I guess it depends on how you read the American political environment.
If you take what I think is a bleak view of conservative voters, then maybe centrist Republican candidates would be so unrecognisably RINO that the base would revolt and the whole thing would be a non-starter. If that’s the case, then it would amount to wishful thinking at least in part.
But I don’t think that the GOP actually needs to be exactly the way it is now to survive and thrive. Following a loss to Obama they will be in consolidation mode for a while regardless, and if it is a popular Democratic incumbency as I suspect, it will have a natural moderating effect to help the transition.
Just to be clear, I’m not demanding Republicans simply become liberal doves; I really think they can provide an independently compelling and competitive narrative to the Democratic Party, without retreating to the excess of the Bush years, that is distinctly conservative. What I think is called for is moderate conservatism of the kind of David Cameron in the UK or the Liberal Party in Australia.
Maybe that is beyond the pale, but if you look back at Bush’s success in 2000, and he was elected as a compassionate conservative, governing through bipartisan consensus, fiscal responsibility, and reluctance to engage in national building or foreign entanglements. Obviously 9/11 changed things with both the party AND the base, but I don’t think the heart and soul of the party need be seen as a priori militarist and totalitarian-lite.
Also, I’m not suggesting any kind of abandonment of core conservative philosophy. For instance, I think Burkean conservative insights about tradition, conservation and incrementalism should rightly inform the core of conservative philosophy, along with a robust narrative about the interrelationship between market freedom and individual liberty. I also see a place for conservative, communitarian, and religious based critiques of the paucity of the liberal rights-based schema. Further, I think they can continue to highlight their interpretation of the protestant work ethic and the virtue of business, and still maintain many hot-button positions, such as with jurisprudential debates, eg. originalism and strict constructionism, etc.
What I specifically want, though, is a change in the tone of dialogue, away from this thoughtless anti-intellectualism that we frequently see on display. I think it’s one thing to suspect university culture as a breeding ground for anti-establishment views, and to exploit that for political gain, but it’s another thing to gradually erode the basis of the scientific method, empiricism, expertise and evidence driven policy. Let’s call this slide what it really is - a completely gratuitous attack.
This is all tied up with what I meant by providing an “overlay” for the base to engage with the political process. What I mean by that is to offer a more constructive pitch to their base, which is based around contesting about facts and narratives rather than merely asserting a deaf triumphalism and demonising liberals as the traitorous “other”.
In practice, I guess that would mean less of the histrionics of Pat Robertson at the Justice Sunday league, and more critiques made in the Federalist Society.
Conservatives IMO also have to recapture their think tanks and put them back into service of a thoughtful policy agenda. It’s not enough to simply have a echo chamber repeating mantras if nobody is listening and the sincerity of your position has been assailed. I mean, even just comparing the kind of intellectual resources someone like National Review founder William Buckley Jr to those found there today and you can see a marked decline. Buckley wrote highly inflammatory pieces which were completely partisan, but there a rational discourse there at the heart of his conservatism, which you don’t see today.
As for foreign policy explicitly, I should probably qualify what I said. I don’t actually think hawks should leave the party, I just think certain kinds of hawks should be alienated from the levers of power within the GOP establishment. That means that hawkish candidates are entirely compatible, but the very strongest currents of American exceptionalism should be tempered within the party.
Ultimately this all boils down to how any particular administration views the resort to force, diplomacy and how they will balances the views of the State Department with those of the Pentagon. In this arena, the Bush Administration has been a specalure failure, for even where they had good people in play like Rice, Nicholas Burns, Dick Armitage and Colin Powell - they were sidelined completely and undermined by the Cheney, Addington, Bolton and the neo-conservatives.
