The Republicans’ 1972

After its disastrous convention in Chicago in the summer of 1968, which combined the worst old-style backroom dealing with bloody riots in the streets, the Democratic Party set up a commission to find a fairer, more equitable way of choosing delegates to the 1972 convention. The Reform Commission, as it was called, was stocked with and staffed by many of the party’s future leaders, and it met on November 18, 1969, to vote on a new set of rules. After intense debate, the Commission voted, thirteen to seven, to impose a quota system on the selection of delegates, so that blacks, women, and young people would be picked “in reasonable relationship to the group’s presence in the population of the states.” The Commission’s chairman was Senator George McGovern, of South Dakota.

McGovern went on to seek the Party’s nomination in 1972 as an insurgent candidate, with passionate grassroots support behind him. He defeated all the establishment choices—Senators Hubert Humphrey, of Minnesota, Edmund Muskie, of Maine, “Scoop” Jackson, of Washington—with the most diverse set of convention delegates in American history. In the general election, President Nixon crushed McGovern by the widest popular-vote margin in American history.

Theodore White, author of the “Making of the President” series, described the Democrats’ adoption of quotas as a decisive moment in the 1972 campaign: “It touched the roots of American culture, and the campaign of 1972 was to become one of those events in American history which can be described as cultural watersheds as well as political happenings. For many liberals, the experience was to be heartbreaking. The beautiful Liberal Idea of the previous half-century had grown old and hardened into a Liberal Theology which terrified millions of its old clients.”

This year is the Republicans’ 1972—or it could be, if they get lucky. Not because they’ll lose the Presidency by the same huge margin as those Democrats—they might well win—but because they’ve reached the same stage of petrified theology, capture by their extremes, and self-isolation from their old majority. After 2008, the Republicans changed their rules to create more competition, with fewer winner-take-all primaries, and now they’re facing the prospect of an ugly dogfight lasting weeks or months more. Mitt Romney, the party establishment’s last, best hope, is even less loved by the activists at the base than Humphrey, Muskie, and Jackson were. Newt Gingrich is the party’s unlikely insurgent—as unlikable as McGovern was decent, but, as the last remaining surrogate for what they really want, the object of a willed passion on the part of true believers, and just as erratic in the chaos of his campaign.

To be a sane Republican today is to hope that Romney can hang on in Florida and beyond. Not simply because he’s the most “electable” candidate—parties make a mistake when they choose based on assumptions about what other people think (remember the Democrats in 2004). A sane Republican has to want Romney as nominee in order to rule out any possibility of having Gingrich as President.

But what if Romney wins the nomination and loses the election? This scenario is still the odds-on favorite. To deduce the consequences among Republican activists, let’s imagine a counter-factual from 1972: pit Nixon against Humphrey or Muskie or Jackson, a candidate imposed on the liberal Democratic base much as conservative Republicans feel Romney is being imposed on them. A Nixon win would have convinced the liberal base that the party had not been true to its core. The theology would have hardened a little more. Next time, they’d nominate a real liberal, a candidate of the grassroots.

It’s easy to picture hard-core Republicans coming to the same conclusion: Romney and the party élite betrayed the party’s principles (again, after McCain) and gave the country four more years of the hated Obama. Never again! Next time, a real conservative! (Go back another twenty years, to the G.O.P. convention of 1952, and Senator Everett Dirksen, of Illinois, a supporter of the conservative Robert Taft, pointing at Thomas E. Dewey, the party’s moderate two-time loser, and thundering, “Don’t take us down the path to defeat again!”)

McGovern’s debacle forced the Democratic Party to find its way back from the ideological wilderness—from being the party of delegate quotas and “acid, amnesty, and abortion.” Every successful Democrat after 1972, from Carter to Clinton to Obama, has had at least one foot in the party’s center. A Gingrich rout in November might have the same effect on Republicans—it might drive their party back toward the center, and toward mental health, in 2016. But if Romney wins the nomination and loses the election, the party will continue down into the same dark hole where Palin, Bachmann, Perry, Cain, Santorum, and now Gingrich all lurk. So a sane Republican has a terrible dilemma, today in Florida and beyond. That’s what happens when political parties are captured by a minority of fervent believers.

Original Article
Source: new yorker 
Author: George Packer