Strange Bedfellows

Today’s American conservatives are several degrees removed from the foundation of conservative ideology that goes back to Edmund Burke. American conservatives may claim to rely on ideas; indeed, scholar Russell Kirk did his best to tie American conservatism into the Burkean tradition.^{Footnote 2} But the American variant is instantiated in an explicitly political coalition, one that uses the Republican Party as a vehicle and often differs from conservative orthodoxy.^{Footnote 3} Like any political coalition, American conservatives adhere to a motley collection of assorted goals and ideologies—the movement has “a protean character,” notes Gregory Schneider^{Footnote 4}—with varying degrees of commitment to Republican political leaders.

As a result, there are a number of ways to analyze the component parts of this coalition. Donald T. Critchlow historicizes it as an association between intellectuals and populists, focusing on the tensions between the GOP “establishment” and various constellations of the grassroots right.^{Footnote 5} By contrast, George Nash’s influential study of the intellectual roots of conservatism emphasized a tripartite intellectual division within conservatism, with moral traditionalism, economic libertarianism, and anticommunist foreign policy concerns all coalescing into the conservative movement.^{Footnote 6} However, when considering conservatism as a political coalition working within a particular political party, I argue that the most useful division to consider is the two categories mentioned above: economic and social conservatives.

These terms of course need clarification. I use “economic conservatives” in a very broad sense. The category is primarily characterized by support for limited interaction between government and the economy, and thus includes economic policy institutes and think tanks, anti-tax advocacy groups, and media organizations like the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board. I also include “business conservative” organizations like the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable. These groups’ commitment to limited government may extend only to opposing any intervention that may reduce their members’ bottom line; beneficial regulation, for example, is often met with approval. Still, the business move away from the Fordist compact and bipartisanship in the 1970s was a key moment in the rise of the Right,^{Footnote 7} and business groups often are aligned on the same side of policy issues as other economic conservatives. The political support of business leaders for conservative policies and officials make them de facto members of the coalition, no matter how much they seek to avoid the “conservative” label. Similarly, the more purely ideological libertarian Right distances itself from conservatism, often vehemently. These libertarians, including think tanks such as the Cato Institute and other influential libertarian figures, also are aligned with conservatives on most economic issues, so I include them in this classification.

Social conservatism dates back to the 1950s “moral traditionalist” intellectuals, who thought that government needed to better reflect traditional American values.^{Footnote 8} But in recent years this strain has been represented more by the evangelical Protestants often described as the Religious Right.^{Footnote 9} These Christian believers are chiefly concerned about social policy issues like abortion and homosexuality. Social conservatives are often described as the base of the Republican Party, but they are more than just grassroots voters. Religious conservatives have their own elite structures, some of which are similar to that of economic conservatives (e.g., interest groups) and others more distinct (churches, parachurch ministries). The religious tenor of Christian Right organizations should not mask the fact that many of them are primarily political groups, and that they pursue strategic goals and seek power.

These two categories of economic and social conservative, while useful, are neither rigid nor mutually exclusive. Certainly there are long-standing cultural and intellectual traditions within conservative thought that overlap with each other. Sociologist Jerome Himmelstein argues that an “anti-collective” ideology united both moral traditionalists and economic libertarians.^{Footnote 10} More recently, Fred Block has argued that both economic and social conservatives share a commitment to “Market Fundamentalism,” a “quasi-religious faith that unregulated markets will somehow always produce the best possible results.”^{Footnote 11} This belief in the market appeals to social conservatives because of its “absolutism” and as an argumentative tool against government welfare programs. Because of such ideological overlap, Kim Phillips-Fein is correct to warn against “setting up an opposition between cultural and economic politics, when in reality the two can never be fully separated.”^{Footnote 12}

Still, these categories, while not essential, are useful guides to interaction among different political interests within the conservative coalition—as well as a clear fault line in Republican politics. Indeed, a number of journalistic accounts of conservative politics often recognize the importance of this division.^{Footnote 13} More significantly, many conservatives describe themselves using these categories. In 1997, for example, a short-lived conservative magazine, Paradigm 2000, introduced a debate between the Family Research Council’s Gary Bauer and the Cato Institute’s David Boaz by noting the magazine would feature “a topic in each issue from a social conservative perspective and a libertarian [economic] perspective.” Scholar Andrew E. Busch, writing in 2006 in the conservative Claremont Review of Books, used the same categories in an analysis of conservative success and failures.^{Footnote 14}

More important, conservatives are organized institutionally along these fault lines in many ways. Political groups like the Family Research Council have different goals and priorities than the Club for Growth; even if these disparate groups are interested in an alliance, there remains the political work to be done to make the alliance function, particularly when social conservatives’ controversial agenda of abortion restriction and discrimination against gays contributes to organizational tensions.^{Footnote 15} When asked about the two categories, the Republican political operative Paul Weyrich noted: “I would say that we need each other. If we don’t all work together, we will get nothing. . . . We’re not a majority. We’ve got to work together whenever we can to constitute a majority. So yeah, social conservatives need economic conservatives. But by the same token, economic conservatives need social conservatives.”^{Footnote 16} Weyrich himself did more than anyone to cement such an alliance; he was part of the delegation of New Right activists that invited Jerry Falwell to form the Moral Majority, helping to bring Christian evangelicals into the Republican Party.^{Footnote 17} This alliance may involve an overlap in ideological commitments, as scholars such as Block and Himmelstein show. But a political coalition does not automatically follow from ideas, and it requires real political work to be established in partisan politics. Cases like the estate tax demonstrate how this work is accomplished.

