Ornstein and Mann give some interesting history about the rise of the “no negotiations” Right, principally through the career of Newt Gingrich, whom they got to know early on, as well as Grover Norquist and his near almighty “Taxpayer Protection Pledge,” and Fox News, though they rather neglect Rush Limbaugh. What they don’t explore, very much, is why the current New Right has gotten so much traction.
The great grand daddy of the Cantorians is, of course, George “Ain’t a Dime’s Worth of Difference Between ‘Em” Wallace. His explicitly racist message resonated powerfully with a fearful white working class in the South, and with many in the North as well, but he could never gain anything approaching a national majority. Wallace was probably too raw ever to become a national figure, although it’s impossible to know how far he could have gone if he hadn’t been crippled by an assassin’s bullet.
It was Jesse Helms who refined Wallace’s act and took it uptown. Helms came to Washington with the primary goal of making the Yankees pay for abolishing segregation. Unsportingly, one can guess that Helms had a particular resentment for the leading role that liberal Jews had played in the struggle against segregation, because he was remarkably hostile towards Israel from 1973, when he first arrived in the Senate, until 1984, when he finally succumbed to the weight of the AIPAC nation.
During the Reagan Administration, Helms (and Reagan) grudgingly realized that segregation was a lost cause, even abandoning their beloved Apartheid allies in South Africa under pressure from those damned neo-cons, who, it must be said, were not always a force for evil. But Helms quickly found other issues, or else the left found issues for him—abortion, affirmative action, feminism, and, of course, homos.
I’ve never read anything about a connection between Gingrich and Helms. Maybe Helms was too big, by the time Gingrich came to Washington, to waste much time with a kid who was, after all, just a representative, but Gingrich must have studied the ways in which Helms waged the Culture War, consistently winning elections if not the war itself.
And that seems to be the problem with the Right. They can win elections, but not the war, which is why so many of their proposals—the notorious Balanced Budget Amendment, super-majorities for tax increases, and even the now pretty much forgotten repeal of the Amendment authorizing direct election of U.S. senators—reflect a distrust of the ability of the people’s elected representatives to do the right thing. And it suggests as well why they seem so angry and so desperate: they feel that somehow time is running out for them. They’re in a crisis, and they have to act now, or else everything will be lost, forever.
