The New Road to Serfdom (17 page)

The Tea Party Movement is the latest manifestation of this tradition: a popular
fronde
that is unaffiliated but conservative, political but skeptical toward political parties, angry but focused. You occasionally read that the Tea Parties were synthetic, that the crowds had
somehow been artificially put together, that the rage was fabricated. In fact, the Tea Party phenomenon is an example of that rare beast, a genuinely spontaneous popular movement. One of its founders told me that it had started life as a twenty-two-person conference call, and had grown within weeks to an army of thousands.

There are limits, of course, to what such a movement can achieve. It has no legislators and can pass no laws. It has scant financial resources. Indeed, it has so far failed in its two main aims: to defeat the Obama health-care bill, and to reduce the levels of taxation and debt. But legislation takes place against a background of national debate and consensus, and this is what the Tea Partiers have helped to shift.

Just as there are limits to what a popular movement can achieve, so there are limits to what a political party can achieve. The Tea Party Movement is nourished by a very American creed, namely that governments don’t have the answers, that reform comes from below, that people are wiser than their leaders. By taking their message directly to the streets, the Tea Partiers changed minds in a way that politicians couldn’t. They have, in short, created an atmosphere in which candidates opposed to Big Government can win. Whether such candidates succeed, and whether they are able to effect a substantive change in public policy, will depend at least in part on what kind of relationship they retain with the wider movement.

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During the middle years of the twentieth century, the left seemed to have won a permanent victory. The Democrats enjoyed what looked like a structural majority in the House of Representatives and, although Republicans could occasionally win the White House, they usually did so when they fielded deliberately non-partisan candidates, such as Dwight Eisenhower.

The GOP leadership had accepted much of the Roosevelt settlement. Patrician, Northeastern, and fastidious, Republican bigwigs balked at the idea of mounting a populist challenge to the consensus. As the economist J. K. Galbraith put it in 1964: “These are the years of the liberal: almost everyone now so describes himself.”

How did the party go from semipermanent opposition to mastery? The story was brilliantly told by two
Economist
journalists, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, in their 2004 book
The Right Nation: Why America Is Different.

They chronicled the transformation of the Republicans from an East Coast, preppy, country club party, a party of old money and big business, a party that kept losing, into an angrier, more church-going, more anti-government, Sunbelt party, a party that kept winning.

The story is epitomized by the history of the Bush family. Prescott Bush, George W.’s grandfather, was
every inch an Establishment Republican: wealthy, well-connected, liberal, a stickler for good manners. A successful Wall Street banker, he represented Connecticut in the Senate between 1952 and 1963, and was well thought of for his bipartisanship, courtesy, and golfing ability.

His son, George H. W. Bush, did what many Americans of his generation were doing: He migrated South and West, leaving Yale for the tin-roofed oil town of Odessa, Texas. There he encountered a very different strain of Republicanism: more libertarian, more evangelical, and—in what was still a one-party Democratic state—more anti-Establishment.

By the time George W. Bush became governor of Texas, the transformation of the GOP was total. The forty-third president was almost exaggeratedly Texan in his speech and manner. Like their party, the Bushes had become more demotic, more anti-Washington, less interested in foreign affairs, and far more successful at the polls.

The family’s migration from Kennebunkport to Crawford mirrored that of the GOP “from patrician to populist, from Northeastern to Southwestern, from pragmatic to ideological” as Micklethwait and Wooldridge put it.

Not all center-right parties have made this successful transformation. My own is still seen by many voters as the political wing of a closed Establishment: a party
of black-tie dinners and private schools and gentlemen’s clubs. It suffers electorally in consequence.

Indeed, by far the most successful Conservative over the past hundred years has been Margaret Thatcher, who aimed to transform Britain into a “home-owning and share-owning democracy.” Perhaps her single most popular policy was to allow people who lived in houses owned by their local authorities to buy their own homes. The beneficiaries of that reform became her strongest supporters. But she was commensurately loathed by many of the upper class “Wets” who had previously run the Tory Party, and who regarded her radicalism as antithetical to everything they believed in. They were not bad people, the Wets. On the contrary, they generally were motivated by a belief in public service, by a high-minded (if pessimistic) patriotism, and by a touching sense of
noblesse oblige.
The trouble is that, like the 1960s Republicans, they kept losing: their modest, undoctrinaire conservatism couldn’t be turned into a popular movement.

Only in very recent years has the British Conservative Party begun to adopt some of the ideas that brought success to the U.S. Republicans: the decentralization of power, referendums, recall mechanisms, school choice, and so on. Strangely enough, the leader who oversaw this change, David Cameron, is every bit as blue-blooded as the Bushes. Such are the paradoxes that make politics fascinating.

The transformation of the Republican Party had many elements, and we should be wary of oversimplification. But if there was a single policy that embodied the change, and began the party’s revival, it was the embrace of localism and states’ rights. The issue that catalyzed that change was the busing of schoolchildren, but that issue symbolized something much wider. A liberal elite appeared to have lost touch with the country. Leftist policymakers, who sent their own children to private or suburban schools, were imposing what seemed an unfair and disproportionate policy on everyone else, sometimes ordering their children to attend schools that were many miles away. When Ted Kennedy tried to remonstrate with an angry Irish-American crowd on the subject in Boston in 1974, he was chased into a federal building.

The Republicans saw their opportunity. They were no longer the elite. They could side with the ordinary voters against remote officials. They could take up the old Jeffersonian ideal that decisions should be taken as closely as possible to the people they affect.