The “Death Tax” Battle

Federal wealth transfer taxes have been in force since the late eighteenth century, although almost always temporarily.^{Footnote 18} In 1916, the first “permanent” estate tax was enacted to balance the consumption taxes that were paid disproportionately by the less-well-off; in essence, the tax was intended to coerce the wealthy to pay their fair share for government services.^{Footnote 19} By the 1990s, inflation had led to complaints that the exemption level in place ($600,000) was unfairly low. Still, only 81,000 estate tax returns were filed in 1995, as compared to more than 100 million individual returns and almost four million corporate returns; and of these 81,000, 15 percent did not even involve a payment.^{Footnote 20} According to IRS data, the number of taxable estates in each year of the 1990s represented less than 2 percent of all adult deaths.^{Footnote 21}

Since the estate tax affected such a small number of Americans, repeal was not considered a viable political option in the 1990s. The Republican Party’s 1994 “Contract with America” included only a proposal to increase the exemption level; and their eventual reform, the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, was criticized as further complicating the tax code.^{Footnote 22} Still, a number of anti-estate tax groups, led mostly by outside-the-Beltway activists and funded by a number of the country’s wealthiest families, attempted to get Congress to repeal the tax.^{Footnote 23} The biggest players were Patricia Soldano, an estate planner from Orange County, California, who created both the Center for the Study of Taxation and the Policy and Taxation Group in the early 1990s to lobby against the estate tax; Alabama estate planner Harold Apolinsky, who formed the American Family Business Institute (AFBI) in 1992 for similar lobbying purposes; Frank Blethen, publisher of the family-owned Seattle Times newspaper; and Jim Martin, head of a conservative seniors group, the 60Plus Association.

This unconventional coalition began to coordinate efforts in the mid-1990s. According to Apolinsky, “Blethen was the one who said, we ought to at least talk about this. So I said, I’ll provide a conference call. So there was a toll-free number that every month you could call and we’d talk for an hour.”^{Footnote 24} Soldano’s and Apolinsky’s groups met with Washington insiders and directed wealthy constituents to lobby their representatives directly. Soldano was key in this lobbying effort, working with connected D.C. outfits like Patton Boggs^{Footnote 25} and forming ties with stalwart repeal proponents in Congress like her own representative, Christopher Cox (R-Calif.) and, later, Jennifer Dunn (R-Wash.).^{Footnote 26}

Martin took a somewhat less polished approach, for example, disseminating a crude poem about taxes to Washington lawmakers (it began “Tax his cow, tax his goat / Tax his pants, tax his coat”).^{Footnote 27} And while he did not coin the term—apparently, Ronald Reagan did—Martin popularized the label of “death tax,”^{Footnote 28} using a “pizza fund” to fine his staff if they used the more neutral “estate tax.”^{Footnote 29} Blethen helped develop the idea of using narratives—in Apolinsky’s words, “real life stories of businesses that had to be sold to pay the tax.”^{Footnote 30} According to Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro, authors of a 2005 account of the estate tax repeal battle, “stories trumped science” in the repeal battle because the statistics used by supporters never matched the power and salience of such tales.^{Footnote 31} This coalition’s increasingly successful efforts reached fruition with the election of George W. Bush, who included estate tax repeal in the major tax-cut proposal that was a centerpiece of his presidential campaign. Bush’s Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 not only gradually increased the exemption level to $3.5 million in 2009, but it eliminated the tax entirely by the year 2010, although subsequent legislation in 2010 and 2012 reinstated the tax with a higher exemption level.^{Footnote 32}

A 2006 report by two liberal public advocacy groups, Public Citizen and United for a Fair Economy, painted a dark picture of the coalition against the tax, arguing that it was basically a front for a group of wealthy families. These families, the report argued, hijacked the democratic process to produce a policy outcome that saves them millions of dollars annually.^{Footnote 33} While it is true that wealthy interests did have an impact on the repeal battle, the report overemphasized their role, as well as the role of the “outsiders.” Public Citizen and UFE together suggested that wealthy families paid surrogates to fight for their narrowly conceived interests. However, broader economic interests also were concerned about the estate tax, and not just these wealthy families. While outsiders like Soldano brought the tax onto the Washington agenda, conservative “insiders”—think tanks, advocacy organizations, and power brokers—played a key role in repeal.

Business lobbying groups, for example, made up an important part of the pro-repeal side. The National Federation of Independent Business joined the fight against the estate tax due to pressure from its grassroots members; according to NFIB lobbyist Alix Norton, the issue “came up in talking with members. . . . Our agenda is determined by the agenda of our members; it bubbled up from there.”^{Footnote 34} The NFIB formed a Family Business Estate Tax Coalition in the mid-1990s,^{Footnote 35} a mechanism for a variety of trade groups such as the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the Farm Bureau, and the Food Marketing Institute to lobby against the tax. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce formed a similar coalition, albeit with much more extensive goals. The Chamber’s Tax Relief Coalition enabled more than nine hundred corporations, trade associations, and advocacy groups to lobby for tax cuts in the early days of the Bush presidency. The Chamber included permanent repeal among its legislative priorities after 2001.^{Footnote 36} NFIB’s coalition sent a number of letters to Congress to lobby for permanent repeal, including one as recently as November 2012.^{Footnote 37}

Economic advocacy groups and think tanks also joined in the fight. The libertarian Cato Institute, for example, offered Club for Growth President Stephen Moore a platform to support repeal before the Bush tax legislation had been enacted.^{Footnote 38} The free-market advocacy group Citizens for a Sound Economy (later renamed Freedom Works) also lobbied against the tax, reporting lobbying activities on the issue in at least five of the years between 1998 and 2005.^{Footnote 39} Some groups joined in later years as the sunset clause became an issue; another free-market advocacy group, Americans for Prosperity, issued a press release in May 2005 that supported a particular bill that would make repeal permanent.^{Footnote 40}

