RALEIGH – The 2006 electorate repudiated Republican control of Congress but not the conservative movement or the case for limited government.
This statement has already been repeated so much as to become a cliché – in part because prominent conservative leaders, commentators, and think-tankers were stating it long before Election Day. Indeed, a telling sign that Democrats were likely to make substantial gains this year was that so many conservatives, by late summer or early autumn, were saying that it wouldn’t be at all bad for their movement, and the country, if Democrats won.
But is the cliché nevertheless true? In my opinion, the proper answer is “sort of.”
As to the electorate repudiating the conservative movement, the word “repudiate” is inapt. Self-identified conservatives have never been a majority of Americans or North Carolinians. Certainly, they have outnumbered self-identified liberals by a large margin, 2-to-1 or greater in some states, but that’s not the same thing. Exit polls found little ideological difference in the electorate this year compared to 2004; the number of self-identified conservatives dropped two points (34 percent in 2004, 32 percent in 2006) and the number of self-identified liberals dropped one point (21 percent to 20 percent). Going back further in time doesn’t offer any more evidence of conservatism’s demise, with exit polls finding 31 percent conservatives and 19 percent liberals in 1998 and 29 percent conservatives and 20 percent liberals in 2000.
Nor has the “conservative movement” ever been elected by the majority of any electorate, so voters can’t be said to have repudiated it this year. Movements aren’t on the ballot. Candidates and parties are. Public intellectuals, be they Left or Right, no doubt prefer that their ideas influence public debate and get implemented in some form. But that doesn’t make them would-be politicians or die-hard partisans.
A plurality of voters nationally, and a significant share in North Carolina, identifies as moderate, by which they mean a variety of different things. Some moderates have what are usually called conservative views on fiscal issues, but not on social or foreign policy. Others are cultural conservatives who favor government growth in the economic sphere (populists). Still others are security-oriented voters who only embrace conservative ideas on fighting crime or fighting terrorism.
Thus, individuals or institutions in the modern conservative movement – representing either free-marketeers, cultural conservatives, or hawks – aren’t necessarily hoping to convince most Americans to become thorough-going, ideological conservatives, much less to endorse a particular political party or candidate. They are attempting to identify, justify, and promote discrete ideas. They don’t much care who may be in a position to implement those ideas.
So when these conservative intellectuals and activists look at the 2006 election returns, they see a complex picture, not a yes-or-no national referendum on ideology. For example, they see a number of Republican candidates on Election Day as having lost because the GOP disappointed its base on issues ranging from federal spending to moral values (my own view is that a disaffected base probably cost some Republicans their seats in tight races, and thus the Senate, but that Democrats would have made sizable House gains anyway because swing voters swung strongly their way). Some conservatives seeking consolation also see the passage of conservative legislation by direct democracy, such as property-rights protections in every state where they were on the ballot or a racial-preferences ban in Michigan, as codifying their ideas.
They look at pre- and post-election polls that confirm a continued voter preference for limited government. A good example making the rounds in the past week was an interesting survey conducted for the Club for Growth in 15 battleground House districts around the country. A majority of these districts went Democratic on Election Day. But most of the voters said they favored a smaller federal government and lower taxes. Asked which was the “party of big government,” 39 percent said the Republicans and 28 percent said the Democrats. Nearly two-thirds agreed with this statement: “The Republicans used to be the party of economic growth, fiscal discipline, and limited government, but in recent years, too many Republicans in Washington have become just like the big spenders that they used to oppose.”
I’m surprised the agreement wasn’t 90 percent.
Finally, many conservatives look at the Democratic newcomers to the U.S. House, and notice that 16 were endorsed by at least one of two centrist groups: the New Democrat Coalition (Clinton-era Dems, pro-growth, pro-tax reform, pro-free trade) or the Blue Dog Democrats (culturally conservative, spending hawks, anti-free trade). These centrists embraced at least some recognizably conservative ideas in their successful campaigns. That doesn’t make them conservatives. What it makes them is evidence for the proposition that the policy debate remains shifted somewhat to the Right of where it was a quarter-century ago.
That’s not the whole story, I would hasten to say. For example, while most Americans are philosophically opposed to a big-spending federal government – or state government for that matter – they often endorse a lot of specific spending programs that add up to big budgets. In addition, some non-conservative ideas were endorsed by the 2006 electorate, too, such as minimum-wage hikes on the ballot in six states. The question of where America is going ideologically is too complicated to be answered in a single column. My point was simply that when conservatives distinguish the validity and salability of their ideas from the performance of the Republican Party, they are sincerely expressing a reasonable proposition – just as liberals have often defended the validity and salability of their ideas during periods when Democrats have lost major elections.
There will never come a time when our society lacks a robust debate about political ideology and public policy. No election will end it. Elections merely decide who will wield the coercive power of government at a particular moment.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.