By Artur Davis, on Tue Feb 26, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET The New Republic’s recent piece on Andrew Cuomo’s presidential ambitions will rankle most conservatives at first glance: its description of the New York Governor as a centrist seems like an ill-fitting label for an unabashed champion of gay marriage, sweeping gun control, decriminalizing marijuana possession, and lately, eroding restrictions on third trimester abortions. But the article is important for a variety of reasons. First, of all the likely Democratic possibilities should Hillary Clinton stay on the sidelines, it is Cuomo who comes closest to Barack Obama’s raw skill and resilience, Cuomo who is best positioned to match either Clinton or Obama as a fundraising machine, and it is the governor who is most likely to reprise Obama’s strength with the metropolitan professionals and suburbanites who are crucial in the big state primaries that will decide the nomination. Short term, the article is illustrative of two points that might explain why extending the Democratic run for another presidential cycle is a more dicey proposition than the gloom about demographics and infighting on the right suggests.
The first point is the extent to which the 21st century brand of centrism in the Democratic Party omits even a scintilla of social conservatism. Cuomo’s stances on social issues may be decidedly to the left of the ground Obama staked out in two presidential campaigns (was it just five ago that Obama was declaring his religious reservations about gay marriage and soft-pedaling his views on abortion?) but they are already orthodoxy among the activists who will dictate the outcomes of caucuses and primaries in 2016 (even in states like South Carolina and Alabama, where the steady migration of conservative Democrats has left primary electorates not much distinguishable from an Iowa or a Maryland).
It’s a shift, though, that will produce a platform and more importantly a nominating campaign that will not resemble the calibrated positions on abortion, gay rights and gun control which Democrats relied on for a generation. Much as 2012 was an object lesson in the Republican shift to the right on subjects like immigration and the distrust in grassroots GOP ranks of every element of Obama’s agenda, the 2016 Democratic race will be a template of what liberal politics sound like when their base has a monopoly on the primaries.
And the reframing of the Democratic Party as an unrestrained defender of social liberalism will have uncertain consequences for the white working class share of their coalition—the share that actually accounted for Obama’s 2012 wins in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, after all four states had elected Republican governors just two years earlier. As Ruy Teixera, who is ordinarily bullish on the prospect of an enduring Democratic coalition, has pointed out, socially progressive politics may no longer be toxic, but they also have no demonstrated appeal to white blue collars who prioritize the manufacturing jobs and wage growth that Obama barely touched in his inaugural speech or State of the Union.
 And it is possible that as liberals assert themselves on themes that they barely mentioned in the economy driven environment in 2008 and 2012, that working class voters will be the leading edge of any gathering cultural backlash around, say, guns or reviving third trimester abortions. In addition, the next election will happen against one of two backdrops, either of which could end up disadvantaging Democrats. Either a worst case, another four years of tepid growth accompanied by continued angst that specific policies like Obamacare haven’t slowed premiums and may have cost jobs, or a best case that has its own risks: a return to robust growth would only divert attention from 2012’s focus on economic fairness. Both scenarios will mean that the thorough-going social liberal who emerges as the next Democratic nominee, either Cuomo or someone who has managed to outflank him, will have to fend for blue collar whites (including conservative Catholics) without the competitive edge Obama enjoyed in running two surrogate campaigns against George W. Bush’s record.
At the same time, as the New Republic suggests, the reformer impulses that have distinguished Cuomo’s record in Albany and given him a genuine claim to the political center, may well end up not influencing a Cuomo presidential platform in any real manner. For example, it will be hard for Cuomo to win his party’s nomination by assembing a combination of national positions akin to his budget reforming, cost-cutting maneuvers and his toughness on public sector unions, both of which have enabled him to garner, until recently, eye-popping approval numbers with Republicans.
Reining in spending nationally would require engaging entitlements, which is a more complicated political beast than reworking pension contributions and trimming fat in Albany. As commentators like Ross Douthat have pointed out, there are major differences between the space for reining in public-sector unions and the tougher terrain of selling reductions of entitlements that are universal. Taking on, for example, federal employees is a non-starter for a Democrat who will need to replicate Obama’s strength in the suburbs of northern Virginia, and the issue has never gotten much national traction anyway. There is certainly no substantive or rhetorical evidence that Cuomo is inclined to challenge the liberal consensus that entitlements are foundations of the social contract that should not be seriously disturbed.