Most of these economic conservatives were D.C.-based “insider” groups that not only worked in parallel with outsider activists like Soldano and Martin, but basically “absorbed” the latter into already established conservative networks. This occurred easily with the specific anti-estate tax coalitions; the NFIB’s lobbying coalition, for example, included Frank Blethen’s Seattle Times among its members.^{Footnote 41} But the anti-estate tax activists were also incorporated into broader conservative networks. For example, Graetz and Shapiro note that a big player in the repeal movement was Grover Norquist, head of the conservative antitax lobbying group, Americans for Tax Reform. Apolinsky was invited to a number of Norquist’s famous Wednesday meetings where congressional and administration officials meet representatives of conservative advocacy groups and think tanks to coordinate policy efforts. Apolinsky described his visits as follows: “I’ve been to a half dozen of them. I would give them a report. ‘Here I am, I make a living from this [estate tax], but I’m against this.’ It was an educational process; it’s a simple tax to understand. I began to share with them how it worked, and that repeal didn’t risk jobs.”^{Footnote 42} Through conservative brokers like Norquist, Apolinsky and other “outsiders” became integrated into the broader conservative movement.

This integration occurred directly at the Heritage Foundation. In fact, Heritage analyst Bill Beach, who would play a prominent role in estate tax repeal, would not have been at Heritage at all if it weren’t for Harold Apolinsky. The estate tax lawyer personally raised the $200,000 that created a place for him at the think tank.^{Footnote 43} According to Apolinsky,

Beach’s work became singularly important to the success of estate tax repeal, and he has since gone on to advance conservative policies in other economic issue areas.

Heritage’s central role as a hub of the conservative coalition so connected estate tax outsiders and insiders that it became hard to distinguish the two. In a 2005 issue of Heritage Forum, the think tank offered a list of “Groups Specializing in Tax and Spending Issues” for readers to contact. Conservative stalwarts like Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform and FreedomWorks were listed alongside Pat Soldano’s Center for the Study of Taxation and Apolinsky’s American Family Business Institute.^{Footnote 45} Apolinsky and his colleagues were no longer outsiders but had been incorporated almost seamlessly into existing conservative networks.

Let the Framing Begin

As noted above, the “death tax” label, which Norquist later called a “fatal renaming,”^{Footnote 46} understandably helped the repeal advocates’ cause: Who would support a tax on death? Indeed, public opinion tended to support repeal, despite some observers’ claims that their support was based on a faulty understanding of economic realities.^{Footnote 47} And certainly conservatives were concerned with winning over the public to their cause. But some conservatives also spent considerable time developing and disseminating a different discourse, one that aimed at a different target. This way of framing the issue focused more on the language of morality and family.

“Frames” are an important way of understanding how language operates in politics. An issue frame is a relatively coherent collection of narratives and symbols that surrounds a particular policy issue and influences interpretation of that issue—in short, a lens through which the policy issue is viewed. The idea of frames goes back at least to the pioneering work of sociologist Erving Goffman, who proposed that shared “schemata of interpretation” help us bring meaning to the events in our lives.^{Footnote 48} This theoretical structure has been adopted by social scientists and historians to address the ways that policy issues are presented in political discourse. A series of works from the political science literature, for example, suggests that the way an issue is framed is a significant indicator—perhaps even a determinative one—of the issue’s success.^{Footnote 49} Frames can be particularly resonant if they connect with the “existing cultural narratives” to which political coalition partners are committed.^{Footnote 50}

Policy issue framing has received significant attention in recent years, particularly due to the work of linguist George Lakoff. He suggests that liberals and conservatives offer two competing meta-frames for American politics: a right-wing “strict father” and a left-wing “nurturing parent.”^{Footnote 51} Lakoff’s work has been criticized for being too simplistic, but his emphasis on ideas and framing has influenced progressive organizing efforts, as well as drawn attention to the role of framing in conservative politics. Even before Lakoff’s work became popularly known, some scholars applied the concept of framing directly to conservative policy issues. Fred Block has suggested, intriguingly, that contemporary American society understands economics through a religious frame, specifically an allegory about lost souls: we’ve lost our way since a once-golden time, this frame suggests, and need a round of belt-tightening.^{Footnote 52} But while he is correct to suggest that frames may unite religion and economics, Block’s analysis remains at the level of abstraction; he does not articulate the specific political actors who promulgate his frame, nor the mechanisms through which they do so.

The development of such a specific issue frame can be found in analyst Beach’s work on the estate tax. Beach noted that “when we started in ‘94, ‘95, ‘96 to build the coalition, we had to do things well. We had to build the argument.”^{Footnote 53} According to Beach, “Heritage has a formula. We create the key foundational paper,” otherwise known as a “Backgrounder.” These Backgrounders are the central resources that lay out the think tank’s main arguments for or against a particular policy, and subsequent policy publications and activities are based upon it. In a 1996 Backgrounder on the tax,^{Footnote 54} Beach presented three largely macroeconomic reasons for repeal: the estate tax is a diminishing source of revenue; it fails to achieve its (questionable) “liberal” goals of wealth redistribution; and the tax does more harm than good in lost productivity, lost jobs, and decreased revenue through other taxation. He tied these arguments to an overall view of taxation as a hindrance to both liberty and economic growth.

Yet a second Backgrounder on the same subject, published two years later, was different in tone. While he offered the same economic arguments in the later document, Beach focused more directly on the effects of the tax upon small-business owners and farmers, noting the “great threat” to these enterprises. The burden of the estate tax, Beach argued here, fell upon “hardworking men and women whose thrift and entrepreneurial spirit expose them to confiscatory tax rates.”^{Footnote 55} The new argument reflected a shift in focus to small enterprise and farmers, rather than macroeconomic forces. And the language shifted to match; Beach emphasized what could be characterized as moral concerns like hard work, thrift, and the “entrepreneurial spirit.”

