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“Rule and Ruin” by Geoffrey Kabaservice and “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism” by Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson

By Jonathan Yardley,February 03, 2012

It is no exaggeration to say, as Geoffrey Kabaservice does at the very outset of “Rule and Ruin,” that there is today “an uneasy sense among many Americans that while their society and culture remain vibrant, their governing system has become quarrelsome, dysfunctional, and incapable of coping with serious national problems,” and that “the transformation of the Republican Party over the past half-century into a monolithically conservative organization” is a, if not the, chief reason for this. Not to make light for a moment of the excesses and foolishness to which the Democratic left is prone, the takeover of the GOP by the tea party and its allies in the media, the religious right and sympathetic boardrooms has brought the American political system to a state of near-paralysis.

Now, in the early weeks of what promises to be a rancorous political year, we have two books that explore this phenomenon and attempt to explain its meaning. All three of their authors are academics — though Kabaservice has no university connection at the moment, Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson are in the Harvard government department — and both books are published by the same academic house. Kabaservice’s loyalties clearly lie with the moderate-to-liberal establishment (his previous book was a sympathetic account of Kingman Brewster’s presidency of Yale), while Skocpol and Williamson appear to be well left of center, but all three authors have made honest efforts to treat their controversial subject fairly.

Kabaservice’s “Rule and Ruin” is the better and more useful of the two books, because it is a thorough history of the evolution of the GOP from the Eisenhower years to the early 21st century, but “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism” contains a great deal of valuable information about who the tea partyers are and what they believe.

Moderate Republicans may not be extinct, but they clearly are endangered. It wasn’t so long ago that they were a crucial part of the political landscape. As Kabaservice says, “Moderate Republicans helped shape many of what are typically thought of as Democratic achievements, from certain Progressive and New Deal reforms to the architecture of the post-World War II global order and civil rights legislation.” Lyndon Johnson may get the credit for the great civil rights laws of the 1960s, but none of these would have passed without the support of such Republicans as Sens. Everett Dirksen and Clifford Case and Rep. William McCulloch, whose votes exceeded those of the Southern Democrats who united against the bills. Kabaservice is right to say: “If American politics can be compared to an ecosystem, then the disappearance of the moderate Republicans represents a catastrophic loss of species diversity.”

It is no small irony that, as Kabaservice points out, Republican support for the civil rights bills backfired, because their enactment enraged the white South and opened the way for the “Southern strategy” formulated by Kevin Phillips in “The Emerging Republican Majority” (1969) and pursued with surpassing cynicism by John Mitchell as he presided over the Republican midterm campaign of 1970 and the presidential campaign of 1972.

I was living in the upper South at the time and writing editorials for a newspaper of moderate inclinations, and I still remember with something akin to horror the manifold ways in which Mitchell and his henchmen played on the racial fears and animosities of white Southerners to herd them into the GOP, where they have remained ever since. Though Skocpol and Williamson bend over backward to give today’s tea partyers the benefit of the doubt on racial matters, they concede that “racially laden group stereotypes certainly did float in and out of [our] interviews, even when people never mentioned African-Americans directly.”

The evolution of the Republican Party to a point at which such views became tolerable, even politically useful, was slow and not without resistance. Among the best aspects of “Rule and Ruin” are its careful accounts of Advance, a magazine briefly published by young moderate Republicans in the early 1960s, and the Ripon Society, founded in 1962, which “in time would replace Advance as the most visible moderate Republican activist organization.” That society, which struggles on to this day, has frequently been vilified by ultra-conservatives as somehow disloyal to Republican principles, but it has been true to the tradition of Robert Taft, Dwight Eisenhower, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and George H.W. Bush, all of them exemplars in different ways of the honorable tradition of moderate Republicanism.