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Artur Davis: Cuomo and the Coming Democratic Dilemma
By Artur Davis, on Fri Feb 15, 2013 at 3:00 PM ET My guess is that if the Netflix political drama “House of Cards” had improbably gotten the backing of a network, it would have swiftly drowned at the hand of Nielsen ratings, and that hiatus or cancellation might have set in before Frank Underwood got to offer his sermon on the nature of forgiveness in a South Carolina church. There is no pop heroine like Kerry Washington’s Olivia Pope (“Scandal”) for a particular audience demographic to root for. And there is no precedent for ratings behind a plotline that doesn’t just include but hinges on the minutiae of governmental details. There may be the requisite sex and adultery and prostitution but they are for major stretches overshadowed with much grayer material: a would-be secretary of state whose nomination unravels over his reference as a college newspaper editor to “illegal occupied Israeli territories” and an impasse over performance metrics in an education bill.
So, this is a show that is destined to be read about more than it is actually watched (the number of viewing souls who know the toxic nature of testing standards for teachers unions and who get that the combination of illegal and occupied are fighting words is, thankfully, small). And then there is the inconvenience for a subscribed series depending on buzz that much of its fan base will not shout their allegiance from the rooftops, or the cultural equivalent that is Facebook: the show’s core of politically engaged people is culturally disposed to deny that it has time to watch television, much less engage in the binge viewing that a simultaneous download of the whole season invites.
But for the politically obsessed collective of Hill staffers, journalists, campaign operatives and ex politicians who have already watched, a decisive verdict: for all of the clichés it spouts about politicians, for all of the little implausible plot engines it relies on (of course, nothing so fanciful as the idea of a first lady enduring a presidential sex scandal and making her own run for president or a black state senator riding a speech to the White House in four years time) this is uncommonly good stuff, for the risks it executes and the vivid story it tells about things that are not inherently vivid.
The central figure, an oily Southern congressman named Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey), is nothing new, nor are his penchants for lowball tactics and outwitting his peers by playing to their vanity or weaknesses. But the novelty is that for all 13 episodes, Underwood stays an unredeemed rogue–not the morally ambiguous striver who starts noble and turns bad, not the hero who has a dark side that he is trying to suppress, but an unmitigated, blissful damager of people. There is a deliberateness to the fact that for all of the specific policy detail that embroiders the narrative, there is never a moment when Underwood shows a flicker of interest in any of it for its own sake. And if David Fincher trusts his audience to wrestle with an array of shifting events and relationships (that would blur had these episodes been laid out over three months) he ventures even more faith in its capacity to stay absorbed in a villain whose only source of suspense is how low he will descend.
Underwood is not the only character whom the audience has to engage while being turned off by their sins. All of his intimates are caught in their own level of moral vacancy: Underwood’s wife Claire (Robin Wright), who cashes in on her husband’s status to run a not-for-profit whose agenda she will sell out without much compunction, just for the thrill of a score; the loyal chief of staff (Michael Kelley) who is Underwood’s henchman and whose only prize is a place in the orbit of a boss who keeps him at arm’s length and calls him by his last name; a young congressman, Peter Russo (Corey Stoll, brilliantly erasing the memory of a weak stint on a failed “Law and Order” remake), whose past is ridiculously compromised and whose only real interest in his career is that it seems to provide an organizing principle for his day; the young reporter (Kate Mara) who entangles herself professionally and sexually with Underwood to fuel her own career, and whose snideness and ethical carelessness make her almost as unsympathetic as Underwood. The relative paragons of decency: a young aide to Russo who tries to save him from his spiral, is still framed as a staffer covertly sleeping with her boss to climb the office ladder; another, a high level aide to Claire Underwood who acknowledges lying about the terms of her dismissal to exact revenge for her boss’s horse-trading with a lobbyist.
What producer David Fincher assumes is that a group of people wallowing in dirt and dysfunction are still watchable. Of course, he is right about that, as television routinely establishes, but Fincher’s gamble is that for most of this series, his characters’ routines are their own contained universe with no one to root for, no mystery to solve, and none of the contrived simplicity of a single narrative conflict.