One source for this discursive shift was law professor Edward McCaffery, who began to describe the estate tax as a “virtue tax” as early as 1994.^{Footnote 56} A self-described liberal, McCaffery testified against the estate tax before GOP-controlled Senate and House finance subcommittees in the late 1990s. Since it appears to encourage consumption rather than savings, McCaffery argued, the estate tax was a disincentive to hard work. Extra effort was not rewarded if the government simply takes the resulting funds away upon death. Moreover, McCaffery noted in a 1999 report for the libertarian Cato Institute, the effects were felt at the societal level: “The biggest problem with the death tax is a moral one. The death tax rewards a ‘die-broke’ ethic, whereby the wealthy spend down their wealth on lavish consumption, and discourages economically and socially beneficial intergenerational saving.”^{Footnote 57} The estate tax, according to McCaffery, thus was more an issue of morality than economics.

Beach often quoted McCaffery in his Heritage Foundation reports.^{Footnote 58} While McCaffery used it in a novel way, Beach noted, the “virtue tax” argument had a long pedigree: “Ed McCaffery was the one I had heard it from first. But if you look back in writings on taxes, even to the 19th Century, you’ll see that taxes fall on the economically virtuous. But he was the one who turned it onto estate taxes.”^{Footnote 59} With McCaffery’s work as at least one inspiration, Beach brought this discourse of morality for the estate tax into Heritage’s publications.

One aspect of this morality discourse is a focus on hard-working entrepreneurs in commerce and agriculture. Estate tax opponents followed Beach’s lead and started to argue that the estate tax forced small enterprises into early sale, bankruptcy, and foreclosure. These arguments likely helped to enlist the aid of small-business owners in the fight against the tax.^{Footnote 60} More broadly, the image of the yeoman farmer and small-business entrepreneur are central to American mythmaking. The farmer is celebrated in an agrarian tradition going back at least as far as Thomas Jefferson,^{Footnote 61} and this tradition continued to exert significant cultural power through the twentieth century.^{Footnote 62} The small-business owner is no less culturally significant. Conservatives often hold up the entrepreneur as the ideal American—American Enterprise Institute scholar Ralph Reiland once called small businesses “America’s prosperity machine”^{Footnote 63}—but this idealization is widely held by those with other political leanings. Mansel G. Blackford has noted that “many Americans have seen the owners of small businesses as epitomizing all that is best about the American way of life.”^{Footnote 64}

But the shift in Beach’s discourse took on a new dimension when the discussion of small enterprises and farms became indelibly connected with the term “family.” The simple phrase of “family farms and businesses” became a signifier for the larger frame; both united the powerful American mythologies noted above with the equally powerful symbolism of “family values.” Beach’s 1996 report contained one reference each to “family farms” and “family businesses.” The change two years later is striking; in the 1998 paper, estate taxes hit “a family’s estate,” and hurt “family-owned businesses” or “family businesses and farms.” In fact, at least ten examples of this language can be found in the latter report.

Frames and Networks

Were it just Beach who pushed this line, the change in language might not be noteworthy. But this “family” frame became widespread, traveling across conservative networks with seeming ease. The official repeal coalitions adopted it in prominent ways. As just one example, witness the name of the NFIB coalition: the Family Business Estate Tax Coalition (emphasis mine). The language also was backed by the narratives that repeal proponents told. One FBETC member association, the American International Automobile Dealers Association, ran a 2005 advertisement in Washington’s Roll Call magazine that began, “The death tax almost destroyed our family business.” The ad told the story of a family-run Ohio dealership that was hit hard by the estate tax after the family patriarch died.^{Footnote 65} So not only did “stories trump science,” but they trumpeted the values of family and morality as well.

Over the next few years, both before and after the Bush tax cuts, this “family” discourse began to be adopted by a host of conservative organizations. For example, a 1999 report from the conservative watchdog group Accuracy in Media (AIM) complained that mainstream media relied on the wrong polls to argue that “the American people don’t really want a tax cut.” Mainstream reporters, the AIM report warned, don’t directly ask about popular tax cuts like repeal of the estate tax, which affects “farmers and small business owners, whose heirs have to sell off assets or land to settle the estate tax obligation.”^{Footnote 66} Later, a 2004 press release from the American Conservative Union noted that since presidential candidate John Kerry opposed estate tax repeal, he was “anti-family.”^{Footnote 67} A similar ACU release the following year noted that the “widely despised and onerous” estate tax “destroys small family businesses, farms and ranches”; the burden of estate taxation, the release claimed, falls on the people “who have worked hard all their lives” to pass on their family business.^{Footnote 68}

Similar language appeared on the state and local level, as conservatives there weighed in on federal estate tax legislation. The state policy group American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) used the family frame in a statement by Director Duane Parde on the federal repeal effort. According to Parde, the estate tax “unfairly targets the family farm and other family businesses.”^{Footnote 69} Similarly, a 2003 ALEC report on state-level repeal noted the “unintended distortionary impact” that forces family businesses and farms to sell.^{Footnote 70} Family language also made it to localities, albeit conservative-led ones. In an April 2006 editorial, the Orange County Register argued that “family farms and businesses are depending upon Congress” to permanently repeal the estate tax.^{Footnote 71} Even fringe organizations seemed to adopt the same language. As early as 2000, the ultralibertarian (and anti-Semitic) The New American magazine included estate tax repeal on a voter scorecard, supporting a bill that would phase out “the Marxist inheritance tax that is decimating family farms across the United States.”^{Footnote 72}

Prominent names in the Republican Party began to use family language as well. In an issue of the American Enterprise Institute’s magazine devoted to the 2000 election, Newt Gingrich mentioned the disparity between ways of framing the “death tax” issue: “We also ought to be aggressively in favor of abolishing the death tax. Let everybody on the left scream, ‘You are helping the rich!’ And let everybody else say, ‘We do not think grandparents should be punished for taking care of grandchildren.’ Guess who is going to win the argument on those two sound bites?”^{Footnote 73} Then-Senator George Allen similarly argued in 2005 that the estate tax hurt “modest Americans who worked hard throughout their lives to save for their families.”^{Footnote 74} And in a blog entry on Senator Bill Frist’s VOLPAC website, Frist noted that the tax attacks virtue because it “punishes hard work and savings”; he then underlined the danger to families by recounting a (possibly apocryphal) tale of a Tennessee family that had to sell land to pay their estate tax.^{Footnote 75}

