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Ditching the Social Right - The Future of the GOP Part 2

Posted by Pete Chase on Tuesday, December 30, 2008 3:00:00 PM
 
Shortly after the 2004 election, the Democratic Party undertook to figure out why their message and the promise of free stuff didn’t resonate inside the thick skulls of the lumpenproles. After what I can only assume was a painful process of critical self-examination the party was finally able to fix the blame where it belonged: evangelical Christians. Turns out there was never anything wrong with their message; Americans were dying to move to the left, but the Christianists scared the red state mouth-breathers about abortion, religious persecution, and gay marriage.
 
Now, after The Great Republican Drubbing of 2008, the GOP is itself in a similarly reflective mood. And many in the party believe they’ve found the reason for our current funk: evangelical Christians.
 
There’s no evidence the party is taking on water, but some in the GOP are already looking to lighten the load by tossing evangelicals and social conservatives over the side.
 
That’s ironic for a party founded specifically around a social issue – the abolition of slavery. It’s doubly ironic because the issue perhaps most identified with social conservatives – and the one some Republicans most want to offload – is one many have identified as the modern abolitionist movement: the pro-life plank. Never mind, time to give those pesky social cons the old heave-ho.
 
Political parties exist to get elected, and the problem for any party is not unlike that of a fisherman who must decide where to cast his net to catch the most fish. By casting in one spot over another he will lose some while gaining others. But does the Republican party itself stand for any particular set of principles? Does the fisherman care what kind of fish he finds in his net?
 
That’s the age-old question, of course, but the fisherman will do well to remember that certain species are always found in close proximity to each other. Where you find one, you will often find the other. I’ll go further and say that there is no meaningful divide between social conservatives and small government, fiscal conservatives.
 
 In fact, there are several practical reasons why it would be unwise to shun evangelicals and the social right in favor of so-called moderates.
 
First is the recognition that liberalism is largely a social program, implementation of whose policy goals necessarily entails massive state intervention in the private sphere, hence scrapping any theoretical upper limit on the size and scope of government. Thus, the concept of limited government is fundamentally incompatible with social progressivism.
 
Second, because liberalism is a social project – rather than economic or political – it must be opposed on that basis. Whenever the social good is found to be in conflict with the limits of government power, it is the principle of limited government that must yield. Therefore liberalism cannot ultimately be countered by constitutional or fiscal considerations, but only on the basis of conservative social values.
 
The third reason that a move to the middle on social issues is flawed is that the middle, as imagined by some, simply doesn’t exist. This is a topic that this blog has alluded to before. Although a seemingly target-rich environment, there is little in the way of ideological consistency that would allow the GOP to scoop up large constituencies.
 
There is also little there in the way of an overarching philosophy that would save the party from ideological creep. Moving to the center – wherever that might be – would simply allow liberals to redefine the center as the new far right. Conservatism claims to be a philosophy based on certain unchanging truths about the human condition, but the same cannot be said of liberalism. Static liberalism simply does not exist – it is a philosophy of perpetual revolution. A move to midfield by the GOP would only result in a concomitant leftward shift of the goal posts.
 
The Republican party is welcome to cast its net elsewhere.  But it may soon find that doing so on social issues costs them not only elections but any credibility about being a principled party.
 
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The Influence of Talk Radio - The Future of the GOP Part 1

Posted by Pete Chase on Friday, November 28, 2008 2:00:00 PM

With the President-Elect faithfully executing the duties of his (completely fictitious) office, most of the goings on in Washington, frankly, hold little interest for me. Right now the most engaging debate is happening within the GOP, as the party tries to decipher the meaning of November 4 and what it bodes for the future of the Republican Party. In the next few posts I’ll be exploring this, and I’ll start with a couple items of interest that have come up since the election.
 
The first is a complaint frequently voiced by disenchanted Republicans since the election. The Republican Party lost, it’s said, because it chose a poor candidate. McCain is a moderate who had too many issues with the base. He co-authored McCain-Feingold. He is pro-amnesty. The last straw came when he blamed the mortgage meltdown on “Wall Street greed.” It seems like he simply refused to stand up for core conservative principles, and the Republican party should never have put up such a weak and compromised candidate.
 
The trouble is, the Republican Party didn’t choose McCain – the delegates to the convention did. And who chose the delegates? Republican voters did. The same voters now moaning about what a terrible candidate he was. There’s only one question: if voters thought that McCain was such a disaster, then why did they vote for him in the primaries?
 
The second item relates to an article the other day by Morton Kondracke, who wrote that the first step on the road to the GOP’s recovery should be to fire Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham as its spokesmen. He frets that the influence of right wing talk radio, especially on social issues like immigration and same-sex marriage has “branded the party as troglodyte,” and suggests that Limbaugh and others should be “ignored more frequently.”
 
Here’s the problem:  no one hired Rush. His influence extends only so far as he convinces through argument. As a nationally known columnist and pundit, Kondracke has the same opportunity as Limbaugh to sway people one way or another. If Rush is wrong, get out there and convince folks. That’s how it works in this country.
 