In that way, “House of Cards” takes a chance that even the notably risk-taking “Homeland” doesn’t: for example, for 11 episodes of the show, there is not an obvious end in sight that Underwood’s machinations are meant to achieve (and when it materializes, it seems accidental); and for about the same stretch, most of the other characters have no endgame of their own. (Unless you fell for the unlikely scenario of Peter Russo’s continued sobriety, and Fincher squashes that rooting interest in some of the series’ few heart-wrenching moments). Imagine if “Homeland” were just a story about the torpor of a deceitful, embittered, returning POW instead of a spy saga about a sleeper terrorist. It is doubtful it would have lasted. Fincher, with great audacity, assumes a show about unappealing people climbing career ladders can work as a dramatic force and it is a large feat that he pulls it off—and doubly impressive that his material is the stereotypical vista of Washington vice, not the relatively exotic venue of mobsters in the “Sopranos” or the creative twist of everymen turned drug dealers in “Breaking Bad”.
At least one critic, Atlantic’s Ari Melber, has made the observation that the other unique perspective of this show is its intuition that it is the culture of politics that attracts flawed people, and that the familiar scapegoats, money and special interests, are only symptoms of the wasteland rather than the causes of it. It’s a cynically appealing perspective, but a short-sighted one. The more substantial reality is that the conniving side of politics is identical to the back-stabbing that goes on in academia and law firms, that the sordid compromises are not so different than doctors peddling medicines they have side deals on, or architects shortchanging some clients to favor others, or traders short-selling their investors’ stocks. The difference is that moral obliviousness in politics resonates while its professional analogues seem mundane (unless there is a lot of sex crammed in).
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Artur Davis: The Genius of “House of Cards”
By Artur Davis, on Wed Feb 13, 2013 at 9:15 AM ET Karl Rove has been spectacularly right about one big thing in his far-flung career: his calculation that Republicans in the late nineties and early 2000s needed to be rebranded as problem solvers, who had a formula to compete on Democratic terrain like education and health-care, outflanked Clintonian centrism when it was on the verge of realigning American politics. Rove was just as spectacularly wrong on another front, his blind spot on the risks of conservatism “going corporate” and turning into just another patchwork of special interests and powerbrokers.
It’s worth keeping the dual nature of Rove’s Bush era legacy in mind as he plots an ambitious effort to intervene in primary fights on behalf of Republicans who are…well, that part remains vague, but excludes at least candidates with a history of dabbling in witchcraft or who have a penchant for philosophizing on gynecology.
If Rove’s version of influence merely takes the form of injecting one more source of shadowy cash into races, then he has already misread recent campaign cycles. Deep-pocketed front-runners from Charlie Crist to Bill Bolling never made it past the starting gate, and it is the insurgents who have cleaned up in GOP state primaries who have been chronically under-funded. The missing element for the losers in these fights has not been a lack of cash to sustain ads or phone banks, but an inability to mobilize rank and file primary voters with either a policy vision or a rhetorical message beyond inside baseball about electability.
In an era where the activists who dominate party primaries award no extra points based on time served in office, or chits from funneling checks to local party committees, the populist, anti-establishment wing of the party has filled a void. In blunt terms, their fears are not getting outflanked with swing voters, but getting trammeled by a government that serves every agenda but theirs. They distrust “reform” as a code for more mandates. They are corrosively suspicious of political power because it seems too subject to being rented or bought by corporate power. And many of them have adopted a Manichaen view of politics that genuinely considers constitutional liberty and fiscal stability to be in some degree of jeopardy.
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Artur Davis: The House that Rove Built
By Artur Davis, on Wed Jan 30, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET The following is the prepared text of a speech Artur Davis delivered at the National Review Institute on January 27, 2013
Rich Lowry, thank you. Rich said that he wanted to get together a few friends for lunch after the campaign, and now I see what he means. And thank you for letting me be the warm-up act for Bobby Jindal, whom I deeply admire, and whom I served with in the House of Representatives.
I want to begin by saying something that needs to be said: I am not going to tell you that we have the luxury of feeling good about where we are as a movement, or that we don’t have lessons to learn. But this is the movement and the cause that rescued this country 30 years ago, when serious people thought we were too complex to be governed anymore. This is the movement and the cause that refused to believe freedom was exhausted; only that it was tired of not being defended. And you held up freedom and made it so vibrant that prisoners in Prague and shipbuilders in Gdansk and freedom fighters in Managua and dissidents in gulags in Russia saw it and were moved by it.
And not only have you been right about these large cosmic things, you have been right about more basic things: we can’t grow an economy by making audacity cost too much, we can’t strengthen people by penalizing them for work, we can’t own our future by living on the credit of countries who want to dominate us. Those values are as right today as they were yesterday, and may they always define us. I have not always been with you but I am with you now and I am proud to stand with you to wage this fight.