Still, while Republicans adopted the family language, the selection and dissemination of this frame was not driven by party operatives or officials. A regular publication issued by the Heritage Foundation intended for candidates for federal office, The Candidate’s Briefing Book, shows how the think tank was able to spread the family frame. The 2006 edition’s tax section advocated the elimination of the “death tax,” providing the talking point that “many small businesses and family farms are destroyed by its penalty, which distorts incentives and hurts families.”^{Footnote 76}

Indeed, the Heritage Foundation seemed to become the central institution for anyone interested in making family arguments against the tax. In another 2001 Backgrounder on repeal, Bill Beach cited a 1999 report by the economically conservative Institute for Policy Innovation that argued against the tax using both economic and family arguments.^{Footnote 77} One of the coauthors of this report, Gary Robbins, later joined the Heritage Foundation as a Visiting Fellow in Tax Policy. Robbins even wrote a Backgrounder of his own in 2004 that was based on a presentation at a 2003 Roundtable, “Jobs, Growth, and Abolition of the Death Tax,” at the Department of the Treasury.^{Footnote 78} The think tank also published the Heritage Forum, a quarterly supplement to the venerable conservative magazine, Human Events. A 2005 issue provided a list of antitax organizations, including Soldano’s and Apolinsky’s, as well as an article (itself reprinted from an earlier issue of Human Events) on the estate tax by Senator George Allen with the title, “Death Should Not Be a Taxable Event.”^{Footnote 79} Tellingly, on the page opposite the Allen article, the Forum ran an advertisement from the NFIB’s estate tax coalition.^{Footnote 80}

Thanks to well-integrated conservative political networks, Heritage and others were able to disseminate the frame widely. For example, an estate tax issue brief from the American International Automobile Dealers Association cited the NFIB website, law professor McCaffery, and a 2002 Heritage report by one of Bill Beach’s colleagues;^{Footnote 81} the auto group likely was led to these sources through participation in the NFIB’s Family Business Estate Tax Coalition. Similarly, Dan Miller, senior economist at Congress’s Joint Economic Committee (JEC), wrote an important report in 1998, with updates in later years, that argued against the tax.^{Footnote 82} While Miller offered mostly economic arguments, he included nods to “family-owned businesses” and cited McCaffery. Miller noted that his work was often driven by academic articles and his own intellectual interests, but admitted that “I do remember seeing what Bill [Beach] had done, what Heritage had done—also some work by the Cato Institute, the Tax Foundation.” Miller was invited to speak in person at the annual Death Tax Summit organized by Frank Blethen and the NFIB’s Family Business Estate Tax Coalition.^{Footnote 83}

The estate tax frame was also circulated through online connections. For example, a 2005 post on the website of the conservative group Americans for Prosperity warned that the estate tax’s sunset clause could trigger mass death in 2010, as elderly Americans either decided or would be “encouraged” to die by greedy family members while there’s no estate tax.^{Footnote 84} The oddity of this argument aside,^{Footnote 85} this posting demonstrates the integration of conservative groups surrounding the estate tax issue. It included links to a 2003 Heritage WebMemo by Bill Beach; public opinion data posted on the Tax Foundation’s Tax Policy Blog; a 2000 Wall Street Journal op-ed, itself posted on the website of the National Bureau of Economic Research, an economic think tank; and an online column by Ron Paul, the libertarian congressman and future presidential candidate, who warned that “many family farms across this country have been bought by large corporations because of the estate tax.”^{Footnote 86}

Interestingly, even the “outsiders” who brought the estate tax issue to the attention of conservative networks eventually adopted the family frame as they became part of these networks. Jim Martin, appearing before the Pennsylvania State Senate in 1999, argued that the estate tax was “anti-family, because nearly 90% of family-owned businesses don’t survive past the second generation.”^{Footnote 87} Similarly, Dick Patten, the head of Apolinsky’s American Family Business Institute, argued in a 2005 op-ed piece that the estate tax hurt “family farms and businesses.”^{Footnote 88}

Thus reports and arguments cited other reports and arguments, helping to spread the family frame to seemingly all corners of the conservative world. Similarly, many webpages referred to other conservative sites that made the same arguments. The discourse was circulated at central meetings, as when Apolinsky spoke in front of Norquist’s crowd of conservative activists and Republican staffers. Some of these myriad reports, press releases, and websites did little more than mention the word “family.” Still, these surface references pointed back to more detailed use of the frame in other contexts. Through it all, Heritage’s Beach was ubiquitous; the pro-family language he chiefly developed was spread throughout conservative networks thanks to Heritage’s myriad connections.

Why Family Language?

