Lost Horizon

An alienated GOP hands the future to Al Gore.

Virginia Postrel from the July 1998 issue

Republicans sound different when they talk to their big donors. The party they describe isn't a party you hear from much these days. They say nothing about "culture wars" and lots about freedom. They praise entrepreneurship and free enterprise. They hardly even utter the word conservative.

And they choose their speakers accordingly. At a January conference for Team 100--donors who give the GOP at least $100,000 every four years and make five-figure contributions in between--Jeff Eisenach, the president of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, told the audience about a survey Wired magazine had commissioned. "Digitally connected" citizens, he reported, are well educated, very affluent, white, and mostly male. They believe in free markets, go to church, and are optimistic about the future. While patriotic, they are skeptical of government's ability to solve problems.

In other words, Eisenach concluded, they should be Republicans. But they aren't. The GOP does fairly well among them, claiming about 40 percent. But about a quarter call themselves independents and fully a third are--horror of horrors! --Democrats. Charged with discussing "The High-Tech Community and the GOP Vote," he went on to dispense practical advice: Pay more attention to technology issues. Don't hide huge new taxes in telecom legislation. Spend more time schmoozing Silicon Valley.

It was an interesting talk, and something the audience needed to hear. Despite a methodology that overemphasized owning pagers and cell phones, the Wired survey did identify a real and important political subculture--informed, active, and largely up for grabs. The "connected" make up less than 10 percent of the population, but they are disproportionately influential. (And, if anything, Wired's methodology undercounted them.) From such swing voters come political realignments.

But Eisenach didn't get to the heart of the matter. He made the mistake political analysts and operatives almost always make on this subject. He confused a cultural identity with an economic interest. So he offered his audience a narrow agenda of business issues. He had nothing to say to the values that move such voters.

In a recent article in The Weekly Standard, conservative lawyer and PBS host-producer Hugh Hewitt repeated the error, adding a layer of pejorative language. As the articulate co-host of the leading public affairs show in Southern California, Hewitt is the face of the Republican intelligentsia for a good chunk of the nation's largest state--the state that controls a fifth of the electoral college. Like Bill Bennett or Bill Kristol on the national level, he therefore exercises a disproportionate influence on how his party is perceived. And like them, Hewitt has increasingly little use for the entrepreneurial crowd.

Each major party, he argues in the Standard, is made up of three subparties: For the Republicans, these are the "Party of Faith," the "Party of Wealth," and the "Party of Patriotism." Ignoring the GOP's suburban base altogether, Hewitt uses his typology mostly to argue that the party should kowtow to such Christian-right leaders as James Dobson and Gary Bauer. The article oozes contempt for the shallow, ignorant money grubbers who send the party six-figure checks. Hewitt writes of the Party of Wealth:

"From mutual-fund managers and some big-business types to small entrepreneurs and anti-tax activists, these folks believe in the bottom line. `If GDP increases, all is well,' is their credo. They write checks to campaign coffers, and they vacation out of state. Net worth is the key to their hearts and minds.

"There have been substantial defections from this group to the Democrats in recent years, especially from the higher income brackets, where laissez-faire lifestyle politics holds sway. Unfamiliar with the redistributionist zealotry of the old Left (or so rich they don't much care what slice the government takes), these newly wealthy technocrats tend to discount the importance of politics. Their discomfort with the Party of Faith propels them into the arms of their natural enemies."

There is indeed a traditional Republican "party of wealth," the old Rockefeller types, but they don't seem to be the people Hewitt has in mind. Instead, he scorns those Republicans who resonate to the American ideals of personal achievement and economic progress. Hewitt's Party of Wealth is but another imperfect way of identifying what Wired, with its own techno-emphasis, called the "connected." But instead of celebrating them, Hewitt finds them annoying and a bit stupid. They don't even know their own interests.

Americans care, of course, about their economic interests. But they care first about their identities. Consider the tax-paying, socially conservative Latinos who went Democratic in droves thanks to Pete Wilson's "They keep coming" campaign for Proposition 187. If voters feel personally attacked--because they are Latinos, or working women, or housewives, or evangelical Christians, or gays--they will bolt the party that serves their economic interests. Their "natural enemies" will start to look like their friends. And if they are courted, valued, and made to feel at home, they will reciprocate. Hence, as the saying goes, American Jews have the incomes of Episcopalians and the voting patterns of Puerto Ricans.

The people Wired identifies as the "connected" and Hewitt calls the "Party of Wealth" are in fact defined neither by their gadgets nor by their money. They have a cultural identity, a cluster of distinguishing values, and a worldview. When you ask Silicon Valley executives why they do what they do, they almost never mention money, and they certainly don't brag about their cell phones. They talk about "the ability to constantly learn new things," about "constant change, challenge, learning, growth," about "creating something significant."

Although they are most visible in Silicon Valley, you can find people with the same attitudes everywhere. Theirs is not the Party of Wealth but, in a broad cultural sense, what F.A. Hayek called "the party of life": They value learning and achievement. They accept trial-and-error experiments. They look forward to the future. They believe in creativity, enterprise, and progress.

Ronald Reagan spoke their language, which is why a remnant of Republican leaders (and a lot of big Republican donors) still imagine they belong in the GOP. A quintessential Californian, Reagan combined the state's Midwestern work ethic with its Western sense of possibility and self-fashioning. He imagined America as a city on a hill: "a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity." In less-poetic tones, another Midwesterner who made it big in the Golden State speaks for that lost Reaganite vision. In America, Rush Limbaugh tells anyone who will listen, "ordinary people can do extraordinary things."

You would think that the vision of Reagan and Limbaugh would be at home in the Republican Party. But you would be wrong. In mainstream Republican rhetoric, the city on a hill has been replaced by a swamp of iniquity, the God of blessing by the God of wrath. No wonder Bob Dole's 1996 convention speech promised to build a bridge to the past. Dole was pandering to the party's imagined base. All the present holds, he said, "is crime and drugs, illegitimacy, abortion, the abdication of duty, and the abandonment of children." Americans are horrible, evil people, and our civilization offers nothing of merit. Hewitt writes, "The country, in the eyes of the faithful, may be irretrievably diseased."