Conservative voters, unlike their liberal counterparts, tend to be pretty passive about most of what goes on in Washington. So when an issue particularly inflames their passions, you can bet that it has touched a nerve, and that politicians would do well to take note. Are we to believe that those who oppose same-sex marriage do so purely from emotionalism, or is there a sense that an important boundary is being breached? Is opposition to illegal immigration racist, or mightn’t there be legitimate concern about the loss of national sovereignty and the dilution of American values?
 
Kondracke’s an intelligent and thoughtful commentator, but really: to suggest that our representatives ought simply ignore the wishes of their constituents smacks of the same elitism that is so detestable coming from liberals.
 
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Life In These (Post-Racial) United States

Posted by Pete Chase on Friday, November 14, 2008 7:00:00 AM
 
Last Wednesday morning, America awoke to a new sight. For the first time, the sun rose over a nation which had shed the specter of its racist past. November 5 was to be remembered as the day when Dr. King’s dream was finally realized.
 
Before work I sat down in front of the television with a bowl of cereal and turned to C-SPAN. A caller was giving his thoughts on those who hadn’t voted for Barack Obama:
 

these people . . . know that he’s not a Marxist, they’re just using these words as code words. They would like to use the big N-word, but they don’t have the guts to, they don’t have the conviction of their forefathers, so they use the cowardly way to do it, by using code words. But . . . I got a news flash for all you racists out there, this country’s not going back to the Jim Crow days, it’s not going back to slavery, so you may as well get over it . . . I’ve known rats with more integrity, more humanity in their little small body then you have in your entire soul.


Well. So much for post-racial harmony.
 
During the campaign, it was close to impossible to attack Obama without attracting charges of racism. Radical? Socialist? Code words for black. Elitist? Presumptious? Codes words for uppity black. And how many insipid op-eds were we forced to endure charging that the only plausible reason for not supporting The One was racism?
 
Even white Obama supporters didn’t come away unscathed. A terrific piece by Shelby Steele in the L.A. Times points out the irony of voting for the post-racial candidate:
 

When whites – especially today's younger generation – proudly support Obama for his post-racialism, they unwittingly embrace race as their primary motivation.


We haven’t defeated racism, we’ve internalized it. It seems like every word we say and every choice we make is vetted by our internal Ministry of Diversity.  Do these jeans make me look racist? Such a strange thing that at the very hour of what should rightly be regarded as the triumph of the American ideal that all men are created equal we should engage in this sort of self-flagellation. Out, damn'd spot! out, I say! –  Congratulations, fellow Americans. We have truly institutionalized racism in America.
 
It reminds me of a 1980 movie gem called Serial about the ridiculously self-aware progressivism of California’s Marin County. Local sex fiend Carol, stung by her friend Kate for spreading damaging – to her hair, anyway – gossip, sets about reinventing herself. The exchange between the two when Carol comes out to her as a lesbian is gold:
 

Kate: You know, Carol, gay or straight, you still have that certain something . . . you’re a c***.

Carol (confused): Still?

Kate: Work on it.


So to all those who voted for Obama as proof of their post-racial bona fides, well . . . as the lady said: work on it.
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The Myth of the 'Center'

Posted by Pete Chase on Thursday, November 13, 2008 8:00:00 PM
 
You're either right, left, . . . or confused.
 
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Obama's Vision for America

Posted by Pete Chase on Monday, November 10, 2008 1:00:00 PM
 
"We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America." Barack Obama spoke these words on October 31 in Columbia, Missouri, days before becoming the President-elect. Change has been the drumbeat of the Obama campaign from its inception, and apparently – given the results of the election – it is a message that struck a chord with the electorate.
 
Exactly what that change entailed, of course, was a little hard to nail down; Senator Obama himself was vague on that. In recent weeks we’ve learned a lot more about the kind of change he has in mind, thanks to the discovery of an audio clip of a panel discussion on Chicago’s WBEZ Public Radio in which Obama participated. His remarks make clear his view of the founding principles of this country:
 
The original Constitution . . . is an imperfect document, and I think it is a document that reflects some deep flaws in American culture. . .
 
I think we can say that the Constitution reflected an enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on until this day, and that the Framers had that same blind spot.
 

(The Constitution) reflected the fundamental flaw of this country that continues to this day.


Obama also bemoaned that the Constitution doesn’t provide for “redistributive change”, that it is essentially “a charter of negative liberties, says . . . what the federal government can’t do (but) doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf.”
 
Democrats, led by Obama, Reid, and Pelosi, share a particular set of assumptions about America – that private property, individual liberty, and constitutional limits on government – far from being founded in timeless "self-evident" truths – are merely notions that may have once served a nation struggling for independence but are now hopelessly outdated.
 
It may very well be that many voters also share those assumptions. But we can at least be very clear about one thing. Whatever the merits of those beliefs, they are not the beliefs of the Framers.
 
With the election behind us, Democrats are insisting that conservatism has been utterly repudiated, and that they have a mandate for their entire agenda. They may be right. Just let’s not pretend that it has anything to do with the American idea. They have explicitly rejected the Founders' vision, and are intent on replacing it with their own.
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