Joe Scarborough - The Right Path: From Ike to Reagan, How Republicans Once Mastered Politics-- and Can Again

Copyright 2013 by Joe Scarborough

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

R ANDOM H OUSE and the H OUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

BARRY M. GOLDWATER, JR.: Excerpt from The Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater. Reprinted by permission of Barry M. Goldwater, Jr.

HARPER S MAGAZINE : Excerpt from The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hofstadter, copyright 1964 by Harpers Magazine. All rights reserved. Reproduced from the November issue by special permission.

THE RONALD REAGAN PRESIDENTIAL FOUNDATION: Excerpts from two speeches by Ronald Reagan: A Time for Choosing (1964) and a 1980 speech given at Liberty State Park. Courtesy of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation.

TIME MAGAZINE: Excerpt from The Rocky Roll from the October 6, 1958, issue of Time Magazine; excerpt from Ronald Reagan: Yankee Doodle Magic by Lance Morrow from the July 7, 1986, issue of Time Magazine. Used by permission of Time Magazine.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Scarborough, Joe.
The right path : from Ike to Reagan, how Republicans once mastered politicsand can again / Joe Scarborough.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-8129-9614-2
eBook ISBN 978-0-8129-9615-9
1. Republican Party (U.S. : 1854)History. 2. PresidentsUnited StatesHistory. 3. United StatesPolitics and government. I. Title.
JK2356.S29 2013
324.2734dc23
2013029788

www.atrandom.com

Jacket design: Joseph Perez
Jacket photograph: Larry Downing/Sygma/Corbis

v3.1

Contents

It was invisible, as always. On election day America is Republican until five or six in the evening. It is in the last few hours of the day that working people and their families vote, on the way home from work, or after supper; it is then, at evening, that America goes Democratic if it goes Democratic at all. All of this is invisible, for it is the essence of the act that as it happens it is a mystery in which millions of people fit one fragment of the total secret together, none of them knowing the shape of the whole.

Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960

IN THEODORE WHITE S NOW CANONICAL TELLING OF THE legend, the sacred democratic ritual begins as silently as snow falling on a serene New England landscape. His beautiful rendering of Americas political system offers a comforting image of a peaceful process that reveals itself to a citizenry that rises the morning after an election to gaze wondrously upon the glorious results of their efforts, like watchful children awakening to winters first snowfall. The beauty of the voting booth, seen through the lens of Teddy Whites inspiring works, is how our glorious Republic moves forward.

Except when it doesnt. In those moments when a cultural shift is so sharp and sudden that its impact jars the political class out of a deep slumber, there is nothing gentle, nothing amiable about politics. These moments are more Norman Lear than Norman Rockwell, and the aftershocks seem all the more violent because few ever see a great political unraveling coming until after a Washington coalition crumbles and consensus disintegrates into cacophony.

This book tells the story of the unexpected rise and self-inflicted fall of the modern Republican Party, a movement that found a path to power in the middle of the 1960s and went on to dominate American life for forty years. With the national Grand Old Party seemingly on a glide path to ideological and demographic irrelevance as a presidential force, its difficult to remember, but we used to be the ones to beat. From 1968 to 2008, Republicans lost only when Democrats took care to sound more conservative than liberal. Between Richard Nixon and Barack Obama, the only Democrats to win the presidency of the United States were two white Southern Baptists who sought office by positioning themselves as nontraditional Democrats who understood the failings of liberalism and appreciated the virtues of conservatism. Republicans were not beyond the mainstream of American politics. For that forty-year period, Republicans were the mainstream of American politics.

But as conservatives endure two terms of Barack Obama and face the possibility of eight more years with a Clinton in the White House, all too often these days its the Republicans who sound angry, extreme, and too out of touch. If the GOP wants to regain its place as the decisive force in national politics, it needs to reengage with its real legacy, which is one of principled conservatism combined with clear-eyed pragmatism. We Republicans have been at our best when we are true to one of the deepest insights of conservatism: that politics, like mankind itself, isnt perfectible in a fallen universe. And if we continue to let the perfect become the enemy of the good, then we will continue to dwindle in influence.

The good news is that the GOPs ongoing decline as a national party is not inevitable. History tells us, actually, that were pretty good when the odds are the longest. Republicans emerged from what seemed an invincibly liberal political culture in the middle of what Time founder Henry Luce called the American Century when Lionel Trilling suggested that in the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. Trilling, one of Americas foremost mid-century literary critics, dismissed conservative thought as little more than irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas. History proved Trillings quote to be as untimely as the one uttered by a British record executive who told the Beatles manager, Brian Epstein, that bands with guitars were on their way out.

Conservatism would ultimately rise, not through irritable mental gestures or by being nativist or racist or blindly ideological. No, the party succeeded in direct proportion to its respect for overarching ideas about the nation and about the world that had a practical impact on the lives of Americans. Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan dominated the ideological middle of American thought because these GOP giants won elections by putting principled pragmatism ahead of reflexive purity.

Note that I say principled pragmatism: like our greatest leaders of any stripeWashington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, TR, FDR, JFKRepublicans of the modern era, driven by conservatives, resonated with a majority of Americans when they demonstrated a genuine commitment to the ideas of greater liberty, a restrained state, social order, and strength abroad. These are the key conservative principles that most Americans agree with, have always agreed with, and will agree with in the future. Republicans who try to use the power of the state to interfere in matters of personal liberty will be as doomed as the big-government Democrats who wanted to use the authority of government to impose a singular Great Society on all of America. Conservatives know that the world is made up of what Edmund Burke described as little platoonsthe small towns or the city neighborhoods where happiness is pursued.