Beach’s stated reasons for the turn toward the language of morality and the family is rather simple: moral arguments appeal to everyone. According to Beach, “Moral arguments almost always are [more effective] on any issue. If you are talking to an audience who are not trained [in economics], you need to address them in the terms that they will understand. Almost everyone is educated by their parents, or at least their community, in moral argument. . . . It wasn’t a clever strategy. We started off with it as a normal part of the argument.” ^{Footnote 89}Journalist Joshua Green suggested that the family language used by tax opponents thus lent a “populist appeal” to their cause.^{Footnote 90} After all, who opposes the family?^{Footnote 91}

But if the choice of family language serves broad strategic purposes, it seems even more calculated when one considers the structure of the conservative political coalition. “Family” language may have some appeal to the general populace, but it seems particularly tailored for what members often describe as a “pro-family” movement. One Republican staffer and longtime conservative activist observed later that this is exactly what happened in the case of the estate tax: “You just re-frame your issues. Like the big push with tax cuts. They were able to expand their coalition. . . .They reframed tax issues in a family way, like the inheritance tax. It was framed: save the family farm, save the family business.”^{Footnote 92}

The conservative activists involved in estate tax repeal may not admit to an organized campaign to bring in supporters of “family values”: social conservatives. But Beach acknowledged that “there was an effort made after 2001 to broaden the language, to connect to other groups.”^{Footnote 93} Beach’s publications reflected this effort. A narrowly tailored memorandum he wrote in 2003 did not refer to family values. This “WebMemo,” aimed directly at House members and their staffs, focused almost exclusively on economic arguments about “wealth creation.”^{Footnote 94} Yet his 1998 and subsequent Backgrounders included the family language; these broad documents were meant to be widely distributed, including among social conservatives.

Why try to recruit social conservatives to the estate tax cause? While taxation was not exactly ignored by Christian conservatives—evangelical Christians had joined the conservative movement in the 1970s largely because of IRS investigations of religious (and segregated) schools^{Footnote 95}—they typically focused on specific tax issues that had a clear moral dimension, rather than argue a broad philosophical or theological case against taxation in general. The Christian Coalition, for example, targeted family-related policies like the so-called marriage penalty. Coalition head Ralph Reed announced in a widely read 1993 article in Heritage’s Policy Review that social conservatives should develop such arguments as part of a broader agenda in order to become a majority movement. According to Reed, “The primary objective of fiscal policy should be to make the tax code more family friendly.”^{Footnote 96}

It also is possible that some coalition leaders remembered the acrimonious battles over tax cuts in years past, when various conservative interests pushed for their own favored tax proposals. Such a battle occurred as late as 1998, when social conservatives were criticized for emphasizing a child tax credit too much; according to a Republican staffer, “It’s tough to have a seat at the table when you’re kicking everyone in the shins underneath.”^{Footnote 97} If there were united support for the same tax issues in the Bush era, then earlier conflict over particular tax policies could be avoided. In fact, that’s exactly the strategy laid out a decade earlier by Reed, William Kristol, William Bennett, and other key political actors, according to a 1993 article in the Washington Post. These conservatives argued that an important part of a broad attack on “big government” would be the inclusion of pro-family tax cuts. Kristol argued that such a plan “appeals to market conservatives for competition reasons and social conservatives for values reasons.”^{Footnote 98}

There were theological reasons to believe such appeals could work. Evangelicals were based in the Protestant tradition, which, as Max Weber famously argued,^{Footnote 99} has an affinity for capitalism; the Calvinist sects particularly encouraged devotion to work while discouraging charitable donations, thus opening the way to capitalist investment. Allan Lichtman has noted how American conservatives “sustained the linkage between virtue and enterprise,” helping to unite the causes of moral traditionalism and free-market capitalism.^{Footnote 100} And there had always been individuals and groups, like James Fifield’s “Spiritual Mobilization” movement in the New Deal era,^{Footnote 101} that attempted to outline the spiritual and moral foundations for modern, free-market economics, although these groups were not always connected to conservative politics.

According to journalist Frederic Clarkson, however, it was a small group of Protestant thinkers that influenced American evangelicals by arguing that economic policies deserved as much attention as social ones.^{Footnote 102} Originally led by the late R. J. Rushdoony, Christian Reconstructionists believe that biblical law can and should be brought into the modern context, and that it provides a basis not just for ethical and private life, but for public life and policy as well. On this view, all governmental policies—laws, court decisions, regulations, etc.—should be directly based upon biblical law. Reconstructionism was influenced by a number of theologies and thinkers, from Calvin to the presuppositionalism (biblical worldview) of Princeton scholar Cornelius Van Til, and had institutional bases in conservative Presbyterianism and the John Birch Society.

Because they sought to broadly apply biblical principles to civil government, Reconstructionist writers like Gary North emphasized the importance of private property and free-market capitalism for ensuring the freedom and responsibility of the individual before God. In books like An Introduction to Christian Economics,^{Footnote 103} North and his colleagues also rejected government price controls, welfare and other entitlement programs, and any kind of wealth redistribution. According to Reconstructionists, taxation should only be as high as necessary for the maintenance of a libertarian state that allows individuals to act freely, although in accordance with God’s moral law.

Reconstructionist ideas were spread through organizations like the Chalcedon Foundation, the Rutherford Institute, and the Coalition on Revival, and have had strong influence on Pentecostal churches (which became politically active as a result) and Charismatics.^{Footnote 104} Clarkson tied Reconstructionism specifically to the Christian Coalition through Pat Robertson’s supposed commitment to dominionism, a theological and political tendency based on the biblical notion that God gave dominion over the earth to mankind.^{Footnote 105} These theological influences, both older (e.g., the Calvinism described by Weber) and more contemporary (Reconstructionism), helped engender a rough acceptance of free markets among today’s Christian Right.

But it was the turn toward “family values” that made the estate tax’s family frame so well suited for adoption by social conservatives. Religious Right leaders have long wrapped themselves in the mantle of the family. Church leaders such as Tim LaHaye, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell were part of a self-identified “pro-family network” during the conservative activism of the 1970s and ‘80s.^{Footnote 106} Still, it wasn’t until the 1990s, when Ralph Reed began to steer the Christian Coalition toward the political mainstream, that leaders of Religious Right groups began to more overtly describe themselves as a “pro-family movement.” Indeed, Christian political groups such as the Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America, and others tried to downplay their Christian affiliation in hopes of making broad appeals to “family values.” Even the names of the dominant Christian political organizations of the early 1990s and subsequent decades (the Christian Coalition and the Family Research Council, respectively) reflect this shift.

