Re-Branding the GOP. By John Fonte. National Review Online, December 16, 2013.
Middle-Class Heroes? By Andrew Stiles. National Review Online, December 31, 2013.
Fonte:
From the party of big business to the party
of the little guy.
As Sean
Trende and others have noted, middle- and working-class voters did not turn out
for Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election in the numbers that
Republican leaders had expected. In the eyes of many of these
once-Republican-leaning voters (including former Reagan Democrats), the GOP
appears to be too closely linked to “big business.” In response, many
conservative thinkers have called for a more populist GOP, oriented toward the
middle and working classes and distant from corporate elites.
It is
time to reexamine the relationship between big business and the American
center-right. While corporate America has a close relationship with the
Republican party generally, its engagement with American conservatism is
fraught with complications. Business leaders and conservatives often join
forces for pragmatic gain on significant issues such as Obamacare, taxes, trade
policy, cap-and-trade proposals, and other environmental and government
regulations. This issue-by-issue alliance is tactically useful to both groups and
no doubt will (and should) continue.
Republicans
as a party, however, and conservatives specifically, should not be subservient
to corporate interests on core issues. The American electorate must come to
view Republicans as the party of the middle class rather than the courtiers of
big business. The GOP “brand” must change. While conservatives and business
will remain part of a broad center-right coalition, the key question is: On
what terms, and who calls the shots?
Let’s
review some history. In 1980, as conservatives rallied to Ronald Reagan, many
corporate leaders were enthusiastic supporters of former Texas governor John
Connolly for the GOP presidential nomination; Connolly was a former
conservative Democratic politician who looked and talked like a CEO. Others
liked Senator Howard Baker and George H. W. Bush. Mindful of the Goldwater
defeat, all these business leaders saw Reagan as too conservative to win. Most
CEOs were more comfortable with a mainstream candidate closer to the political
center.
One of
the big internal fights in the Reagan administration pitted business interests
against national-security conservatives. In the 1970s, hundreds of major
corporations as well as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National
Association of Manufacturers had joined to form a private pro-trade group, the
U.S.-USSR Trade and Economic Council (USTEC). While conservative hawks wanted
to curb the flow of military-use items to Communist countries, USTEC lobbied to
remove barriers to Soviet trade. The group opposed, for example, the
Jackson-Vanik amendment, which placed trade limits on certain Communist-bloc
countries that restricted emigration, as the USSR did with Jews and Evangelical
Christians.
Cold
War ancient history, you say? Okay, let’s go back to this summer and look at a
crucial domestic- and constitutional-policy issue. In July 2013, House
Republicans voted to remove some federal mandates in the No Child Left Behind
Act and empower the states to formulate their own accountability systems and
curricular standards. Strong opposition to this federalism-affirming
legislation came from every Democrat in the House, the Obama administration, an
array of leftist groups (including the ACLU, the Children’s Defense Fund, the
National Education Association, the Center for American Progress Action Fund,
and the Southern Poverty Law Center) and also from business interests led by
the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable. Former Reagan education
official Chester Finn Jr. rebuked the two business groups for their stance:
“Both . . . joined the left . . . in savaging the Kline [House Republican] bill
and demanding more federal regulation and control of education. . . . I suppose
this is yet another sad example of corporate America succumbing to
big-government-itis.”
In
fact, since the days of Theodore Roosevelt and Progressive theorist Herbert
Croly over a hundred years ago, business has done well enough working with the
regulatory forces of the administrative state. As Milton Friedman often
remarked, corporate executives are not fans of the free market. They are often
involved in “rent-seeking” behavior, lobbying the federal government for
special privileges at the expense of others.
Not
only will corporate America readily depart from conservatives on a matter such
as state control of education, it also appears to have little use for the
various other constituencies within the conservative coalition. Social
conservatives advocating life, pro-family policy, and religious freedom;
national-security conservatives defending American sovereignty, arguing for a
strong military, and working to meet the challenges of China and radical Islam;
national-cohesion conservatives aiming to curb racial, ethnic, and gender
preferences and the pernicious ideology of multiculturalism; and free-market
conservatives fighting statist measures – all these find that business leaders
are often either indifferent to their concerns or lined up on the other side of
the barricades, alongside the forces of the leftist establishment. Better to
shun supposedly extreme right-wing ideologues than challenge liberal orthodoxy.
