Rick Perlstein's Secret Plan for GOP Resurgence

I saw Rick Perlstein speak at this year's America's Future Now! conference (formerly Take Back America), and he began with three stories from 2008 that proved to him that the "conservative machine" has lost its discipline. The most important was the time McCain disavowed radio host Bill Cunningham, the significant part of that story being that Cunningham gave as good as he got ("I've had it with McCain; I'm going to throw my support to Hillary Rodham Clinton"). Back in the day, Perlstein said, Cunningham would have fallen on his sword for the sake of Mother Movement. If the Right can't command enough loyalty to keep one of its footsoldiers quiet during a controversy, then it's a movement facing decadence.

Great, I thought, Perlstein's saying that the Right should become more machine-like. Maybe it's true what the man said, that in time you can turn these obsessions into careers! But even if Perlstein declension narrative is right and what the Republican Party has is a loyalty problem*, that's a diagnosis and not a cure. There are two kinds of political loyalty, and picking one means rejecting the other. The first kind of political loyalty is ideological — it's the Goldwaterite enthusiasm for the GOP as the agent of conservatism, which extends as far as the party's ideological purity and no further. The other is party loyalty plain and simple, the kind of obedience a political boss might require from his subordinates.

In 1964, the GOP had more of the former than the latter, which was distinctly un-machine-like, as James Q. Wilson points out in The Amateur Democrat:

The leaders of the Goldwater campaign saw themselves as responsible to a set of ideas, to a man, and to a cause — not to an organization, a coalition, a heterogeneous party. The result, of course, was disaster.

Indeed it was. Contrast that with the role ideology played in Carmine DeSapio's Tammany regime, which was none at all. As Pat Moynihan put it:

The extent of his ideological commitment may be measured by his pronouncement to the Holy Name Society Communion Breakfast of the Sanitation Department that "there is no Mother's Day behind the Iron Curtain."

Tammany-style loyalty would be my preference, but if Goldwaterism's fixation on ideological loyalty is in conservatism's DNA, then machine loyalty might be difficult for the GOP to achieve.

But maybe there is hope. After all, what could be more fusionist than "There is no Mother's Day behind the Iron Curtain?"

*Perlstein also noted that, based on what he saw at the '08 national convention, the GOP has become politically tone deaf and can no longer tell which parts of its message resonate and which alienate. I picked up on the loyalty problem rather than tone deafness only because it's more interesting to me. However, "Don't be tone deaf" is good advice.