Throwing around ever-expanding terms like “racism”, “homophobia”, “progress”, “rights” and “oppression” with all the forethought and subtlety of a longshoreman’s curses, [the Left] have convinced themselves they are in the vanguard of the march of history, and that trying to stop them is akin to a sin. Once these terms had a genuine significance in addressing and redressing injustices. Now, they are used primarily to trump democracy and cement the stranglehold on power enjoyed by the intellectual aristocracy.
The astounding reversal of this trend in the face of non-stop vitriol and slander from a united chattering class, directed in the most personal terms at both the President and all his supporters, is a seminal event in the history of democracy. […] It is hard to believe the Democrats will make any progress in rebuilding until they face their open contempt for so many voters squarely, a process that almost guarantees years of bitter, internecine warfare. Pity. Of course, Republicans may soon face the dilemma of how to resist the temptation to use their executive, legislative and judicial powers to similarly sidestep the popular will.
—Peter Burnet, writing at Brothers Judd
I've spent the past several hours reading postelection analyses, which more properly ought be called postmortems for twentieth century American progressivism. And for a movement conservative such as myself—who will be savoring sweet, sweet schadenfreude for months to come—it just doesn't get much better than this. But for the present, let's consider weightier matters.
Such as: whither the Democrats? One of the more remarkable events in this year's campaign was the July DNC convention. Recall how the delegates, by sheer force of will, managed to submerge their Bush-hatred just long enough to stage the flag-draped apotheosis of the Antiwar War Hero. But the aloof Senator was always an instrument to an end, not an object of affection: the true inspiration for those gathered was a corpulent disciple of Riefenstahl, seated with honor alongside Jimmy Carter.
All pretensions to populism aside, the face of the national Democratic Party is not that of a Carolina millworker, or of a matronly school librarian from Iowa. Instead, we have a boomer elite which openly regards their wrong-voting fellow citizens as stupid, evil, or stupid and evil. Faith in Progress is as much a fundamentalist creed as any liberal's nightmares of backwards Biblical literalists, and is a religion more intolerant by an order of magnitude.
For true believers, compromise is anathema—see, for instance, Paul Krugman's brusque dismissal of the moderate Democratic Leadership Council. Others, like Krugman's fellow Timesman Nicholas Kristof, are more realistic.
When I studied in England in the early 1980's, the British Labor Party seemed as quaint and eccentric as Oxford itself, where we wore gowns for exams and some dons addressed the rare female student as “sir.” Labor was caught in its own echo chamber of militant unions and anti-American activists, and it so repulsed voters that it seemed it might wither away entirely.
Then Tony Blair and another M.P., Gordon Brown, dragged the party away from socialism, unions, nuclear disarmament and anti-Americanism. Together they created “New Labor,” which aimed for the center and aggressively courted Middle Britain instead of trying to scare it. The result is that since 1997, Mr. Blair and Labor have utterly dominated Britain.
The Democrats need a similar rebranding. But the risk is that the party will blame others for its failures - or, worse, blame the American people for their stupidity (as London's Daily Mirror screamed in a Page 1 headline this week: “How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?”). […]
Democrats need to give a more prominent voice to Middle American, wheat-hugging, gun-shooting, Spanish-speaking, beer-guzzling, Bible-toting centrists. (They can tote The Times, too, in a plain brown wrapper.) For a nominee who could lead the Democrats to victory, think of John Edwards, Bill Richardson or Evan Bayh, or anyone who knows the difference between straw and hay.
I wish that winning were just a matter of presentation. But it's not. It involves compromising on principles. Bill Clinton won his credibility in the heartland partly by going home to Little Rock during the 1992 campaign to preside over the execution of a mentally disabled convict named Ricky Ray Rector.
There was a moral ambiguity about Mr. Clinton's clambering to power over Mr. Rector's corpse. But unless Democrats compromise, they'll be proud and true and losers.
This is perhaps more revealing than the writer intended. Kristof is almost certainly opposed to the death penalty, as are all good Northeastern liberals; yet if he does not fully approve of Clinton's action he at least excuses it as a “moral ambiguity”, useful for a greater purpose. Ponder for a moment the volumes that speaks about modern liberalism.