A major
weapon in the Left’s continuing campaign to “fundamentally transform America,”
as Candidate Obama so memorably promised to do, is what I call the coercive
diversity project. This is the ongoing effort to use federal power to impose
proportional representation along race, gender, and ethnic lines in all aspects
of American life. If women, for instance, constitute 50 percent of the work
force, then 50 percent of engineers, doctors, accountants, etc., should be
women. Ensuring that each group is represented in each endeavor in the correct
demographic proportion would require a degree of government coercion
incompatible with a free society. Yet, with strong support from the business
community, the coercive diversity project has advanced steadily for decades.
Little by little, race- and gender-based preferences and quotas have replaced
the original affirmative-action goal of achieving colorblind and gender-neutral
equality of opportunity.
Corporate
America was present at the creation of the coercive diversity project. Business
executives provided funds and political support and collaborated with activists
in promoting “diversity.” Most significantly, they helped blunt opposition from
principled conservatives.
In The Diversity Machine, sociologist Fred
Lynch details how corporations teamed up with progressives to fight the Reagan
Justice Department’s attempt to end group preferences based on race, ethnicity,
and gender. Attorney General Edwin Meese met strong resistance from the
business community. The Reagan administration surveyed 127 chief executives of
large corporations and found that 95 percent “planned to use numerical
objectives to track the progress of women and minorities . . . regardless of
government requirements.”
When
Ward Connerly led a series of successful statewide referenda opposing the use
of group preferences in education and employment, business interests fought him
at every turn and poured money into the leftist campaigns to stop his efforts.
After his successful initiative in the State of Washington in 1998, Connerly
wrote: “The most significant obstacle we faced in the Washington campaign was
not the media . . . but the corporate world. . . . Boeing, Weyerhaeuser,
Starbucks, Costco, Microsoft, and Eddie Bauer all made huge donations to the
[opposition]. . . . The fundraising was spearheaded by Bill Gates’ father, Bill
Gates, Sr., a regent at the University of Washington whose famous name seemed
to suggest that the whole of the high-tech world was solemnly shaking its head
at us.”
In the
most significant Supreme Court case on the coercive diversity project, Grutter v. Bollinger, in 2003, corporate
America weighed in heavily on the side of mandated proportional representation
and racial preferences. Sixty-five Fortune 500 companies (including Coca-Cola,
Dow Chemical, DuPont, Eli Lilly, Intel, Johnson and Johnson, Procter and
Gamble, Sara Lee, Texaco, Microsoft, Eastman Kodak, Pfizer, and United
Airlines) submitted an amicus curiae
brief in support of the University of Michigan Law School’s affirmative-action
admissions program, which was being challenged by Barbara Grutter, a white
woman whose law-school application the school had denied. The majority (5–4)
decision, written by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, cited the Fortune 500 brief
as evidence that major American businesses had made it clear that they
supported the diversity project.
I have
been using the term “corporate America,” but this moniker is something of a
misnomer in an age when executives are increasingly “post-American” and major
businesses almost always identify themselves as global ventures. Not untypical
are comments from the vice president of Coca-Cola, who said in a speech in
2005, “We are not an American company,” and from a top Colgate-Palmolive
executive, who in 1989 said, “There is no mindset [at Colgate] that puts this
country [the United States] first.”
Speaking
to Atlantic reporter Chrystia Freeland in 2011, a U.S.-based CEO of one of the
world’s largest hedge funds described an internal debate at his company. One of
his senior colleagues had suggested that the “hollowing out of the American
middle class didn’t really matter,” the CEO told Freeland, adding: “His point
was that if the transformation of the world economy lifts four people in China
and India out of poverty and into the middle class, and [that] meanwhile means
one American drops out of the middle class, that’s not such a bad trade.”
Almost a decade ago, Samuel Huntington identified this trend as the
“de-nationalization” of American corporate elites. The new “economic
transnationals,” he said, are the “nucleus of an emerging global superclass.”
Not
surprisingly, the Chamber of Commerce and leading corporations are currently
supporting the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), a treaty
strongly opposed by Senate conservatives, who argue that UNCLOS would undermine
American sovereignty and establish a global regulatory system in which the U.N.
would receive direct tax revenues for the first time. Corporate elites approve
the global regulations in the treaty because these regulations, they believe,
would be good for business.