So, about this election. Yes, we have learned that we the American people can trust us to do a better job on the three things they said mattered the most to them, the economy, healthcare and spending and still not vote for us. We learned that 5 million fewer people can vote for the president and that he can still get reelected, the first time in 120 years that an incumbent has won and gotten fewer votes than he got the first time—in contrast, 12 million more people voted for George Bush in 2004 than 2000. How is that we lost when so many Americans agreed with our broad principles, and when 5 million people abandoned Obama?
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Artur Davis: A Winning Conservative Message
By Artur Davis, on Mon Jan 28, 2013 at 1:30 PM ET The consensus about Barack Obama’s inaugural address is right. It is the most fulsome presidential defense of liberalism we have heard since 1965, and the most programmatically specific inaugural speech since the thirties. This was also the rhetoric of a partisan who believes his opponents are losers and fools, who won’t have much threat left in them ten years from now.
But before liberals feel too deep a thrill, they should consider the following proposition: Obama’s words will be paired with a second term resume that could be the thinnest since Richard Nixon. Given the alignment in the House, and the number of Red State Democratic senators on the ballot in 2014, there is no viable chance Obama can actually enact a single item on the liberal wish list. Not one, from an assault weapons ban to an overhaul of corporate deductions, to cap and trade, to comprehensive immigration reform, to a government financed infrastructure plan, to a recalibrated war on poverty, to campaign finance reform.
So, Obama Part 2 is more about the tactical work of isolating conservatives than classic presidential legacy building: in other words, not so different from the stalemate of the second half of Obama’s first term. Of course, for liberals, the president’s middling results have had the perverse consequence of providing a rallying cry without a record of accomplishments that are susceptible to backfire (the backlash at Obamacare is a window into how vulnerable Obama might have been if he had managed to pass legislation on immigration or climate change).
This entirely unpredictable element–that gridlock has spared Democrats the consequences of their policies floundering–plus shifting demographics which Republicans have struggled to adjust to, have left an altered political landscape. If not quite the liberal dawn that some Democrats are prematurely celebrating (as they did four years ago), the terrain is changed enough that major stretches of Obama’s speech already seem more boilerplate than visionary.
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Artur Davis: Obama’s “Us Versus Them” Speech
By Artur Davis, on Tue Jan 15, 2013 at 1:30 PM ET The shortest distance in modern politics is the one between a Republican willing to denounce his party for extremism and the set of a cable or Sunday morning talk show. The gift of exposure is waiting for the cheap ticket of describing today’s Republicans as an intolerant set of know-nothings whom one no longer recognizes.
There are a variety of reasons why the current incarnation of the Republican Party is unfamiliar if you are a Republican moderate of a certain age. From the irrelevance of the establishment wing that once financed and vetted most of the party’s candidates, from president down to congressmen; to the spinning off of non elected influencers, from Grover Norquist to the Tea Party, who limit the maneuvering room of the elected leadership; to the devolution of its media center from the glass panels of the Wall Street Journal to a cable network owned by an Australian plutocrat.
To be sure, each of these trends has driven the party to be a straightforwardly conservative ideological vehicle, and each has made the party unwieldy and harder to direct. Is that tantamount to a descent into the darkness? It’s worth noting that for all of its turbulence, the right wing of the party has enrolled what are likely tens of thousands of non-involved homeowners, teachers, retirees, and even the unemployed into the ranks of activists—still a good thing in a citizen driven democracy. Yes, the difficulty of assembling a Republican coalition for congressional deal-making makes consensus harder to achieve than ever. But then an accounting of the “good old days” recalls that consensus generates its own flawed outcomes, like the unraveling of accountability around the capital markets in the latter Clinton years and the explosion of legally sanctioned influence peddling on both partisan sides of K Street.
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Artur Davis: The Tempting of the Moderates
By Artur Davis, on Wed Jan 9, 2013 at 9:15 AM ET  I’ve written before that Republicans looking to recast themselves as middle class-friendly and more reform oriented should look for guidance at Bill Clinton’s renovation project for Democrats in the early nineties. So, I am admiring of Bill Kristol’s project to model the Democratic Leadership Council’s role as a vehicle to modernize the post Bush/Romney Republican Party.
Admiring, but still mindful of two limitations that are often glossed over regarding the DLC’s trajectory: both the rough patch the centrist organization endured in its formative years before Clinton’s 1992 campaign, and the decidedly uneven record the group compiled during the Clinton presidency and beyond.
