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The Ottawa Citizen Wednesday, October 29, 2008, By Dan Gardner. ©The Ottawa Citizen.

The party of bitter resentment.

That the Republican party is going to lose the White House next Tuesday is as close to certain as anything ever is in politics. That the GOP will crash in Congress is almost as likely. But what will crawl out of the wreckage? That is the more difficult question. And in the long run, it may be the more consequential.

The modern Republican party is a diverse coalition of interests, including religious conservatives, neo-conservatives, libertarians and so on. But its temperament is essentially bipolar.

One of those poles is represented by Richard Nixon.

All his life, Nixon was a bitter man. He felt excluded by elites, scorned by snobs, belittled by those who thought they were better than him. Even as president, Nixon saw himself as an outsider fighting insiders.

But Nixon was as brilliant as he was bitter and he recognized that his private resentments could be the basis of a winning electoral strategy.

"Before Nixon, populist revolts pitting the forgotten majority against the hard-face elite had usually taken the form of economic sanctions against the rich," write John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge in The Right Nation.

"Nixon's genius was to pick up on George Wallace's (segregationist) insurgency in the Democratic Party and direct populism against cultural elites: against what Nixon saw as the effete snobs who controlled institutions like Harvard and the Washington Post."

Nixon's speechwriter was a young man by the name of Pat Buchanan. It was Buchanan who coined the phrase "silent majority" and turned Nixon's dark moods into an appeal with deep resonance at a time of riots, demonstrations and a growing counter-culture. Nixon swept the vote twice.

Ronald Reagan represented a very different vision of Republican politics.

"Whatever else history may say about me when I'm gone," Reagan said, "I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears."

Reagan's Republicanism wasn't quite so innocent -- there was more than a trace of race-baiting in his campaigns -- but for the most part Reagan's sunny personality was reflected in his "morning in America" message.
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In the years since, the Republicans have swayed between the poles of Nixon and Reagan.

In 1992, Pat Buchanan challenged a sitting Republican president, George H.W. Bush, for the presidential nomination. He failed, but not before mounting a potent campaign that tapped into the same economic and cultural fears that made Falling Down -- bitter white guy flips out -- the emblematic movie of the era.

Attempting to unite the party, Republican organizers asked Buchanan to deliver the keynote address at the national convention and Buchanan unleashed a furious attack on abortion, gay rights and other cultural totems. There is "a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America," Buchanan thundered.

But 1992 was not 1968. Buchanan's tirade repelled far more Americans than it attracted, damaging Bush's campaign and helping elect Bill Clinton.

John McCain always defined himself as a Reagan Republican -- in policy and personality -- but this summer, when his presidential campaign seemed stuck, he hired a new campaign team and agreed to something very different. It was unveiled at the Republican national convention.

"For decades, Washington has been looking to the eastern elites," Mitt Romney railed in his convention speech. "We need change all right -- change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington!"

Barack Obama is "a gifted man with an Ivy League education," sneered Rudy Giuliani, who went on to contrast Obama with Sarah Palin. "She's been a mayor. I love that. I'm sorry that Barack Obama feels that her hometown isn't" -- long pause, extra sneer -- "cosmopolitan enough. I'm sorry, Barack, that it's not flashy enough. Maybe they cling to religion there."

The cynicism of these attacks -- delivered by rich, powerful members-in-good-standing of the eastern elite -- was obvious to anyone not blinded by partisan feeling. Equally obvious was how typical that cynicism was. Republicans running as angry outsiders -- including George W. Bush, on occasion -- have always been comfortable insiders. The only major figures to really feel the resentment they sought to exploit were Buchanan and Nixon.

But now it seems a third name must be added to that list.

"We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit," Sarah Palin told a North Carolina fundraiser recently, "and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard-working, very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation."

This may have been just another cynical script but there's reason to think that, despite those photogenic smiles, Sarah Palin really does see herself as the scorned outsider. Palin "may be the first conservative politician since Nixon to experience resentment so authentically," writes Noam Scheiber in The New Republic. "For her, it's not so much a political tool as a motivating principle. A trip through Palin's past reveals that almost every step of her career can be understood as a reaction to elitist condescension -- much of it in her own mind."

With defeat looming, Republican rallies and the conservative blogosphere are dripping with bitterness and resentment. If the Republicans are blown out next week, the bile will rise and Sarah Palin -- mocked and dismissed by "the elites" -- will be embraced all the more passionately. "Palin 2012" T-shirts and bumper stickers will be on sale before the last ballots are counted.

And the Republicans will become the party they would have been had Pat Buchanan led them in 1992. The consequences for American politics, and thus the world, will be many.

You can contact Dan Gardner at the Ottawa Citizen.
E-mail: dgardner@thecitizen.canwest.com

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