age when lawmakers crossed party lines to enact legislation, socialized with their opponents and lived in fear that they would be thrown out in the next election. But was that really the case? While Eilperin does wield considerable evidence in showing how House districts have become less competitive, much of the "golden age" theory rests on anecdote. Not long ago, Republicans too complained that they suffered under a tyrannical Democratic majority, which foisted perverse legislation on an unsuspecting populace. The difference between Republicans then and Democrats now is that, upon taking power in 1995, the Republicans pledged reform -- and promptly failed. The Democrats must know better. Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.) tells Eilperin that, should the Democrats come back into power, "We're not going back to the fair way of doing things. Democrats will say [to Republicans] you did it, now you bastards enjoy it."
What's the Matter With the Heartland?
For proof of Eilperin's contention that American political discourse has become increasingly polarized, one need look no further than the Democratic political consultants Steve Jarding and Dave "Mudcat" Saunders's Foxes in the Henhouse: How the Republicans Stole the South and the Heartland and What the Democrats Must Do to Run 'em Out (Touchstone, $24). Together the authors try to help Democratic candidates relate to Southern male voters. Their most successful client: former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, a Democrat whose popularity in a red state is helping his nascent presidential campaign.
The problem with America today, as Jarding and Saunders see it, is that even though "from the 1930s through the 1970s, several generations of Americans witnessed firsthand the power and compassion of a government dedicated to equality, justice, fairness, and opportunity," around 1980 the voters decided to vote for a government of inequality, injustice, partiality and privilege. This happened, the authors argue, because the Republican Party appealed to the worst biases of Southern voters, including on racial issues. Jarding and Saunders want Democrats to take a loftier course -- to embrace those long-lost NASCAR fans, hunters and anglers. In so doing, they argue, the Democratic Party can recapture the South without changing any of its ideas or policy prescriptions.
At least I think that's their argument; it's difficult to get past all the vitriol Jarding and Saunders spew in the course of their fairly conventional attack on the GOP's Southern realignment. According to the authors, President Bush is a "dangerously insecure head case," Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) is a "pretty-boy fool," Zell Miller, the former Democratic senator who lit into Sen. John F. Kerry during the 2004 election, is a "white-trash opportunist," and the late President Reagan was a "pompous, ignorant fool." Such trash-talking may help Jarding and Saunders sell books, but it won't broaden the appeal of their party.
The Right Stuff
Also in the advice-giving mode, Edwin J. Feulner, the president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, and Doug Wilson, the chairman of the conservative Web site Townhall.com, have coauthored Getting America Right: The True Conservative Values Our Nation Needs Today (Crown Forum, $26.95). For conservatives, who control all three branches of government, "this should have been the best of times," they write. But the federal government continues to grow, corruption is spreading throughout the Capitol, and a nation of self-reliant individualists is morphing into a nation where many "look to government for the 'quick fix' or for personal advantage."
Into this breach step Feulner and Wilson, who argue that the GOP must reassert basic conservative principles or risk electoral disaster. They criticize profligate legislators who spend billions on pork-barrel projects while ignoring America's endangered entitlement programs. And they resuscitate a decades-old conservative maxim, arguing that "social power is a zero-sum game: When government takes it, individuals lose it."
If that were true, of course, there would be no instances when government actions have expanded individual freedom. Yet Feulner and Wilson champion a series of programs -- the 1862 Homestead Act, the GI Bill passed after World War II and the 1996 welfare overhaul -- that they say foster "self-reliance." This admission -- that government sometimes helps achieve conservative goals rather than impede them -- comes as a breath of fresh air. Unfortunately, that breath is short. Soon enough, the authors fall back on time-worn conservative tropes. Feulner and Wilson show that the GOP is still the party of ideas; it just happens to be the party of old and increasingly unpopular ones.
Old-fashioned and Organic
Speaking of old -- really old -- ideas, Rod Dreher's Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, Gun-Loving Organic Gardeners, Evangelical Free-Range Farmers, Hip Homeschooling Mamas, Right-Wing Nature Lovers, and Their Diverse Tribe of Countercultural Conservatives Plan To Save America (or at Least the Republican Party) (Crown Forum, $24) not only has the longest subtitle in the history of the world, it also makes an impassioned case for old-fashioned, anti-modern conservatism. According to Dreher, a journalist at the Dallas Morning News, he and his fellow "crunchy cons" stand with "a number of lefties who don't buy in to the consumerist and individualist mainstream of American life." They eat organic food. They homeschool their kids. They dislike suburbs. They practice orthodox religion. They are critical of the free-market economy and want to preserve the environment. They don't much care for mainstream America, so they've dropped out.
And there aren't that many of them. Dreher's book is a collection of interviews with engaging people from around the country (including his wife) who hold center-right (and occasionally far-right) opinions but live like they're on a commune in northern California, circa 1973. No doubt the crunchy cons are good people, but this book, which sometimes lapses into self-parody, gives little evidence that they are an emerging political bloc.
That makes Dreher's book ultimately unpersuasive. But it still suggests an answer to an important question: What happens when voters find themselves irritated at ideologically exhausted and rhetorically uninspiring political parties? The answer: They drop out of today's politics -- and begin quietly laying the foundation of tomorrow's. ·
Matthew Continetti is a staff writer at the Weekly Standard and the author of "The K Street Gang: The Rise and Fall of the Republican Machine."
