Reconnecting with an angry electorate

The failure of Republican congressman Eric Cantor to win a party primary in his own Virginia district has shattered many certitudes of American politics. Cantor is the number two man in the US House of Representatives. No congressional leader had ever lost a primary before.

Cantor raised 20 times as much money as his opponent, the Christian economics professor David Brat, and used that money to besmirch Brat on television, in time-tested fashion.

Brat accused Cantor of caring more about the party’s donors than his own constituents, and deplored Cantor’s willingness to work with President Barack Obama on immigration law reform. Voters were persuaded. Brat won in a landslide with more than 55 per cent of the vote.

After recent primary losses, Tea Party insurgents had seemed to make their peace with party leaders. But talk of a rift has emerged once more, and Democrats look hopefully towards November’s midterm elections.

This hope is misplaced. Gerrymandering and Obama’s unpopularity will suffice to produce considerable Republican gains. By the 2016 presidential elections, the balance of power in the Republican party may well have shifted from funders to voters. And this is where the Virginia primary is seismic.

The Tea Party approach is more interesting to mainstream voters than it looks. Approval of Congress is at historic lows — in single digits, according to some polls. A party’s willingness to defenestrate its own leaders ought to help its chances. Far from pushing the party to the ideological fringe, Brat’s style of politicking may be drawing Republicans towards the very heart of the American electorate.

Brat was such a long shot that no national Tea Party association backed him. However, it is right to call him a Tea Party man. He is an ideologue. Cantor, by contrast, was a pragmatist.

He often said during the campaign: “The differences between us pale in comparison to the differences we have with the president and his policies.” Tea Partiers do not believe this. In their view, Republican bigwigs represent their donors, who overlap and socialise with Democratic donors. Together they secure the things rich people want: Low capital gains rates, high immigration, an agnostic culture.

In many ways, Cantor was the very person Brat cast him as. He raised more from financiers and property magnates than anyone except the House speaker John Boehner. His staff spent almost as much in steakhouses, according to the New York Times, as Brat did on his entire campaign.

It is a common error to look at the Tea Party ideology as just an intense, distilled version of the Reaganism Republicans have espoused since the late 1970s. The political scientist Norman Ornstein, for instance, speaks of a battle “between hardline conservatives who believe in smaller government and radical nihilists who want to blow up the whole thing”.

This is wrong. What the Tea Party brings to the Republican party, for the first time in a century and a half, is a leaven of hostility to capitalism — or at least to crony capitalism. Republicans have been an anti-slavery party, a robber-baron party, a hard-money party, an anti-communist party and a Christian party, but they have always had a soft spot for businessmen.

No more. While Brat professes to revere Ronald Reagan, he is not a supply-side dogmatist. When a television interviewer asked him about the minimum wage, he replied: “I don’t have a well-crafted response on that one.” He believes in free markets, but does not assume every rich person is his friend.

Of the Wall Street executives he blames for the past six years of finance crisis and stagnation, he said on the stump last month: “Those guys should have gone to jail. Instead of going to jail, they went on Eric’s Rolodex and they are sending him big cheques.”

Brat posted a tweet that showed Cantor embracing Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder who has made expansion of high-tech immigrant visas a lobbying priority. Brat’s message: “There are 20 million Americans who can’t find a full-time job. But Eric Cantor wants to give corporations another 20 million foreign workers to hire instead.”

Brat’s immigration policies are thus embedded in economics not envy. “I love every single person that God made on this planet,” he said at his victory celebration on Tuesday. The first political thing he said, after thanking his staff, was: “Dollars do not vote — you do.” He also promised: “Every vote that I make will move the pendulum in the direction of the people.”

Such views are not radical. They are aimed at the heart of an electorate angry at being snubbed in favour of the rich. Those who ignore this anger have already been surprised once.

Financial Times

The writer is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard