Elections are about the future, and voters — particularly upwardly mobile, middle-class voters who reside in the suburbs — want to feel good…<\/b>
\nElections are about the future, and voters \u2014 particularly upwardly mobile, middle-class voters who reside in the suburbs \u2014 want to feel good about their future.
If this is an insight that animated the Republicanism of George H. W. Bush, it is also an approach to politics that created tension between that form of Republicanism and a more cynical wing of the GOP with deep roots in Texas.
Intellectual, aristocratic and internationalist, Bush drew his sense of American governance from a different philosophical root than the populist, isolationist, and anti-government conservatism that is touted by many of the leaders of today\u2019s Texas GOP.
For generations this struggle has pulled at the GOP \u2014 with the path for Republicans like Bush becoming narrower in Texas and across the country even as the party has ceded ground, first in cities, now in suburbs and down the road, perhaps, in power altogether.
As the elder President Bush is laid to rest, Texas Republicans would do well to reflect on the sort of party he represented and why he represented it. They would do even better to understand how these two strains of the party have come into conflict in the state and what is lost when those in the mold of George H. W. Bush are pushed out.
The road of Bush\u2019s conservatism and that of the current party forked generations ago, if it was ever one path to begin with. It\u2019s interesting, though, to follow the road\u2019s history through the history of Dallas itself \u2014 a sort of ground zero in the fight for modern conservatism.
It was here in the 1950s that the country\u2019s richest man, H. L. Hunt, funded the radio broadcasts of Dan Smoot\u2019s Facts Forum \u2014 the original Rush Limbaugh-style talk radio show where almost any government action suggested communism, where conspiracy theories were freely peddled and where a populist message pitted the little man against shadowy rulers and even an \u201cinvisible government.\u201d
This was a far cry from the conservatism Bush shared with his father, Sen. Prescott Bush, and with his predecessors at Yale, people like Time Magazine founder Henry Luce. Theirs was a conservatism of internationalist engagement, of effective and nimble governance, of the sense that American democracy and American free markets are a force for good in the world, elevating people out of the bonds of tyranny and poverty. People like Luce and the Bushes didn\u2019t dabble in conspiracies about the ruling class. They were the ruling class, and they wore the distinction with a sense of noblesse oblige, seeking not to undermine the existing order but to use it as a stabilizing force. They didn\u2019t share the sense that freedom was somehow tainted by the act of governance itself.
Bush offered lip-service often enough to that side of the GOP during his political ascendance \u2014 no more famously than when he declared \u201cRead my lips, no new taxes.\u201d But political platitudes weren\u2019t at the heart of his policy practices. So when the time came to do the truly conservative thing \u2014 control deficit spending \u2014 Bush made the right choice, very possibly destroying his hopes of a second term in the process.
Today, the Texas GOP appears to be leaving behind the lessons Bush offered. A far-right talk show host is the state\u2019s lieutenant governor. In the last primary in northern Dallas, an anti-vaccination candidate displaced a moderate state representative only to lose the seat altogether in the general election. Key legislation from the state capital has focused not on resolving pressing policy problems but on stirring social division over straw-man political problems like the bathroom bill.
The current Texas GOP is too often a party of emotional, not intellectual, argument. Its leaders know the pressure points of the populace, and they push them for political gain, to the diminishment of governance rather than its improvement.
There is a reason for that. It has been, for a long time, a winning formula. But the old playbook is tattered now, and the cost the party is paying for its embrace of this sort of Republicanism is becoming clear.
There are plenty of Republican votes to be had in the cities and suburbs of our ever more urban state. But they won\u2019t be won with anti-intellectual, anti-government, faux-populist messages that have drifted down from the past.
Those votes can be won, perhaps, with a reconsideration of the sort of Republicanism George H. W. Bush represented.
He seeded trust, not distrust, in American government, because he believed it was the foundation to protect our free society. He believed in our country\u2019s ability to make not only the lives of its citizens better but the lives of people all over the world better. He saw America as a great good in the world, not as a nation that\u2019s greatness has slipped away.
What’s your view?
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