To a degree that is not widely remembered, the DLC’s first phase, which ran from 1985 to Clinton’s ascension to its leadership in 1990, was mired in internecine combat with more conventional Democratic forces, from Jesse Jackson to Mario Cuomo. The DLC was dubbed variously as a stalking horse for KStreet lobbyists (“the Democratic Leisure Class” in Jackson’s parlance), or Southerners trying to reassert their primacy over blacks and feminists, or unprincipled panderers trying to win over Reagan Democrats by channeling their resentment toward the liberal base. During that stretch, the DLC label was damaging enough that aspiring presidential possibilities like a young Al Gore avoided an overt association, and in the case of Missouri’s Richard Gephardt, worked overtime to purge his record of any links to the DLC as he emerged as a serious contender in the 1988 primary derby.
In other words, the DLC’s initial contribution to the Democratic debate was to polarize the party’s internal political landscape and to provide something of a convenient foil for the Democratic liberal wing. Rather than weakening under a centrist assault, that left wing dominated the 1988 primaries to the point that Jackson ran a competitive second, while a putative moderate like Gore never developed momentum outside his home base of southern whites. Nor was the issue environment that year one friendly to centrists: the spectrum ran, unhelpfully for moderates, from Gephardt’s protectionist pledge to slap tariffs on Korean and Japanese car manufacturers to a near universal consensus among the candidates that Ronald Reagan’s policy of aiding South American counter-revolutionaries be permanently scrapped.
It is also not likely that Kristol and his cohorts mean to emulate the DLC’s footprints in the administration it unmistakably helped elect. It is worth recalling that the only major DLC initiatives that were written into law were welfare reform, a tangible, signature achievement to be sure, and a valuable but relatively modest agenda of grants for community policy. A much larger portion of the group’s portfolio never made it beyond the policy binders: not middle class targeted tax relief; not vouchers for purchasing health insurance; not national service for college scholarships; not the substitution of class for race as the criteria for affirmative action. The Democratic Party’s embrace of a global free trade campaign did not really broaden beyond NAFTA, which George HW Bush primarily negotiated. S-Chip, a genuine advance for low income children, was less a Clinton or DLC priority than a fallback from the wreckage of the abandoned 1994 effort on national health care.
To be sure, the DLC deserves reams of credit for crafting a brand of political argument that was attractive to suburbanites and blue collars, including a robust emphasis on personal responsibility over entitlement and a newfound Democratic tough-mindedness on crime. But to the extent that conservative reformers are ambitious to construct a specific policy apparatus , the DLC seems like a low baseline of achievement that actually did not succeed in reorienting the ideological instincts of its party in a sustained way. To cite just a few examples, the Democratic Party’s Clinton era hawkishness on deficits and fondness for Social Security reform did not survive Clinton’s own vice president’s messaging in 2000, much less subsequent Democratic campaigns.
Finally, the DLC’s ascension was tied in an indispensable way to the gifts of one preternatural campaigner in Bill Clinton. Democratic centrism notably failed to produce a cohort of like-minded prospects at the federal or gubernatorial level. The DLC never fostered the machinery to wage primary battles on behalf of moderate candidates who were engaged in street fights with more traditional liberals. To the contrary, the model was less to nurture centrist candidacies than to sit on the sidelines and nurture relationships with the ever diminishing class of moderates who managed to win on their own (often by sliding to the left to paper over their centrist ways).
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Artur Davis: A DLC for Republicans?
By Artur Davis, on Mon Jan 7, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET Having offered my perspective about the shape of a conservative rebound, I will end the year with a bout of wishful thinking about what 2013 might bring, if the stars align in just the right way. Here are twelve hopes for the next twelve months:
(1) That George HW Bush and Nelson Mandela have more good health in front of them. They are not a commonly linked pair, but their lives epitomize the values of political tolerance and forgiveness. The elder Bush had his brass-knuckled side, as Michael Dukakis can attest, but he is arguably the last president who regarded election to federal office as a compact for Republicans and Democrats to achieve some rough consensus around the country’s challenges. Some of the deals cut, on federal employment laws and acid rain, looked then and now like sensible compromises; the 1990 tax package only preceded a recession and more rounds of rampant spending. But Bush’s four years were notable for their absence of intense division; it is no accident that he is the only president in my adulthood given the moral credit of never being despised by his partisan foes. And Mandela: what more needs to be said other than that he forged a political peace with a regime that jailed him and snatched the prime of his life away?
