How Republicans Lost the West

By Christian Probasco, 1-02-07

	Caption: Ryan Sager, from rhsager.com

Ryan Sager is a columnist for the New York Post. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Reason, National Review, and the Atlantic Monthly. He is also the author of The Elephant in the Room, Evangelicals, Libertarians, and the Battle to Control the Republican Party. Writing before the midterm elections, Sager predicted that the Republican shift towards Southern values—religion, morality and tradition, as he sees it—would cost the party in the West where people tend to put more value on freedom, independence and privacy. I interviewed Sager, who lives in Brooklyn, on Thursday, December 21st.

One note of caution: I identify that last set of principles as loosely libertarian values and when I use that term I am in no way referring to the Libertarian Party but rather the libertarians within the Republican Party.

Probasco: How long did it take you to write The Elephant in the Room, and were you worried that it wouldn’t be timely when it was published—that the situation would have changed by that time?

Sager: Initially the book was going to be timed to the 2008 primaries but then the midterm elections started looking a lot more interesting and we moved up the date. It wasn’t rushed. I mostly wrote it between January and April of this year and we knew we’d get it out by the midterms. I guess the election is making it look prescient. I didn’t really make any predictions. But what happened out West confirmed the trend I described in the book.

Probasco: How could Karl Rove have missed the South/West split?

Sager: I don’t subscribe to the “Karl Rove as political genius” theory. Losing the popular vote in 2000 and then barely beating one of the worst presidential candidates of all time, John Kerry—such a record of accomplishment! His idea that you have to turn out “the base, the base, the base,” micro-targeting conservatives every time, just doesn’t work. And when you pander too much to the religious right, and when you base everything around swinging a small block of Catholics in Ohio, for example, you end up getting some major repercussions elsewhere that they kind of arrogantly presumed couldn’t happen. But I think the West could easily move away from the GOP.

Probasco: Let me run some things past you that Bush may have done correctly from a libertarian perspective. For one thing, he hasn’t tried to get Congress to introduce any new gun laws. For another, he cut taxes, and finally, he did try to introduce private Social Security accounts. If you look at the number of libertarians compared to social conservatives, has he governed in a proportional fashion? Actually, in your book, you argue that he misses both bases, don’t you?

Sager: Except that social conservatives have gotten their judges. That’s part of it though: both sides feel disenfranchised. The perception of libertarians is that the social right runs this administration and the social right thinks business conservatives run the party and the social conservatives get shafted every time, which they often do. The tax cuts are good except that they are meaningless when you increase spending like has been done under Bush, which is just a guarantee of a future tax increase. There’s no evidence that the “starve the beast” theory works and that reducing revenues will permanently reduce the size of government. So that’s ultimately going to be a negative: creating a huge deficit and forcing someone to raise taxes in the future. Bush got an expansion of Medicare health savings accounts—that’s one good thing from a libertarian perspective—but the Medicare bill legislated the first new entitlements to be created in a generation, which is not a great accomplishment to have happen under a Republican president. Divided government would have prevented anything from occurring on that front. And libertarians, at this point, just want divided government. It was much better when we had a Congress and president from different parties.

As for private Social Security accounts, I would give him credit there for acting on principle and trying to enact a real libertarian reform--something that was a key objective of the Cato institute. There you ran into a pure competence problem, where he couldn’t execute his goals. And that’s been one of the main flaws of this administration. The message was, “this horrible crisis is coming—in 2040.”

Probasco: The size of government has ballooned under Bush. Is it possible he’s not trying to starve the beast, he’s just going to expand it and put the tax increases that will be necessary in the Democrats’ court and make them the bad guys?

Sager: Oh, certainly, that’s the theory—conservatives force them eventually to raise taxes. The problem is that he’s the guy who expanded the size of government and you can’t blame the Democrats for that, and they have a pretty plausible claim that the irresponsible spending happened under Bush and they’re just cleaning up his mess. You see it across the country and this is borne out in polls: after Bush, the Democrats now have the reputation of being the party of fiscal responsibility. Right before the elections the Republican Party was identified by a margin of, I think, 10 points by voters as the party of big government and the Democrats had a 15-point margin on the question of, “who will spend your money more responsibly?” So Bush has really shot the Republicans’ image of fiscal conservatism, probably for a generation.

Probasco: Do you think the losses the Republicans experienced in the last election were primarily due to libertarians splitting from the party?

Sager: No, I don’t think the libertarians did it all by themselves, but I think a lot of the things Bush has done, as far as big government conservatism, are responsible. And certainly the corruption issue was huge and so also was the South’s captivity of the Republican Party. You really saw essentially no losses in the South outside of—well, the big one was Senator George Allen, who was somewhat of an anomaly with his idiocy in the macaca incident, and even then it was a razor-thin loss. You saw huge losses in the Northeast, some losses in the Midwest, and some very important losses in the West. So as far as the Republicans becoming the party of the South, that absolutely happened in this election. The less you went to church, the more likely you were to switch from Republican to Democrat in this election. We saw about a 14-point loss among Latino voters because of the Tom Tancredos of the world and the whole anti-immigrant sentiment. You certainly can’t blame Bush for that. He has always understood the importance of trying to bring Hispanics into the GOP coalition. But the ultraconservatives did quite a bit to push Latinos away this time.