It seems hard to believe that Bill Beach and other conservative operatives were unaware of how a newly christened “family” tax would operate in this environment. If they were simply focused on building popular support for estate tax repeal, or targeting business owners, they could have used the more general tropes from American mythology noted above, such as “small business” and “free enterprise.” Such appeals would certainly motivate the economic and populist constituencies in the public at large. Instead, however, the language of “family farms and businesses” was carefully inserted into antitax appeals and circulated through conservative networks, suggesting that the frame was intended for “pro-family” forces to hear.

Social Conservatives on Board

While Bush’s 2001 tax-cut package made estate tax repeal a reality, social conservatives began to embrace the tax reform as a “pro-family” policy. For example, in its June 2001 issue, the Christian magazine World reported that social conservatives were happy with the “family-friendly” Bush tax program. While the article specifically cited reduction in the marriage penalty as “mark[ing] families as a favored group,” it also noted favorably the repeal of the death tax, “which sometimes forced children to sell the family-owned farms and businesses their parents had spent a lifetime building.”^{Footnote 107} Similarly, a 2001 paper by a conservative Catholic group, the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property, stated that estate tax repeal would help grant “material stability to the family.”^{Footnote 108} A March 2001 press release from Concerned Women for America noted that Bush’s 2002 budget included estate tax repeal among other “pro-family tax cuts.”^{Footnote 109}

The view of the estate tax as “pro-family” was clearly influenced by Beach and Heritage. When discussing repeal a few years after the Bush tax cut package was implemented, the Family Research Council’s Peter Sprigg used familiar arguments to describe why the FRC supported estate tax repeal: “A large part of the concern is that the estate tax is a concern of those who have family businesses, and they’re worried about passing their businesses on to their children. This is a little more specific family-related concern. We think that families should be encouraged to pass on their businesses.”^{Footnote 110} More significantly, Focus on the Family published a brief report after the tax cuts celebrating the “good news for families” in the 2001 tax cuts, including the end of the “death tax.”^{Footnote 111} There was no explanation as to why estate tax repeal would be “pro-family”; however, Heritage’s Bill Beach was actually quoted in the Focus article. Thus taking their cue from Heritage and the existing “family” language that described the tax, Christian groups began to see the issue as a family one.

The most striking example of the Christian embrace of the estate tax as a family issue was a pamphlet issued by FRC in the fall of 2001. The report, written by the group’s then-director of Family Tax Policy Leslie Carbone, was entitled “Death and Taxes: How Divorcing the Two Benefits the Family.”^{Footnote 112} The idea for the report, Carbone noted, came from “[a] conflation of things. The death tax was a big issue back then—it was part of the Bush tax cuts. I felt that all the arguments that were being made were economic arguments. I felt that the family impact and the social impact were equally important. I wanted to write something on it.”^{Footnote 113}

In the report, Carbone started in McCaffery’s “virtue tax” vein, noting that “anything that undermines virtue weakens the family; the estate tax is no exception.” The tax discouraged hard work, discipline, courage, and dependability, she argued.

But Carbone also saw the natural order of the family as the primary starting point for any government policy. In enabling the government to take a seemingly large portion of an individual’s savings upon death, the estate tax implied that the state is more important than the individual; estates then existed more for the purposes of government than for the people who owned them.^{Footnote 114} Carbone noted that by disrupting inheritance, the estate tax upset the kinship bonds that make up the family. She contended that: “By interfering directly with the natural or family order, the death tax works against the family to a greater extent than other forms of taxation. By artificially separating the family along generational lines, it disrupts the extended family. . . . The death tax considerably weakens the role and status of families in American life.”^{Footnote 115} The estate tax thus was not just a threat to farms and businesses. It attacked the very structure of the family and, indeed, the very structure of society itself.

Carbone’s family language demonstrated the provenance of this report in the efforts of discursive entrepreneurs like Beach. Bush’s tax proposal may have brought the issue to her attention; but her report heavily drew upon previous work by conservatives on the estate tax issue, citing Heritage’s Beach, as well as the Institute for Policy Innovation and Joint Economic Committee reports mentioned above. Indeed, Carbone at least had met with Beach’s colleagues, if not the man himself: “I had known people at the Heritage Foundation—I was aware of their work. . . . I’d go to meetings at Heritage, Cato, you know. Heritage was actually very helpful; they set up a couple of roundtables with economists, and helped me bounce ideas off them. Because I am not an economist.”^{Footnote 116} Beach also remembered meetings with Carbone’s organization: “I’ve sat in on several meetings with Gary Bauer and the Family Research Council.”^{Footnote 117}

Following the FRC’s lead, other socially conservative organizations started paying attention to estate tax repeal. A 2005 Focus on the Family web article cited both Beach and Apolinsky’s colleague Dick Patten.^{Footnote 118} Similarly, a 2005 “News Brief” from the socially conservative American Family Association quoted 60Plus Association’s Jim Martin on how the Katrina disaster should not be used to delay estate tax repeal.^{Footnote 119} Representatives of the Christian Coalition, Family Research Council, and other socially conservative groups regularly attended Grover Norquist’s weekly meetings,^{Footnote 120} and some of these representatives were almost certainly present for some of Harold Apolinsky’s presentations. Apolinsky also met directly with FRC head Gary Bauer, as well as Republican senator John Ashcroft, as they prepared for their 2000 presidential campaigns. According to Apolinsky, “Bauer got very interested in it. He wanted it to be a major plank in his run for the Presidency. Ashcroft said the same thing.”^{Footnote 121}

Eventually, the estate tax issue became absorbed as a largely unquestioned part of the pro-family, Christian agenda. The Family Research Council included permanent estate tax repeal on its website as part of its three policy priorities for “Economics and Taxes”;^{Footnote 122} it listed the tax as a “pro-family issue” on its voter scorecards;^{Footnote 123} and it reported on the issue in its updates to members.^{Footnote 124} The (now-defunct) Christian Coalition also included it among its top priorities on its own website^{Footnote 125} and listed the issue on its last widely distributed presidential voter scorecard.^{Footnote 126} The addition of the issue to voter scorecards is especially telling. Even though the policy area had been characterized for years as a largely economic one, Republican action on the issue—which provides direct financial benefits to wealthy economic conservatives—now earned political points from social conservatives. The Republican Party thus had one more policy area upon which it could be rated “pro-family.”