(2) That the missing cause of 2012, education reform, is discovered alive and intact. For that to happen, liberals will need to extricate themselves from the embrace of the teachers’ unions that have wilted the Democratic reform agenda down to charter schools and not much more; conservatives will need to remind themselves that no other initiative satisfies the right’s goal of upward mobility through self determination more effectively.
(3) That some influential observer will write the seminal book or article documenting the degree to which modern Democrats have abandoned the political center. For all the hand-wringing over Grover Norquist and the Tea Party, it is today’s House Democratic Caucus that refused to supply a single vote for continuing the Bush tax cuts for all but millionaires, until recently the favored position of Democratic moderates; this year’s Democratic platform that discarded the notion that public policy should strive to make abortions rare; and the current Democratic mainstream that has declared opposition to the Affordable Care Act or same sex marriage—views that thirty- five to forty Democratic congressmen held just a few years ago—as, respectively, stone-hearted or hateful.
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Artur Davis: Wishful Thinking in the New Year
By Artur Davis, on Thu Jan 3, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET Tim Scott’s appointment to represent South Carolina in the US Senate has been met with a notable skepticism from most African American commentators, with Adolph Reed’s essay in the New York Times and Jamelle Bouie’s column in the Washington Post providing articulate examples of a common theme: that Scott’s status as a strict fiscal and social conservative means that he will be an impediment to black economic interests as well as the socially liberal agenda that most African American intellectuals have embraced; and that the selection of Scott is an empty and false token meant to prove a Republican inclusiveness that does not exist.
To be sure, Scott’s ascension is the polar opposite of the kind of racial breakthrough that the same critics have fantasized about. When Scott stands for election in 2014, he will depend on the conventional alliance of white suburban and rural conservatives that sustains the GOP’s hold on the Deep South, as opposed to the coalition of blacks and metropolitan whites that liberals assume as a prescription for the election of a black candidate to statewide office. In blunter terms, Scott’s win would mean that he had reassured voters who hold the prevailing right-leaning views in his state that he is one of them, and of a piece with their vision of limited government and traditional cultural values, as opposed to the ideal progressive pathway of convincing those voters to rethink their mindset.
But regardless of the reservations on the left, Scott’s victory scenario is likely the only kind of African American electoral win in the Deep South that is conceivable at this point. In the parts of the region (Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi) where the Democratic share of white voters has slipped to the upper teens, and even in the slightly less polarized areas of Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee, not a single one of the seven black Democrats who hold congressional seats are regarded as plausible statewide figures. Only Atlanta’s Mayor Kasim Reed, a pro-business moderate, is regularly cited as a prospective black contender for a governorship or a Senate seat, and it is worth noting that the last two black Democrats nominated for Senate seats in Georgia have hovered around the 40 percent threshold.
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Artur Davis: Tim Scott’s Rise
By Artur Davis, on Tue Jan 1, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET  Why, despite its periodic low points, does conservatism always rebound? The reason is that much more than their liberal rivals, conservatives understand the weaknesses of our modern bureaucratic, too balkanized society. The strings of bureaucracy do tie the hands of genuine innovators in the public space, and the costs include a substandard education system and income support structures that actually perpetuate poverty. The growth of government has taken on a relentless pace that has weakened constitutional values from the separation of powers to the Commerce Clause. Entrepreneurship is vulnerable to regulatory overreach. And the subdivision of Americans into factions and grievances based on identity has diminished the concept of a national interest.
But while conservatism has endured, it’s worth pointing out that in my lifetime, voters have tended to turn right primarily as a correction to liberal failure or disarray—the freefall of the sixties, the ineptness of Jimmy Carter, the excesses of Democratic Congresses in 1994 and 2010.
The challenge the political right faces today, and that it failed in 2012, is the one of earning American confidence during a crossroads period, when the country is middling along and neither left nor right seem to bear exclusive responsibility for the train wrecks around us. Of late, conservatism has failed to offer its own account of how the middle class became poorer and less upwardly mobile, much less how to turn their fortunes around. It has seemed incapable of defending its cultural values without resorting to derision or wishful thinking. It has seemed tongue-tied about the immorality of financial markets that squander investors’ capital with not an inch of respect for the restraint that orders the lives of smaller, less entitled businesses, much less the standards around kitchen tables.
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Artur Davis: A New Year’s Resolution for Conservatives
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