Abstract
In this important book, Verlan Lewis identifies and debunks what he calls “the Liberal Conservative Myth.” Political history, according to the myth, is largely about the movement of individuals and groups along a stable left-right ideological spectrum. American political writers typically describe Republicans as sliding back and forth on the right side, Democrats on the left. By contrast, Lewis argues that the meaning of ideological labels has kept changing over the decades and that the parties have often swapped sides on critical issues. It thus is problematic to claim that a party is more liberal or conservative than it was 40 or 50 years ago. The words do not necessarily mean the same things.
Lewis makes his case by drawing on party platforms, opinion surveys, roll-call votes, and public statements by party leaders. For long periods in the past, he shows, Republicans favored a muscular national government, while Democrats touted the virtues of states’ rights. Things were different by the late 20th century. What accounts for ideological change? Intellectuals are fond of Keynes’s dictum that practitioners who disdain abstraction are usually the slaves of defunct academic scribblers. Lewis agrees that ideas are powerful, but with a crucial caveat: ideology is a product of political action as well as its cause. Parties will adjust their ideology when it suits their interests. Specifically, he says, parties in power will have an incentive to expand that power just as out-parties will want to curb it. Their ideas and arguments will align with their incentives, leading them to pick different academic scribblers to follow.
Lewis elaborates on these tendencies with chapters on foreign policy, economic policy, and the judiciary. Out of the lengthy history that he discusses, the turn of the twenty first century illustrates his point. During the administration of President Bill Clinton, Republicans opposed national health insurance and foreign intervention. Under President George W. Bush, they backed the Iraq War and a massive expansion of Medicare. The parties changed less when it came to the judiciary, with Republicans continuing to oppose what they saw as liberal judicial activism. An important reason, Lewis explains, is that their control of the judiciary was incomplete. Under the leadership of Republican-appointed Chief Justice John Roberts, the high court preserved the Affordable Care Act and overturned laws against same-sex marriage. As this example suggests, Lewis shrewdly avoids overstatement. He acknowledges that partisan ideological change is neither instant nor automatic. He lists the ingredients for such change, including the emergence of a new salient issue such as the Cold War.
This book is of great value to political scientists in several ways. For one thing, it reminds us of the limitations of ideological measurements that rely exclusively on roll-call votes in legislative bodies. Without accounting for historical context and the content of the bills, these measurements can lead to dubious conclusions such as labeling the laissez-faire Cleveland-era Democrats as being more liberal than their Great Society counterparts. Woodrow Wilson more accurately described the parties of the 1880s: “They are like armies without officers, engaged on a campaign which has no great cause at its back. Their names and traditions, not their hopes and policy, keep them together.”
This book suggests future avenues of research. For instance, one could apply the same kind of analysis to the parties’ positions on constitutional reform. In the 1980s, when it seemed that Republicans had a lock on the presidency and Democrats had a lock on the House of Representatives, Republicans supported term limits for Congress and an item veto for the president. In 1994, under a Democratic President, they unexpectedly gained control of Congress. After failing to muster the necessary two-thirds for a term-limit constitutional amendment, they cooled on the idea. They did pass an item veto, but in a statutory form that was highly vulnerable to constitutional challenge. To their relief, the Supreme Court soon struck it down in a lawsuit by New York City’s Republican Mayor, Rudolph Giuliani.
Reversals of position are even more vivid and abrupt when it comes to legislative procedure and electoral reform. When he served as Senate Minority Leader under a Republican President, Democrat Harry Reid of Nevada waxed eloquent about the filibuster, which allowed the minority party to stall or stop judicial nominations. As Majority Leader under a Democratic president, he severely limited the filibuster. During their 40-year stretch in the minority, similarly, House Republicans complained that Democratic state legislatures drew congressional district lines that disadvantaged them. Now that Republicans control many more legislatures, Democrats are lodging similar complaints.
Lewis’s analysis should prompt us to re-think the relationship between politicians and the policy community. We may tend to think that there is something like an assembly line that takes ideas from think tanks and engineers them into laws and rules. But perhaps reverse engineering is also at work. Think tanks often supply rationales for policies that parties and interest groups already favor.
Finally, the book offers a unique perspective on developments unfolding since the 2016 election. Four years earlier, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney preached the virtues of free trade and warned that Russia was America’s most important geopolitical opponent. Under President Trump, Republican leaders adopted trade protectionism and a much more lenient rhetorical attitude toward the Putin regime. This shift, as Verlan Lewis teaches, is not the result of careful deliberation on the underlying issues but is rather an accommodation to the President and his zealous supporters. And as the political tides change, this, too, shall pass away.