The Capitalist and the Zombie: Romney's Threat to the GOP

A number of Republican presidential hopefuls and not so hopefuls have attacked Mitt Romney as a heartless capitalist who destroyed jobs while a partner at Bain Capital. Newt Gingrich compared Romney to a looter. Rick Perry called him a vulture. Jon Huntsman suggested that Romney likes firing people.

The anti-Romney offensive has raised the ire of many Republican leaders, who have condemned the charges as disrespectful to heartless capitalism. Their concern is understandable. Heartless capitalism is the very soul of Republican Party. Without it, the party would resemble some toothless decomposing zombie that blunders haplessly into disgusted voters while gurgling about taking back the country.

The sad state of today's Republican Party would surely disappoint its forefathers. Abraham Lincoln never intended to found a political movement for heartless capitalists or toothless decomposing zombies. In its youth, the abolitionist Republican Party held great promise as a force for social justice.

But the party went off course around 1896 when the Democrats surprised everyone by nominating a presidential candidate who seemed to genuinely care about the poor. William Jennings Bryan, the "Great Commoner," denounced monopolistic corporate trusts and called for an end to the gold standard. In response, anxious bankers and industrialists poured money into the pockets of his Republican opponent, William McKinley. McKinley won the presidency, and the course was set. Wall Street has fueled Republican campaigns ever since.

In the early 20th century, many Republicans proudly represented heartless capitalism in all its glorious brutality. They denounced the poor as undeserving loafers and vilified their progressive opponents as socialists and demagogues who would bring financial ruin to America.

That argument took a beating, however, when Republican president Herbert Hoover helped drive the country into the greatest depression it has ever known. After FDR demonstrated that government intervention could help the poor and improve the economy, American voters consigned the GOP to forty years of minority status in state and federal legislatures.

By the mid-1970s, Republican leaders finally acknowledged that heartless capitalism was no longer a winning campaign issue. They began to branch out into social issues, condemning by turns abortion, feminism, homosexuality, welfare, and integration busing. They warned that the government had been taken over by "secular humanists" bent on destroying America's moral fabric.

The new strategy worked brilliantly. Republican ranks swelled with social conservatives who embraced free markets as if they were ordained in the Bible. With God on their side, the heartless capitalists seemed warmer, gentler, more righteous. In 1994, the Republican Party finally recaptured Congress, and it has been collecting state legislatures like trophies ever since.

But the alliance is troubled. The motley confederation of rich capitalists and middle-class social conservatives worked well enough in boom times, especially with a drawling, brush-cutting, born-again child of privilege at the helm. But when financial excess crashed the economy (again), the stature of the bankers and executives plummeted even among social conservatives.

Unfortunately for the alliance, Mitt Romney chose this inauspicious moment to try to lead the Republican Party into a presidential election. Like George W. Bush, he is as elite as they come, an Ivy-educated dynastic multimillionaire. But in Romney's case, these attributes are not masked by a Texas twang, and his resume lacks a born-again epiphany. In the eyes of many evangelicals, he is not even Christian. Factor out Romney's shifting social positions, and what's left is a heartless capitalist stripped bare.

The social conservatives never signed on for that. They were willing to offer cover to an abstract anti-tax version of free marketism, but a naked capitalist in the flesh is only attractive to other capitalists. As Romney amassed his campaign chest from the usual big money donors, the social conservatives jumped from candidate to candidate in search of a viable alternative.

But there were no viable alternatives. The other candidates turned out to be slobbering toothless zombies.

That should come as little surprise. In the 21st century, a credible Republican candidate must have the soul of a heartless capitalist, the skin of a Christian conservative, and the chutzpah to carry off the contradiction. It turns out that men and women of such caliber do not come along every day.