Ok. Republicans who believe that Palin is fully qualified to be President should leave their car in the garage: don’t bother with a reassessment. Just keep reading William Kristol’s column in the New York Times.
My comments are directed to the remainder of the Republican Party.
There are a few issues here.
By necessity American political parties consist of broad coalitions, so setting the religious fundamentalists adrift makes no sense.
Rather, the Republican party needs to rebuild its minority of moderates and adults. These two groupings have considerable overlap, though they are not the same. We should expect silly electoral claims. But at the end of the day the adults need to be in charge.
But I don’t see that as central. Far more serious is the intellectual failure of modern conservatism, or rather the failure of conservative intellectuals. They do a poor job of mapping conservative temperament to ideology.
No. Actually they do a great job of that. Where they fall apart is at the point that ideology meets prudence and empirical reality. Conservative intellectuals need to become more serious with their observations.
Let me submit an example. I hear a lot about the alleged fiscal conservative. They claim to like low budget deficits and low taxes.
Mathematically, that implies low spending. But how often does one see a plan that can bring that about? Sure, the extremists talk of the end of social security and medicare which is honorable in its own way. But it would also be electoral suicide: these programs are popular and centrists believe they perform rather adequately.
Here’s an alternative. A moderate conservative might advocate 12 criteria by which to judge a new government program. A moderate conservative might develop a plan to phase out existing government programs with built in safety values to reverse course if necessary. The latter just might provide some political credibility. Regardless, there needs to be a conservative constituency that acknowledges that sometimes taxes have to go up if budget deficits are to be reduced.
And they need to have a passing familiarity with the Federal budget. It’s not mostly about aid to the poor. Rather the federal government is a large pension plan that happens to have an army. All other programs taken together are… not large. Which is not to say that they don’t deserve a hard look.
My proposal is messy. Reality often is. But ducking the issues is unworthy of a serious analyst, conservative or otherwise. Just saying that you like lower taxes under all circumstances is embarrassing, unless you are a professional panderer.
If a new think tank is announced over the next 2 or 3 years, or if Hoover or Rand receive a substantial infusion of cash, that might be a good sign. Even better would be if AEA adjusts course and Hoover suffers some defections.
To sum up, yes Republicans need to take a walk in the woods but more importantly, conservative intellectuals and commentators need to think about making a serious and tough-minded set of arguments. Pandering should be reserved for our elected officials.
I don’t understand your argument here. Did you mean to say that Republicans don’t care if the Bush administration is torturing terror suspects (citizens or not), as long as it’s happening only “in the same sense that Obama pals around with terrorists”?