The Missing Moderates
Important voices gone silent
It was not until my own young adulthood, not until my very late-teens and early twenties, that I personally knew any actual Republicans. I never met one over on the East side of town where I grew up.
My Dad was a Clement Democrat, loyal to the “leap-frog regime” in its day (Frank Clement then Buford Ellington, and so forth) and for all I knew then so were all his closest friends and allies – e.g., Fulton, Barrett, Seigenthaler, and the rest. Only later did I appreciate there were important rivalries among such Democrats, let alone between the political parties.
To this day, I well remember the first Republicans I encountered, as a young news reporter at the old Tennessean. Their names were Outhier, Barbara and Frank; she was a member of the county Election Commission, which I covered at the latter 1960s, and Howell, Charles and Julie; he was in our county delegation to the state House, then served with my father on the first Metro Council.
These were honorable citizens, proudly Republican, who worked for the best interests of our hometown and nation, as they saw it. Otherwise, I was reared among activist Democrats. (See again Paragraph 2 above.)
Then other Republicans soon appeared on my personal radar.
In 1970, I met Winfield Dunn when he ran for and was elected Governor. Later, one summer evening in 1974, I met Lamar Alexander in Memphis, in his first campaign for Governor. (His press officer Tom Ingram, who had been my work-mate in the Tennessean newsroom, introduced me for an interview.) In the fall of that year, which was my sixth year at the morning newspaper, Seigenthaler gave me a six-month tour of duty in Washington as the Tennessean DC correspondent, and there I met Senator Howard Baker.
Alexander, after losing his first election to Ray Blanton, tried again four years later and invited me to join his staff. This work in time introduced me to Alexander’s own circle: Honey Alexander, Lew Conner, Marc and Lewis Lavine, Tom Beasley, Robert Echols, Ted Welch, Pat Wilson and Joe Rodgers in Nashville; Lewis Donelson, Bill Gibbons and Julia Gibbons in Memphis, Pat Brock and Joe Davenport in Chattanooga, Tom Hull and Ronnie Greer in Greeneville, and others in Upper East.
These were mostly moderate, forward-looking Republicans, and I think of them often now as I watch our national politics growing ever angrier, our nation further polarized because of it – and its manifestations in Tennessee also more extreme and mean-spirited. The contrast now with Tennessee’s leadership then is profound, in my opinion, and our country is the worse for it.
Their kind were the sensible rudders who, while ever competitive in our elections, in important ways helped to temper extremism in our politics over the past half-century. These and others like them across America understood that the most important things are what happens between elections.
One of these, my friend Lew Conner, was quoted this week in The New York Times about some of this. In the wake of the Covenant School shootings on Monday, the reporter was exploring the causes of the political and policy attacks upon Nashville by the extremist GOP supermajority at Tennessee’s State Capitol. Read that piece here.
Conner was born and reared in Chattanooga. His father Lewis H. Conner Sr., was a Democrat and law firm partner of Estes Kefauver before Kefauver was elected to Congress in 1939. (Young Conner was once the congressman’s driver.)
Lew came to Nashville for law school at Vanderbilt, and he remained here through his own judgeship (on the Tennessee Court of Appeals) in the 1980s, and his successful law practice after that. He has been an influential Republican in Tennessee ever since, and a keen observer of the state’s politics.
Wrote Richard Fausset, the Times correspondent: “Conner laid the blame for much of the change in tone on his fellow Republicans, particularly those in the Statehouse. His nostalgia for the mainstream Republicans of old seems acutely telling.”
“The state of the city is ‘very divisive,’ Conner said. “And you have this tragedy on top of it. I mean, it doesn’t get any worse than that.”
In the Times piece, I read two kinds of anguish in my friend Lew’s words – partly for the Covenant School victims and their families, of course, and partly for what Republicans nationally have become in our modern era.
Since Donald Trump first ran for President in 2016, his influence on traditional Republicans has been profound. Largely missing now from the U.S. political scene – nationally and in Tennessee – are the voices and the influence of the old mainstream moderates everywhere, of the sort I met in the 1970s who once helped in myriad ways to reign in ugly extremism.
This has become even more apparent in the past few days in the wake of Trump’s indictment by a New York grand jury. That news has produced an objectively weird behavior among otherwise competitive politicians like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and the former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina: All of them are now walking a public tight-rope – careful of what to say, mincing their timid words, fearing any blow-back from Trump’s roiling fan-base, afraid of how they will react if they slip and criticize the ex-President out loud. Read more about that here.
In fact, it seems to me that unorganized fan-base, even more than Trump himself, has become the main engine driving Republican national politics in this moment.
Of course, many of the old-line moderates we appreciated in the past are gone now – either deceased or otherwise departed from the active political stage. They definitely exerted a moderating influence on elements of their party nationally.
In their absence, both Democrats and Republicans have become more extreme in their respective ways, less yielding in their positions, fewer elected officials willing to consider constructive compromises “across the aisle.”
This is not how government is supposed to work. What we’re left with now seems less like governing at all and more like an expensive circus carousel leading nowhere.
Who will rise now as part of a new generation of voices for reason, courage, sound judgment, and good policy?
This weekend, in this current maddening void, the republic seems in especially perilous shape. Whether from fear or fatigue, traditional Republicans of the type who pulled their party so often back to the middle so that government could actually work, of the type who saved America from extremists before, have gone silent.
Our nation is much the poorer for it.
So right Keel. I wrote something similar on Facebook recently. Though I’ve never voted for a Republican candidate, I was never frightened about the outcome of an election. Generally two reasonable people were running and, though my views may have been more closely aligned with the Democratic candidate than with the Republican one, I felt safe with either one in office. No more. I’m terrified that either Trump or DeSantis will be the Republican candidate for president. Or someone just as bad. And our state legislature. What a disgrace! Where are the moderates indeed?
On point, Keel. The lack of those voices that you lament were those of what I called "Main Street Republicans". They were the ones that saw and improved local situations, be that the need for a new city park or county-wide library expansion. Now, it's all taking coup and braying about it. Let's hope the rising young voters make better choices than we have.