All too
often, the interests of corporate elites overlap with those of high-profile
Republican donors and lawmakers. The foremost example of this connection is
Carlos Gutierrez, George W. Bush’s former secretary of commerce and the ex-CEO
of the Kellogg Company. With fundraiser Charlie Spies, Gutierrez has founded a
super PAC, Republicans for Immigration Reform, and through TV appearances and
op-eds he has become a major spokesman for the push for amnesty and low-skilled
mass immigration. Gutierrez fits Huntington’s “economic transnational” profile
rather well. As Bush 43’s commerce secretary, he was the major proponent of the
North American Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), which sought to
increase “economic integration” between the United States, Mexico, and Canada.
The SPP also called for the “harmonization” of security and customs regulations
“in all three countries” in order to speed up border crossings – which would
have made American border security dependent on Mexican and Canadian personnel
and practices.
Today,
Carlos Gutierrez is vigorously campaigning for the mass immigration of
low-skilled workers. A few years ago, however, his goal was equally globalist:
a transnational labor force for North America. Under Gutierrez’s leadership,
the SPP in March 2006 included in its list of priorities the effort “to
formalize a transnational technical labor force that could work in any North
American country on a temporary basis.” Understanding the effect this would
have on the standard of living of American blue-collar and white-collar workers
was not then, and is not now, on the high-priority list set by Gutierrez and
his colleagues in the corporate–Republican alliance.
American
conservatism has in the past few decades become an ever more robust coalition
of populist “non-conformist dissenters”: free marketers, social conservatives,
national-security hawks, national-cohesion conservatives, patriotic
libertarians, etc. Analogous to 18th-century British Whigs, these dissenters
are united in their non-conformity to the “established church” of 21st-century
America and its prevailing progressive orthodoxy. On the other hand, American
business and its GOP allies who do not look beyond “economic man” either
silently accept or actively approve the dogmas of progressive orthodoxy – the diversity
project, multiculturalism, radical feminism, globalism, mass immigration,
environmentalism, and all of the progressive social issues.
Immigration
politics is at the heart of the divide between conservative populist groups, on
one side, and corporate elites within the GOP on the other. Senator Jeff
Sessions of Alabama wrote a memo in July to his fellow Republican lawmakers,
calling on them to “flip the immigration debate on its head.” At National
Review Online, Sessions urged the GOP to “adopt a humble and honest populism”
and distance itself from “the corporate titans who believe the immigration
policy for our entire country should be modeled to pad their bottom line.”
The GOP
lost the 2012 election, Sessions said, “because it hemorrhaged support from
middle and low-income Americans of all backgrounds,” and the party must now
mount an “unapologetic defense of working Americans.” He noted that Americans
oppose by a two-to-one margin increasing low-skilled immigration and also
strongly oppose any legalization of illegal immigrants before border security
is in place. Sessions made the key political point that Republicans have a
golden opportunity to appeal once again to Reagan Democrats, who are, as John
O’Sullivan put it in a statement lauding Sessions, an “electoral bloc that
dwarfs any other in numerical terms.”
Two
preconditions of populist ascendancy are already emerging in embryonic form:
first, a Sister Souljah–style rebuke of corporate elites and, second, the
development of policy measures aimed specifically at supporting the middle and
working classes. To the first point, Sessions on Labor Day chided
pro-immigration-reform business groups and pointedly raised the issue of
American patriotism, asking, “What is the loyalty a nation owes to its own
citizens?” On the second point, conservative policy intellectuals as well as
elected officials such as Senator Mike Lee of Utah are beginning to formulate
policy initiatives focused on strengthening the middle and working classes.
Barack
Obama’s most effective campaign argument in 2012 was that Romney represented
corporate America while the president and his party were fighting for ordinary
Americans. Immigration is the first issue on which to turn this accusation back
against Democrats and seize the moral high ground by speaking up for the real
underdog, the American worker. Let us begin the re-branding, as Jeff Sessions
suggests, with conservatives and the GOP vigorously and unapologetically
opposing all legislation that increases low-skilled immigration and denouncing
“comprehensive immigration reform” for what it is: class warfare waged by an
unholy alliance of Obama, progressive elites, and big business against the
well-being and way of life of the American middle and working classes.
