Where is the GOP going?

Great Debates
1

Well, it’s been an interesting couple of months, hasn’t it? I mean we had this whole Rush Limbaugh thing, and then the bailout snafu, and then the budget crisis, and the piracy thing, and then Hugo Chavez. Entertaining! To say the least.

But what’s clear is that a coherent message still hasn’t emerged for the GOP. This is okay, and I don’t think conservative America is dead forever. But the GOP has a unique chance to reinvent itself, and I wanted to see where people think they’ll go. Here’s some related items to peruse.

Nate Silver sees a Libertarian faction gaining strength, as evidenced by the recent Tea Party phenomena.

Steve Schmidt, campaign manager for McCain, recently came out in favor of gay marriage at the Log Cabin Republicans convention. At the same event, Meghan McCain urged the GOP to “go gay.” So will the GOP jettison social conservatism?

Finally, Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs has taken down several of his old associates rather publicly and viciously. So what’s the foreign policy/anti-terrorism plank of the GOP going to be?

Personally, I really hope we can see the GOP ditch gay marriage, stem cells, abortion, and creationism as wedge issues, because I’m much more intrigued in a party that wants to sell small government than one that wants to beat me about the head with biblical morality. I really do find the size-of-government debate interesting. But that’s me.

I don’t intend for this to be a “oh those wacky Republicans!” thread. There’s one of those in the BBQ pit. But where do you see the party coalescing?

2

Unpredictably in the long run. With such a chaotic situation, I don’t think you can really say which side will win out. In the shorter run, it looks to me like the most rabid and loony of them are in charge. If that leads to another electoral failure, then the other factions will have a chance to take over. If it gets them elected, then the rabid and loony will remain in charge for quite some time.

3

There is a longstanding tradition in America to seek a more laissez-faire governmental environment, with fewer regulations and those geared to preventing abusive results rather than regulating every move (e.g., “you may not release arsenic compunds into the air, water, or soil”, as opposed to “you must fill out these forms detailing every step you take with arsenic-containing chemicals”), a smaller, less expensive and less pervasive federal government, a business-friendly stance that also is solicitous of workers, and support for what used to be called “American traditional values” before the social conservatives hijacked the term for their own use.

Those were the characteristics advocated by the Republican Party of ca. 1940-1970. This liberal raised as a small-town Northeast Republican sees some value in them, and thinks that the GOP could put together a majority behind itself if it refocused on them. (But I doubt it will – conservatism is too fractured to come up with a leader that would dare advocate for that sort of moderate platform.)

4

I agree with Der Trihs (I know…STOP THE PRESSES!)…it’s a really chaotic situation and it’s too early to tell. I also agree with him that it looks right now as if the ‘rabid and loony of them are in charge’…and to me it appears it might stay that way for some time to come, since those rabid and loony types seem to be getting the most press and the most traction. And I agree with him that the deciding factor will probably be the next cycle of elections…if they fall on their faces then it might change their outlook. If they succeed…well, nothing breeds success like success.

While personally I’d love if that happened, I don’t think the Tea Party thingy is going to send this kind of message to main stream Republican types. There has always been a small faction of libertarian type Republicans, but they are definitely in the minority and I don’t see that changing.

Again…would love to see it, would be all in favor of it, might even consider voting Republican if they did it…don’t think there is any chance in hell it will happen. Social Conservatism has been the hallmark of Republicans for over a decade now and it seems firmly entrenched in the party…much more so than economic conservatism.

Me too…that quasi-religious bullshit sets my teeth on edge. Unfortunately neither you or I (especially not me) are the Republicans target audience.

-XT

5

I guess in the language of political Darwinism, we’re asking which faction of the Republican party is going to garner them the most successes: the Bible faction, whose pet issues are abortion, gay marriage, and stem cells; or the Money faction, whose pet issues are taxes, small government, and capitalism.

If I had to wager on it, I’d go with the Money faction.

6

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

7

Down the tubes.

And we needs 2 parties.

Not good.

8

If the GOP is smart, they’ll make a clean break with movement conservatism and go back to the days when the dominant wing of the party was the Rockefeller Republicans – socially liberal, moderate in foreign policy, pro-business but not ideologically hostile to a limited welfare state.

9

That’s one heck of an if.

10

People, especially the media, are persisting in the belief that it’s still a 50/50 country when that’s just not the case right now. Sure, occasionally someone will acknowledge that the reason the GOP has been so lockstep in congress is because all the moderate Republicans were the ones to lose their seats in 2006 and 2008.

But the same is true for the party at large, too. The GOP from 2002 and the GOP in 2009 are totally different. Millions and millions of people are disgusted with the Republicans and switched to be independents and Democrats. So while I agree that in the short term the rabid and loony are in charge, I think people seriously underestimate how large a proportion of the current Republican party are rabid and loony. They’re still thinking half the country is red. Not everyone, but they’ve lost a lot of rational moderate people they had a few years ago.

Obviously it’s unlikely they’ll be a permanent minority but I think they have a really really long road ahead.

11

Actually, if one really listens, this is not all that different than what Ron Paul was and is saying. One of the reasons so many people on both ends of the spectrum is that when it comes down to it the best thing is to leave people alone unless they are actually harming someone else.

12

Frankly, the changes we’re seeing now have very little to do with the Republican party. The last Republican politician who tried to speak at a ‘Tea Party’ got shouted down off the stage. The head of the party, Michael Steele, is completely clueless. The Republican party is current adrift.

What’s happening in the conservative wing of America, as opposed to the Republican party, is the same thing that happened on the left - power is shifting away from politicians and towards bloggers, new media journalists, and communities organizing themselves on the internet. The grassroots of both wings of American life now have the tools to organize and communicate with the rest of the country without the need for gatekeepers and central authority figures.