Here was the formula that would secure their success: a success that was to reach its fullest flower in the victories of Ronald Reagan and, later, in the Contract with America.

Only now, perhaps, do we have the sense of perspective needed to appreciate the magnitude of the Contract. It wasn’t just that Dick Armey and Newt Gingrich
managed to win a congressional majority after forty years, turfing out a number of Democratic officeholders who had regarded their posts as permanent. It was that they then went on to prove that politicians can keep their promises.

The Contract took the form of a very short document: a series of eighteen simple, measurable promises, rounded off with the striking offer: “If we break this contract, throw us out.” The Contract initially was scorned by Washington pundits. It was, they scoffed, far too concerned with such abstruse issues as internal congressional reforms. Out in the country, the columnists agreed, people were far more interested in bread-and-butter issues such as education and the economy.

But the Republican leaders had spotted something that the pundits had not. People were on the point of giving up on their politicians. A series of petty scandals had drained Congress of authority. Republicans grasped that, until it had put its own affairs in order, the House of Representatives would not be trusted with the affairs of the nation. The very first item of the Contract—“require all laws that apply to the rest of the country to apply equally to the Congress”—was dismissed by sophisticated correspondents. But, outside the Beltway, voters who had long given up on their representatives looked up with sudden interest.

Having cracked down on a number of congressional abuses, the representatives turned their attention
outward, with legislation to balance the budget, tackle crime, and—outstandingly, as we have already seen—reform welfare.

I was so fascinated by the story of the Contract with America that I traveled to Atlanta to listen to Newt Gingrich, and to Dallas to discuss it with Dick Armey. When I asked them what the toughest part had been, both gave the same reply: “The toughest opposition comes from your own side.”

When I returned, I set about selling the idea to my own party. During the 2010 general election, David Cameron posted 3.5 million copies of his Contract with Britain to targeted voters. It worked. He won.

The Contract with America was, as we can now see, the high point of anti-government Republicanism. As the party settled into office, it lost its hunger. As the years passed, the Republicans began to forget what had made them win.

Under the second Bush, the GOP began to drift toward big government, centralization, and crony capitalism. It reverted to the protectionism that had been its creed before World War II, imposing a steel tariff from no higher motive than to shore up support in a marginal state. It presumed to tell state legislatures what laws they should pass on moral issues, such as euthanasia and same-sex unions. It expanded the federal government’s role in education. It pursued a vastly expensive foreign policy. It gave the security forces colossal new
powers, some of them justified by the changed situation, but others wholly disproportionate. It pushed federal spending to unprecedented levels, while allowing the deficit to rise. Then, in its final days, it began bailing out, or seizing outright, failed businesses.

To put it at its simplest, the Republican Party started winning when it aligned itself with the masses against the elites, when it championed local prerogatives against Washington, when it stood for the individual against the state. It started losing when it reversed that alignment.

In the absence of an organized opposition party, Americans took opposition into their own hands. They took to the streets to remind their leaders of their duties under the Constitution. In doing so, they were living up to the highest American ideals, consciously emulating the eighteenth-century patriots whose creed they recited. A scheme to make America less American—less devolved, less independent, less competitive, less diverse, less free—provoked the rage of the American people themselves, or at least a goodly number of them.

For those of us who admire the American ideal, it was a heartening sight. After all, as the old chestnut has it, a democracy gets the politicians it deserves. Americans deserve better.

Y
ou might be wondering why a patriotic British politician has written a book lauding the constitution of a state that was created out of a popular rising against Britain.

The answer is that, when I look at the United States, I see British liberties thriving. The men who made the Revolution didn’t develop their doctrines in a vacuum. They were drawing on centuries of English political thought and, more to the point, political practice.

The ideas that animated the revolutionaries, and were eventually enshrined in the U.S. Constitution,
were all commonplaces in contemporary British politics. Most Britons at the time would have assented cheerfully to the propositions that laws should be passed only by elected representatives, that taxes might not be levied save with the permission of the legislature, that no one should be subject to arbitrary punishment or confiscation, that ministers should be held to account by elected parliamentarians, that property rights should be defended by independent magistrates, and that there should be a separation between the executive, legislative, and judicial arms of the state.

American historians, quite understandably, tend not to emphasize the extent to which Britain sympathized with the grievances of the colonists. Later accounts of the revolution generally portrayed it as a national uprising?—as, indeed, a War of Independence.

This interpretation, however, depends on a very selective reading of what the patriot leaders were arguing
at the time.
They saw themselves not as revolutionaries, but as conservatives. In their own minds, all they were asking for was what they had always assumed to be their birthright as Englishmen. The real revolutionaries, as they saw it, were those in the Georgian Court who were seeking to impose a new settlement, in contravention of the ancient constitution: one that would tilt the balance from legislature to executive, and open the door to oppressive government.

Obviously, once the fighting started, the patriot leaders began to use nationalist language in an attempt to rally as many colonists as possible to their cause. And, following their victory, they tended to stress this aspect of their cause, to reinterpret their recent past with one eye on where their actions had led. They would not have been human had they done otherwise. Nonetheless, the idea in 1776 that America was engaged in a war against a foreign nation would have struck most of the inhabitants of the colonies, patriot or loyalist, as bizarre.

In his 1999 study,
The Cousins’ Wars,
Kevin Phillips approached the American Revolution more realistically, as a civil war within a common polity. More than this, he demonstrated that the Revolution was, in many ways, a successor to the English Civil War of the 1640s.