It was typical of the genial John Chafee that when he announced his retirement from the Senate last week, he did not issue one of those pompous “Washington is terrible, Congress is beneath me” statements now so common when solons announce they’re quitting.
“I want to make it clear that I’m not going away mad or disillusioned or upset with the Senate,” the Rhode Island Republican told The New York Times’ Alison Mitchell. “I think it’s a great place.”
Chafee’s retirement now means that two great Senate problem-solvers–the other is New York’s Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan–will be gone. Their departure further frays the link between our time and a moment a few decades back when the political news was dominated by battles over policy (imagine that) and a competition between the parties over whose programs had the best chance of working. I disapprove of nostalgia, but we could surely use a new season of that old spirit.
Chafee is that rarity that no longer speaks its name: He’s a liberal Republican. He was never shy about saying that certain problems could only be solved through public action. He fought hard to expand health insurance coverage and was one of the Senate’s premier environmentalists. He, like Moynihan, with whom he worked comfortably, could build bridges and find the Senate’s philosophical middle.
But the Chafee middle was not a mushy muddle. If getting something done meant working with Democrats and making enemies, Chafee did it–and paid the price. Thus did his more conservative colleagues vote him out as party conference chairman in 1990. He just kept going, and in the process created tens of thousands of Chafee Democrats in his highly Democratic home state.
Conservatives, for reasons of principle, object to Chafee and those remaining Republicans who are like him. In the old Goldwater-era phrase, they see them as “me too” Republicans who mimic Democrats. To the conservatives, liberal Republicans were people who voted with the Democrats 70 percent of the time and expected conservatives to cheer the remaining 30 percent of their votes.
Yet Chafee’s stepping down is a useful reminder that the tradition he represents was once at the heart of the Republican Party. There was nothing “me too” about progressive Republicans who toasted the politics and then the memory of Teddy Roosevelt. They were important in the big cities (New York City’s Fiorello LaGuardia was one of their giants) and in rural America (Nebraska’s George Norris was one of the century’s finest progressive senators).
Liberal Republicanism could trace its roots right back to the beginning of the republic. In his 1964 book “Order of Battle,” then-Sen. Jacob Javits of New York announced his “choice of ancestors” as Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln and, of course, TR.
What bound them together was “a vision of `the national interest,’ ” as against regional or parochial interests, and their willingness to use the federal government for the national good. Hamilton used it to build up the new nation’s fledgling industrial economy, Clay to create his “American System” binding the nation together with roads and canals, Lincoln to save the union, end slavery (and also establish the land grant colleges), Roosevelt to protect the environment and regulate the new economy.
The first heavy blow to liberal Republicanism came not from inside the Republican Party, but from Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR converted progressive Republicans into progressive Democrats in large batches. And a near-lethal blow was struck by Lyndon B. Johnson when he embraced the traditionally Republican cause of civil rights. This drove conservative Democrats–in the South especially–into Republican ranks. Progressive Republicans from the Northeast, people such as Chafee, found themselves ever more marginalized in a party increasingly led by conservative Southerners.
Now you can argue that our current American party system is more rational than the old because it lines up a more-or-less conservative party against a more-or-less progressive party. That means that in the future, there will be little room in the GOP for the likes of Chafee. Republican strength in the South will increase even as its old New England bastions become ever more solidly Democratic.
But there is a loss in this. Progressive Republicans have been, on the whole, high quality public servants with a capacity for civility, a tendency toward the practical, an interest in innovation and reform, and a gift for spotting flaws in the ideas of both parties. It makes you hope that John Chafee’s Republican generation will not be the last of its kind.