Barack Obama is President because he represented what the grassroots on the left wanted, and they brought immense power to bear to elect him, Fundraising like we’ve never seen before, message communication, etc. There are no politicians on the right who have managed to do this - to become of the embodiment of the internet-enabled conservative community. McCain couldn’t do it. Palin excited them temporarily, then let them down with her own limitations. Fred Thompson lit them up temporarily, but failed them through his own lack of ambition.

There are a few bright lights in the Republican party, but not many. Most of those politicians made it the old-fashioned way, by courting the establishment and ingratiating themselves to the traditional gatekeepers of power. That means they’re all pretty much contaminated. For a long time, you couldn’t get elected as a Republican if you weren’t strongly pro-life, anti-gay, Christian, and open to being wishy-washy when it comes to spending lots of money on behalf of the people who held the purse strings. Not surprisingly, that describes most Republicans today.

But that’s not what’s going to elect Republicans in the future. Just as Obama could tell the old guard to stuff it because the community behind him gave him all the financial support he needed, the next successful Republican contender for President will be able to do the same.

So the real question is, what does the conservative grassroots in America really want? It’s tempting to project my own desires on them and say they’re all a bunch of libertarians who support gay rights and less government, but I honestly don’t know how much of the libertarian uprising we’re seeing is just an oppositional reaction to Obama’s outrageous spending and deficits, as opposed to a being a reflection of an underlying desire for less government. I think we’ll know when the next presidential candidate who ignites the right shows up on the scene.

Thirty years ago, Ronald Reagan managed it. Interestingly, he wasn’t much of a religious conservative. He paid lip service to it, but he was a California Republican with a spotty church-going record. His administration focused mainly on economics and the cold war. The Republicans in 1994 captured the energy on the right through a platform of smaller government, welfare reform, and lower regulation.

If this were 1994, I’d feel much more comfortable that the Libertarian wing was truly the emerging force on the right. But 1994 was a long time ago, and society has evolved an awful lot, and I honestly don’t know what the right really wants any more. I think the latest moves are encouraging, and it certainly looks like there’s plenty of life left in the libertarian wing of the right, but time will tell us how real it is.

13

Excellent post, Sam.

I tend to think that the right-wing blogosphere will attract the social conservatives (the frothing-at-the-mouth factor) and become the noisy fringe, while the grassroots/community-based groups will go for whoever leaves them alone and promises the lowest taxes. Forced to choose between blocking gay marriage and having more money, your average (real) Joe the Plumber will vote with his overstretched wallet.

14

Hey, I’m essentially the same as you, but I’m not holding my breath for that party to come back anytime soon either.

15

That conflicts with the image I had of Reagan as the harbinger of modern religious moral conservatism. Isn’t he the guy that invented the war on drugs?

16

What does “religious moral conservatism” have to do with “the war on drugs”? The latter is a Law and Order issue, not a religious crusade.

17

Read Glenn Greenwald’s Great American Hypocrites. It’s painfully obvious that these kind of inconvenient facts in conflict with the image aren’t interesting, in the sense of being atypical, among conservative leaders. They are the norm.

18

No, he’s not. That would be Richard Nixon, who first used the term in 1969. In any event, I’d separate the ‘war on drugs’ from conservatism in general, since the Democrats have been at least as complicit in it.

You may be associating the drug war with Reagan because of Nancy Reagan’s ‘just say no’ campaign. But that campaign was not really anti-civil liberty. The approach was not to go after the supply side by jailing dealers and users, it was to go after the demand side to attempt to convince people that taking drugs was harmful. I don’t see anything wrong with that approach, other than that I disagree with some of the claims made about the effects of drugs. But in fact, drug use did decline substantially during the Reagan years. Correlation does not equal causation, but it’s possible that the ‘Just Say No’ campaign played some part in this.

It’s true that there were expansions of the drug war under Reagan - some a byproduct of other anti-crime measures such as the sentencing reform act which effectively increased the length of prison stay for many drug offenders. The Drug Offenders Act in 1984 focused on establishing treatment programs for drug users. The worst of expansions was in the crime control act, which was a large reform of penalties for various crimes. Unfortunately, it instituted federal minimum sentencing guidelines for drug offenses which really increased the number of people jailed for drug use - something I heartily oppose.

Still, you have to separate ‘law and order’ conservatism from social conservatism. Rudy Guliani is a law and order conservative, as was Reagan. Guliani is not a social conservative, however.

19

I think with a Republican in the WH with huge approval ratings and a Senate newly controlled by the GOP, religious conservatives felt they could begin concentrating on other aspects of their agenda, which led to the ascendancy of the pro-life movement and icons like Falwell, Roberts, and Robertson during the Reagan era. But just because his administration may have enabled them somewhat, he hardly embodied their values. He simply created a political environment conducive to the religious right getting traction in society and making inroads that other economic and cultural factors didn’t allow them to as effectively in the past.

20

I’ll buy that about Guliani, but not Reagan. Although he didn’t go to church during his presidency, he did before and after it. He frequently addressed conservative religious groups while he was in office. He was deeply involved with and supported by the Moral Majority movement, whose purpose was basically to get him elected and to combat the liberal social movement by injecting a healthy dose of good old fashioned Baptist morals into the government. Afterward he appointed Moral Majority members to cabinet positions. He claimed God intervened to save him from the assassination attempt, in order to continue doing His work. While president, he argued and quoted scripture against a liberal minister who expressed doubts of Christ’s divinity.

The dude was at least as religious as Obama, and did a lot more for the religious conservative movement than almost any other president, with the only possible exception being Bush jr.