Mugwumps can save America

At the end of the 19th century, American politics was in flux, just as it was in the 1990s. The Civil War was fading into history (just as memories of the Cold War faded in the Clinton years). New immigrant groups were transforming the American political landscape (Southern and Eastern Europeans then; Hispanics now).

The hero of Rove’s story was a Cleveland businessman named Mark Hanna, with whom Rove seemingly personally identified. It was Hanna (Rove said) who managed the election of President William McKinley - and created the new Republican coalition that dominated US politics until 1930.

Hanna and McKinley did it by using new issues and themes to woo selected immigrant groups, especially the huge German minority. They deployed campaign technology in new ways too, again like Rove’s Republicans. They de-emphasised the torchlight parades of the post-Civil War era, relying instead on advertising and pamphleteering - paid for by a new kind of fundraising: massive contributions from corporate America. Although McKinley had fought at Antietam, he folded away the “bloody shirt” of post-Civil War vindictiveness and built his campaign on economic issues.

Rove’s analogy powerfully shaped the presidential decision-making of the Bush years. Almost every big initiative of the first Bush term was selected with an eye to expanding the Republican coalition, as Hanna and McKinley had supposedly done.

The big Bush tax cut would cement the loyalty of traditional economic conservatives. The No Child Left Behind education reform would attract married mothers. The faith-based initiative, opposition to abortion and Bush’s coded religious language would motivate lower-income white evangelical Christians. A promised amnesty for illegal immigrants was intended to woo Hispanics. And so on, all the way down to a last-minute commitment to protect West Virginia steel from foreign competition.

This method of policymaking by analogy has not served America or the Bush Administration well. As a professor of mine used to remark: “History never repeats itself - it only appears to do so, to those who neglect the details.” And so it proved.

Unlike Hanna’s campaign of 1896, Rove’s campaigns of 2000 and 2004 were not huge Republican triumphs - and they do not seem likely to lead to an era of Republican political dominance. The smart money has to be on the Democrats to win the White House in 2008 and to increase their majorities in Congress.

But that’s not to say that there is nothing to learn from Republican history. There is - a very great deal. It’s just that the lesson that today’s Republicans need to learn from their 19th century past is exactly the opposite of that learnt by Karl Rove.

A little more than a century ago the Republican Party found itself in a situation very nearly as dismal as it is today. Yes, it had won the Civil War (just as modern Republicans claim credit for winning the Cold War). Yes, it had built a transcontinental railroad and created a national currency (just as modern Republicans can say they stopped the inflation of the 1970s and revived American economic growth).

But all those things had been done in the 1860s. In the 20 years since the battle of Appomattox, the party had been tainted by corruption and had lost touch with the economic concerns of ordinary people. Populist economic movements kept erupting in protest against the pain inflicted on farmers and debtors by Republican high-tariff, gold-standard policies. Republicans beat these movements back with a ferocious smashmouth rhetoric that makes today’s talk radio seem tame by comparison.

Here is the legendary orator Ralph Ingersoll urging a Republican vote in the election of 1880:

“Every man that tried to destroy the Government, every man that shot at the holy flag in heaven, every man that starved our soldiers... every man that wanted to burn the negro, every one that wanted to scatter yellow fever in the North, every man that opposed human liberty, that regarded the auction-block as an altar and the howling of the bloodhound as the music of the Union, every man who wept over the corpse of slavery, that thought lashes on the naked back were a legal tender for labour performed, every one willing to rob a mother of her child - every solitary one was a Democrat.”

This kind of talk worked in the angry aftermath of war, but as the years passed, it came to sound embarrassingly outdated. Economic depression, congressional corruption scandals, presidential mismanagement: all took their toll. The Republican share of the presidential vote declined. The Republicans lost their Civil War congressional majority in a crushing 96 seat loss in the House of Representatives in 1874.

Facing disaster, Republicans weighed two solutions - solutions that will sound very familiar to anyone who has been listening to the Republican debates of 2008.

The first was to adhere ever more militantly to the tried-and-true messages of the glorious past: that’s what Ingersoll was doing in that 1880 speech. But there was an alternative force within the party, a force that believed that the party had to adapt and modernise - that it could not win elections for ever by taking victory laps for a war won ten and twenty and years before.

These modernisers have never received their due from later history, perhaps because their opponents successfully branded them with one of the most ludicrous nicknames in the gallery of American invective: They called them the “Mugwumps”, a term supposedly derived from an Indian term for “big shot” or “wise man”. In the election of 1884, these Mugwumps favoured the legendarily honest Democratic Governor of New York, Grover Cleveland, over the corruption-tainted Republican nominee, James G. Blaine. Sarcastic cartoonists drew pictures of the Mugwumps as overly pious goody-goodies.

Yet under this absurd name, one finds some of the most impressive people in late-19th-century American politics: people like Charles Eliot, the greatest of Harvard’s presidents, or Charles Francis Adams and his brother Henry.

And if modern Republican reforms are looking for avatars, they could look in worse places.

Then as now, modernisers had to struggle against a corrupt political system, against economic policies that favored the privileged few, against a surge of immigration whose scale overwhelmed American institutions - and against the exploitation of dangerously polarising social isses.

In those days, corruption took the form of the spoils system that appointed party loyalists to government jobs all the way down to filing clerks and Customs inspectors.

The regressive economic policy was protectionism. The institutions overwhelmed by mass migration were urban governments, which watched helplessly as central cities were transformed into impoverished slums. And the polarising social issue was alcohol prohibition, bitterly resented by Catholic immigrants as a Protestant imposition.

Today, of course, the issues are very different. And yet the basic political problem is eerily similar. The Republican Party has lost contact with the currents of the times. Old glories substitute for new solutions; divisive social issues are highlighted while urgent economic problems are neglected.

Nobody is ever going to get far in American politics by suggesting that we bring back the Mugwumps. But someone who has studied American history as closely as Karl Rove must surely know that McKinley’s 1896 victory was achieved in great part because the much-derided Mugwumps succeeded in transforming the party first.

The party did clean itself up and did downplay the divisive social issues of the era. (Although it remained unfortunately enmired in protectionism.).

What was done before can, and must, be done again. But if we Republicans are to do it, we must abandon nostalgia and look forward.

The differences between the 21st century and the 19th century are very great. But at least we can emancipate ourselves from a false narrativethat provides excuses for bad politics and bad policy. The past belongs to Republican reform. So too should the future.

If Republicans are to realise the renewed national majority that Bush and Rove sought, they will have to reinvent themselves as a very different party from that which Bush and Rove sought to build: as a broad national party rather than a constituency party; as a party of ideas as well as interests; as a party that can lead change, rather than have changed forced upon it.

David Frum is a resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. His new book is Comeback: Conservatism that Can Win Again.