Probasco: Do you think the Republicans are victims of their own success, since there have been no major terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11? You wrote that the War on Terror was supposed to be a unifying factor among Republicans and it seems to be failing on that account.

Sager: I think as far as libertarians are concerned, the War on Terror does not work to keep together the coalition like the Cold War did. It just raises so many civil liberty issues at home, like the Patriot Act. You had Jon Tester of Montana, a fairly libertarian state, running explicitly against the Patriot Act. I think you’ve seen a somewhat corrosive effect on civil liberties at home, which drives libertarians away. And if Iraq wasn’t such a disaster, it might have had more of a unifying effect, but since it has turned out to be a disaster, it has probably had more of a heightened dividing effect internally among Republicans, and not just libertarians but paleoconservative, Pat Buchanan-type Republicans who also opposed going into Iraq. And centrists are driven away by the competence question. Iraq looks a lot more like the Katrina response every day. The Republicans are supposed to be adults, the ones who can run things. Turns out they can’t. That’s a pretty big problem.

Probasco: How much does the Patriot Act, compared to the big government stance, hurt Republicans with the libertarian faction of the party?

Sager: I think it’s split pretty evenly between libertarians who put economics at the forefront and those who put civil liberties at the forefront. You have to remember, however, that the Patriot Act is tremendously popular among the general public. It is overwhelmingly popular with a lot of people in the center and even on the left. One of the objections people make against my arguments is that, yes Bush did move away from the libertarians between 2000 and 2004 but he also increased his margins. So you do gain votes amongst a certain segment of the American public when you embrace big government conservatism and become the daddy party on security issues. But I don’t think they’ve gained that much and I think the ultimate dilemma is still this regional problem, in that you can gain a lot of votes nationwide and run up your totals, but when you take the West out of the Republican coalition, you no longer have a presidential coalition. You don’t have a party that can win the Electoral College.

Probasco: Can there possibly be such a thing as a gun-loving Democrat?

Sager: Yeah. You want his name? Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana. You mentioned earlier that Bush hasn’t pushed for any new gun legislation. The Democrats have decided to forget gun control for now—there is no party of gun control in modern American politics, except regionally. In New York City, certainly, the Democratic Party is pro-gun-control. Rudy Giuliani was pro-gun-control, which I think will be very different when he runs for president. The Democratic Party would have to be absolutely brain-dead to ever go back to gun control. And I think it hurts them more in the West and in rural America to worry about gun-control, which is something we know just doesn’t work anyway. Every Democratic candidate should get out there like Schweitzer, wearing cowboy boots, with a hunting rifle and a dog because it seems to work.

Probasco: As long as you don’t shoot somebody in the face. What are the Republicans doing to get back into power?

Sager: I don’t think they’ve learned much of a lesson. In the last House leadership elections, we saw the same status quo, establishment leadership team return. We saw Trent Lott put back into a leadership position in the Senate. Talk about a party of the South; we have a guy who was just exiled from American politics for expressing nostalgia for segregation and now he’s back in Senate leadership. These people just don’t get it. Lott is one of the worst of the worst as far as big government, corrupt Republicans goes. He’s a symbol of everything that’s wrong with this party. So right now, I look at it like the stages of grief, and I think the Republicans are in denial, and we’ll see when they get to the bargaining stage, but they’re not there yet.

But I also think they have a real opportunity to redeem themselves in 2008. And it’s interesting that the current top two candidates would each pull the party away from southern conservatism. I think Rudy is clearly the front-runner at this point. I know a lot of the press doesn’t want to believe that, but any poll will tell you he is the front-runner. He’s a northeastern, socially liberal Republican and he is going to be able to do fairly well among the religious right and people of that nature because he is strong on terrorism, and he’s also the competence candidate. He can actually run something, and he’s shown that in New York City, a very tough city to govern. And then there’s John McCain, who would bring us back a little bit towards Western conservatism.

The Southern candidate, oddly enough, is Massachusetts’s governor Mitt Romney who is doing everything he can to appeal to the religious, anti-gay element of the party. He may be coming out of Massachusetts but he is running as the Southern candidate.

Probasco: I’ve got a title for your next book. I think you should call it The Wandering Libertarians.

Sager: Yeah, we’re in the wilderness right now.

Probasco: Hopefully not for forty years.

Christian Probasco, who writes from his guest blog on New West, interviewed Sager by phone on Dec. 21. Find Christian's blog at http://www.newwest.net/cprobasco




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