Even if the repeal effort eventually failed, conservatives could claim victory in the numerous examples of greater ties and coordination between social and economic conservatives, as well as among both and the GOP. Thus Paul Weyrich’s Free Congress Foundation pushed the “family farms and businesses” line in a web posting by its Director of Development;^{Footnote 127} the article later appeared on the websites of both Martin’s 60Plus Association and the conservative media watchdog, Accuracy in Media, continuing the circulation of the frame. Similarly, a 2006 edition of the Family Research Council’s weekly radio program featured a discussion of pending repeal legislation with AFBI’s Dick Patten. The show’s guest host, Republican congressman Mike Pence—a favorite among the Religious Right—agreed that it is “morally wrong” to take the “after-tax resources of American families” at the time of a family member’s passing. Neither Pence nor Patten talked overtly about religion; instead, they used the language of family and morality to speak to religious listeners about an economic issue.^{Footnote 128} Of the many connections between conservative organizations and individuals noted above, a number have arisen just because of the estate tax issue; in this way, the issue helps build a political coalition.

The Triumph of Economic Conservatism?

Again, economic and social conservatism are not mutually exclusive categories; individuals and ideas do not have to be slotted into one or the other. Still, various political institutions fall more clearly on one side or the other; their pursuit of different goals and agendas reveals tensions within Republican Party politics. The attempts to repeal the estate tax over the past two decades illuminate at least one way that these tensions are managed. Thanks to the efforts of a group of “outsider” activists, conservatives adopted estate tax repeal as a part of their ongoing agenda. But it was the key work of framing the tax using “family” language that enabled social conservatives to adopt the issue as their own.

The result is a stronger conservative political coalition, with significant consequences for our politics as a whole. For example, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson note that Republicans in Congress are adept in framing their favorite political issues (although they use the term “Orwellian” to indicate that the GOP’s language is deceptive).^{Footnote 129} But they also argue that the Republicans’ impressive party discipline is a key factor in their legislative success. While they do not connect the two issues—framing and coalition effectiveness—I argue here that issues like the estate tax help align conservative goals and help prevent party disarray. Moreover, such framing makes it harder to counter support of what Block calls “market fundamentalism” using appeals to equality, particularly among religious believers; while Christian evangelicals have some ideological reasons to favor free-market principles, there are traditions and ideas within Christianity that may lead in other directions.

For example, self-described “unabashed social and religious conservative” Rod Dreher wrote in 2006 about a new rash of “crunchy conservatives” who recognize that market ideology makes a fetish of choice at the expense of traditional communities.^{Footnote 130} Dreher explicitly tethered himself to the traditionalist agrarian tradition of Richard Weaver and Russell Kirk. In a review of Dreher’s book, George Nash called it “a reminder of the enduring tension on the right” between freedom and virtue.^{Footnote 131} More broadly, there is a long tradition within Christian ethics that offers a critique of economic inequality.^{Footnote 132} At a time when, as economist Joseph Stiglitz has argued,^{Footnote 133} costly market failures lead to an economic system that seems to benefit only those at the highest economic levels, Christianity may offer at least some options for critique.

Instead, right-wing grassroots politics seems to be headed away from this critique and even more toward what Block describes as blind support of market ideology. This is especially true with the rise of today’s “Tea Party” conservatism. Following a well-circulated televised rant by Rick Santelli, a former trader and CNBC news editor,^{Footnote 134} Tea Party groups sprang up across the country, organizing rallies and various other forms of political action to demand chiefly a reduction in government spending. Thus the movement offers the possibility that grassroots conservatism has become more concerned about economic issues than before. As one member of a Virginia group noted, “Tea Party organizations typically do not take a position on social issues such as abortion and gay rights. The conservatism that unites us is governmental and fiscal, not social.”^{Footnote 135} Indeed, a Tea Party activist from Houston developed a “Contract from America” in 2010 that was promoted as the movement’s agenda.^{Footnote 136} The contract includes specific demands for a balanced budget, reduced taxes, and an end to “runaway government spending,” but it takes no position on any of the controversial issues like abortion that social conservatives have pursued for decades.^{Footnote 137} Even after a resurgence of such issues at the state level—critics note, perhaps hyperbolically, that Republicans have declared a “war on women”^{Footnote 138}—economic issues remain the main concerns of Tea Party organizations, if not individual members.

It would be difficult to suggest that the framing of economic issues like the estate tax directly led to the explosion of Tea Party populism in the past few years. But it is curious that after decades of conservative framing of economic issues in order to bring social conservatives closer to an economic agenda, grassroots conservatives essentially transformed themselves into economic conservatives. During the early protests in 2009, the socially conservative American Family Association joined in to organize Tea Party tax-day rallies.^{Footnote 139} Another prominent Tea Party “umbrella” organization, TeaParty.net, claimed to have generated eighty thousand letters to repeal the estate tax, asking Tea Partiers to “help extend relief to family businesses and farms.”^{Footnote 140} Taken together, these anecdotes at least raise the suggestion that years of “family” framing for the estate tax may have affected grassroots conservatives. Whatever the effects on Tea Party activism, it seems clear that thanks to issues like the estate tax, social conservatives have become connected in a kind of feedback loop with economically conservative groups and GOP officials. And issues like the estate tax will continue to help bind together these political actors’ divergent interests.