A lot of discussion has erupted after the Republican Party's miraculous ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory for a second set of elections. While the Senate was easily winnable in 2010, a set of Tea Party fanatics threw away shoe-in races. While no President should be electable with employment over 8 percent during much of the campaign, extreme positions adopted by Mitt Romney to apease the base had the same effect.
Clearly, something needs to change. Andrew Bacevich, a Professor of International Relations and History at Boston University, has some suggestions.
First, conservatives should claim the environmental movement as their own. Preserving the natural world should be a cause that all conservatives embrace with gusto. And, yes, that includes the issue of climate change.
Second, conservatives should lead the way in protecting the family from the hostile assault mounted by modernity. The principal threat to the family is not gay marriage. The principal threats are illegitimacy, divorce, and absent fathers. Making matters worse still is a consumer culture that destroys intimate relationships, persuading children that acquiring stuff holds the key to happiness and persuading parents that their job is to give children what the market has persuaded them to want.
Third, when it comes to economics, conservatives should lead the fight against the grotesque inequality that has become such a hallmark of present-day America.
Call me old fashioned, but I believe that having a parent at home holds one of the keys to nurturing young children and creating strong families. That becomes exceedingly difficult in an economy where both parents must work just to make ends meet.
Flattening the distribution of wealth and ensuring the widest possible the ownership of property can give more parents the choice of raising their own youngsters rather than farming the kids out to care providers. If you hear hints of the old Catholic notion of distributism there, you are correct.
Finally, when it comes to foreign and national security policies, conservatives should be in the forefront of those who advocate realism and modesty. Conservatives should abhor the claims of American dominion that have become such a staple of our politics. Saving humanity is God’s business, not America’s.
Sure, we need a strong military. But its purpose should be to defend the country, not to run the world. And anytime Washington decides it needs to fight a war, then popular support should going beyond cheering. That means higher taxes to pay for the war and an army drawn from all parts of American society – to include Domers – to fight it.
I don’t seriously expect the Republican Party to show the least interest in any such ideas. But that’s because the actually-existing Republican Party is anything but conservative.
Obviously, there is little reason to believe that the Republican Party is going to embrace these concepts with open arms. Change is hard, after all. But I think these comments lead to a much larger conclusion.
We all wear several hats in life - brother, friend, lover, mustache aficionado - but few places make this distinction more obviously than American electoral politics. We're all affiliated to "teams," and yet we're all individuals at the same time. What's more, we're supposed to be voting for members of a distinct political party while assessing them based on their own particular quirks at the same time.
You see this all the time in our debates. As an Obama nut-hugger, I'm always thrown into the position of defending activist foreign policy that I mostly disagree with. Ron Paul fans have to defend a predatory form a lassiez faire that they don't really believe, since this is associated with the Koch Brothers kind of Libertarianism. And moderate Republicans are immediately thrown to the wolves whenever we need to rant about that obscure monster called "conservatives."
I don't think any of us should take these things personally. In the realm of politics, by becoming affiliated with any particular body, we inevitably stand for more than what we find important, or even believe. It's important to remember than within the major tents, many different views can flourish. The history of conservationism, which dates back all the way to Teddy Roosevelt, is an important part of the history of the American right. We wouldn't have things like our National Park System, the Forest Service or the Sierra Club if it wasn't for environmentally-minded Republicans. It's a little silly that this fact is now completely ignored in our mainstream political debate.
But it's also important to assess the current state of the tents. It's not unfair to say that the current Republican Party, as represented by its platform, deviates in important ways from some of the common-sense beliefs of its members and of the society at large. The focus of the party is narrowing to match its base, becoming more preoccupied with the very limiting concerns of older white men. As The National Review puts it, the activist and donor base is fully in charge, and these people have very little in common with the rest of America. The same problem consumed the Democratic party in the middle of the 80s, leading it to some of the most embarrassing defeats in modern politics.
It's not unfair to say that the Republican party, as it closely follows the interests of several corporate donors, is hostile to the environment. It's not unfair that they're policies are hostile towards women, even though few Republicans are not genuinely misogynistic. It's not unfair to say that the party's Mellon-ist economic policies cater almost entirely to the rich, even though average Republicans care a lot more about their jobs and the wages of their middle-class friends (although I would argue that, since economics is often counter-intuitive, they don't always recognize what benefits them and what doesn't). It's even not unfair to say that the party benefits from racism and uses it as a part of its campaign strategy, even though the overwhelming majority of Republicans are not racist. As Lee Atwater famously said,
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”The party is more than the sum of its members, and an individual member isn't always a great representation of the party. Parties can drift far away from what their members actually believe in. And at this point, I'm certain that this is exactly where we're at with the Republicans. The "our actions determine our reality" mentality of the Republican party, best exemplified but its complete denial of basic science, has alienated enough of the nation, including its own members, that they're in for a reckoning.
At this point, the party is dead in the water for any national election. Gerrymandering was the only reason they hung on to the House, and it only gets worse for Republicans from here. Maybe we won't see Republicans embody the things that Dr. Bacevich recommends, but a shift back to the center is long overdue. The party can't survive without a dramatic overhaul, and neither can the country.
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