The Republican gamble.

• Author: Bresler, Robert J.

Last November, a wave of populist anger gave Republicans 16 control of the Congress for the first time in 42 years. This was the third time that such a wave washed across the shores of American politics in the last several decades. Each time, it has been more ferocious, and each time, it has receded in frustration and disappointment. The first came in the 1968 presidential election, when many white working- and middle-class voters, alienated from the Democratic Party on civil rights, Vietnam, and cultural liberalism, voted for either Richard Nixon or George Wallace.

Nixon, it seemed, understood these voters by their resentments (which mirrored many of his own), not their aspirations. As president, he provided them only the psychic gratification of bashing the anti-war movement and assorted undesirables. This overheated rhetoric cloaked a domestic program more attuned to liberal interest groups than the alienated working class. Nixon sponsored and signed a laundry list of environmental and consumer legislation, institutionalized affirmative action programs, increased Federal regulatory activity, and presided over an explosion of entitlement spending for the poor and elderly.

These programs provoked little opposition from Nixon's populist constituents, but neither did they generate any enthusiasm. Nixon desired to make his mark in foreign policy. On domestic issues, he did nothing to define a new Republican-populist agenda. With little to distinguish them from the Democrats, the Congressional Republicans failed to win the allegiance of these voters and to create a new base for a Republican majority. The Watergate scandals and the inflation of the early 1970s eventually turned voters sour on Nixon. His successor, Gerald Ford, offered them only bland Republican orthodoxy and was unable to hold Nixon's populist base. Most of these voters, particularly those in the South, returned to the Democratic Party in 1976 to support native son Jimmy Carter.

They hardly were impressed by Pres. Carter's performance. He offered them neither substance nor rhetoric, and what loyalty he had gained from them by virtue of being a southerner quickly faded. The Carter Administration ended in economic calamity, producing a second wave of populist anger that elected Ronald Reagan. Far more popular with these voters than Richard Nixon, Pres. Reagan was slightly more successful in rebuilding the Republican base. On economic issues, he did make progress. New jobs were...