AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE NEW CENTURY, NEW DEAL: MODERN AMERICA AND ITS POLITICS REMARKS BY: HENRY OLSEN, VICE PRESIDENT AND DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL RESEARCH INITIATIVE, AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM THURSDAY, APRIL 04, 2013 I entitled the talk “New Century, New Deal,” because my thesis is that while American politics is relatively variable, it also is relatively consistent. For over 200 years, parties come and go; issues come and go; coalitions come and go. Yet certain American values seem to remain constant. Most national political coalitions that succeed over the long term clearly have at their heart the advancement of the individual. They articulate this not in a paternalistic way (in the sense of a European or a despotic state) nor in a purely libertarian way (as one might get from a seminar in von Mises or from the Institute of Human Studies) but rather in a very uniquely American way that emphasizes freedom and involves self-government on the individual level and self-government through the collective level. This is something that was intended to be such by the American founders, and it is something that has prompted the central question of virtually every important national campaign for 225 years. That question is: How can we best apply America’s principles so that the average person is given respect, value, and an opportunity to make their way in the world—tyrannized neither by people claiming the rule of law but acting in private interest, nor by people claiming the public interest indirectly and tyrannizing them explicitly for their own private interest? That, in a sense, was the question over which the 2012 election was fought. It was fought over a question of whose vision for America best applies that principle to today’s circumstances in a way that resonates with today’s electorate. And, as such, whose coalition is going to form around that vision and enact a series of policies that will bring it about. Obama’s and the Democrats’ record was clear. They had power from 2009 to 2010. They passed a number of path-breaking acts. They had a clear rhetoric. Anyone could judge what their vision was of and for themselves. So the Obama campaign did what any campaign in those circumstances would do— especially since going into the early part of 2012 and after the 2010 election, a clear majority did not endorse that record, or that rhetoric, or their direction. The campaign asked: Who do you like better? What about the other guy? And they spent months talking effectively about what the GOP alternative was. Would you, they asked, prefer the Republican alternative as exemplified by the candidacy of Mitt Romney and the actions that they have proposed in Congress and on the stump? One would have thought that Romney would actively join the debate. Anyone who followed the campaign knows that you would have been cruelly disappointed. In fact, from the moment that Rick Santorum dropped out until the moment of the Republican convention, Mitt Romney did not schedule a public event on two consecutive days in the United States. There was a period of four months where the president was being president, occasionally making news, while also being candidate and flying for multiple events per day in swing states that everybody knew in advance were going to be swing states. He went to Iowa; he went to Wisconsin; he went to Florida; he went to North Carolina and Virginia. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney was fundraising in Boca Raton. Mitt Romney would stage one event, then go back to fundraising. He thought the strategy would work. He and his team thought it would work because of a simple opinion: they could not entertain the possibility that—having seen what the president’s agenda was, having seen what the president’s rhetoric was, having seen the shape of his coalition and the direction at which he was aiming—Americans would not reject him. One could see this throughout the campaign. When polls suggested that Republicans were behind, they disputed the accuracy of the polls. “Too many Democrats,” they said. “We know from past history there aren’t that many Democrats in the electorate.” “Don’t believe those polls behind the curtain. Believe in America.” That was the campaign slogan, but they never explained what it meant. The Obama campaign, in contrast, kept its eye on the ball. When voters were ultimately asked if they preferred the devil they knew or the devil they didn’t, they preferred the former, 51 percent to 47 percent. For the first time in three elections, fewer Americans voted than in the previous election. As a percentage of Americans, turnout remained relatively high, but based on the percentage of Americans who chose to vote in both 2004 and 2008, five million Americans who would otherwise have voted chose to stay at home. Five million Americans who would have voted in a high interest year decided there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between these two candidates. This is distressing to conservatives. It’s distressing to conservatives precisely because they believe they see the future and the future is not the America they revere. They believe the president seeks to fundamentally remake the idea of American citizenship into something that is not as unique as the founders had intended. In the conservative view, the president sees citizenship as embracing a higher moral status for the collective and a lower moral status for the individual, placing more value on collective decision making than on individual judgment. Republicans believe in America, but they neither explained to America what that idea was, nor articulated how somebody who did not automatically see that vision could be part of their America. They could talk to themselves “Our country is slipping away.” “We’re becoming like Europe.” “I won’t recognize America when my children are grown up.” One can go to any conservative gathering and hear those exact phrases. But Republicans lost and it wasn’t close. This creates some despair among conservatives. When a party expects to be measuring the drapes of the White House, but instead is on the outside looking in, this can cause some consternation. Adding to this despair is demographic change that everyone could have seen coming. Most Republicans chose not to see it, but now it is in front of them like a bug on a windshield on the turnpike. The election was clearly decided by the non-white vote for the first time in American history. Seventy-two percent of the electorate in the 2012 election was white, according to the exit poll. That bloc includes people of many different ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds. But while there’s no monolithic white vote any more than there is a monolithic non-white vote, the racial differences are still stark. Romney carried the white vote 59 percent to 39 percent, a 20 point lead and the fourth highest that a Republican has carried the white vote since the advent of exit polling. No candidate in American history had ever carried 59 percent of the white vote and lost the presidency. Romney lost, by four points. He lost by four points because he lost the non-white vote by 63 points. He actually improved his standing among African-Americans when compared with John McCain. John McCain got about 4 percent of that vote. Mitt Romney got 6, which approaches a 50 percent improvement, but is so small in absolute votes to be inconsequential. Among Hispanics and Asians though, he did even worse. Somehow, Hispanics chose not to self-deport prior to election but rather chose to self-report to the voting booth. This segment of the electorate is growing. In fact, in every election since the 1996 election, like clockwork, the share of the non-white vote has gone up as a share of the total voters by 2 percent and the share of the white vote has gone down by 2 percent, much of that stemming from Hispanic population increases. Granted, there are many of caveats to that overall trend in the non-white vote. Some of it is attributable to the record high turnout of African-Americans voters in 2008 and again in 2012. Will they do so when Obama is not on the ballot? I don’t know. Nevertheless, because of who’s coming into the country and being born and who’s leaving the country because of death, there are fewer whites. There may be more whites absolutely, but as a share of the eligible electorate, the share of whites in the eligible electorate is shrinking and the share of non-whites is growing. In 2016, if there is not a dramatic shrinkage in the African-American vote, a Republican candidate will need to get 60 percent of the white vote, plus a record high among African- Americans, plus a record high among Asians, plus a record high among Hispanics, plus a record high among those people who don’t classify themselves in any of those categories, or are American-Indian or Hawaiian or Aleut, to win a bare 50.1 percent of the vote. I work in Washington, D.C., and most everyone there is rather gleeful over these trends because the establishment is not conservative. The establishment would like to see conservatism fall. The establishment believes that this portends doom. So how do the first set issues I posed about American identity interact with the last observation—the sheer numbers, the demographic weight? They interact because of the nature of modern conservatism and the concerns of the electorate.