Yet even beyond his advocacy of coldblooded realpolitik, Kristof is badly mistaken. The early signs are that his Party will continue to be dominated by ideological purists, meaning (to my great anticipation) that more electoral routs are in store for the faithful. What is more, the Third Way “reforms” he espouses are merely a makeover: call it Moderate Eye For The Progressive Guy. In the meantime the challenge of real transformation is already being taken on—but by Republicans, led by the vilified George W. Bush. The Democratic response will almost certainly be far too timid and years too late.
Or to quote Michael Barone:
During the 2000 campaign and during this campaign year Mr. Bush has set forward proposals to reshape public policy and, in the process, to reshape American politics. He has already had some success. On education he has called not just for spending more money—on that framing of the issue Democrats always win—but for insisting on achievement and accountability. That has become law, thanks in part to Democrats like Sen. Edward Kennedy and Rep. George Miller, who are genuinely dismayed by the low achievement levels of their low-income constituents: We measure not just inputs but outputs. On taxes Mr. Bush has, with the indispensable help of House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas—a community college professor a quarter-century ago, now a major policy maker; such is the upward mobility possible in American politics—enacted massive tax cuts that free up the private sector to provide the economic growth indispensable to the success of the millions who start off behind.
This year Mr. Bush laid out, late in the campaign in my view and too sketchily for the taste of policy mavens, domestic policy reforms as ambitious and capable of reshaping America as Lincoln's and Roosevelt's. He has called, as he did in 2000, for personal retirement accounts in Social Security. His opponent John Kerry, the darling of the self-regarding intelligentsia, called for the brain-dead policy of no change in a Social Security regime that any sensible person understands is in the long run unsustainable. Mr. Bush wants something better. Mr. Bush has also called for an expansion of market-based health-care reforms like health savings accounts. And he has called, in exceedingly vague terms, for broad-based tax reforms, freeing up savings from taxes to encourage investment and wealth accumulation.
These policies are as well adapted to our post-industrial America as Roosevelt's wartime domestic policies were to the industrial America he led to victory. But as with Roosevelt, policy success cannot be taken for granted. Mr. Bush, in my view, has risked giving his policy proposals too little political oomph to get them passed through Congress. Risk-averse House Republicans would rather avoid Social Security changes and the House had to be dragged kicking and screaming, after a three-hour roll call last December, to pass a Medicare bill that included a modest health-savings-account provision.
I am not an enthusiastic supporter of all these changes. No Child Left Behind seems an unwieldy and unwarranted Federal intrusion into state governance, and the Medicare “reform” may prove a costly boondoggle. But Mr. Bush never campaigned as a small-government conservative. What is more, the success of his vision may prove critical for the future of the Republican Party, and hence for movement conservatism as well.
This year, for every foretelling of Democratic doom (a genre to which I am a proud contributor), there has been a corresponding prediction of a Republican train wreck. If nothing else this election has decided which side has the better prophets, at least for the short term. Nonetheless, there are stresses within Republican ranks, between Blue-state moderates and the conservative core. Can these two sides coexist? Yes—provided that both renew a commitment to federalism.
Below the fold is an essay on the subject that I originally posted on 3 August. (Before it was hip, I might add: now even faux-conservative Andrew Sullivan is singing federalism's praises.) This is a crossroads in our national history; returning power to the states, so that each can decide questions of (say) gay marriage and abortion, will do much to cool the culture war before it turns any hotter.
read the rest »
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Back in June, I discussed how plotting political orientation requires at least three axes: one for moral issues (from social conservatism to liberalism), one for fiscal policy (fiscal conservatism to liberalism), and a third for level of government intervention (libertarianism vs. statism). Your positions (or coordinates) on any two of these axes do not necessarily predict where you might place yourself on the third. (In other words, the axes are orthogonal, or at least nearly so.)
Or so it goes in theory. In practice, it's a good idea to examine what species of political animal share your political coordinates, when each is considered individually. If you find yourself in fundamental conflict with certain of your ideological allies, perhaps some rethinking is in order.
For instance: two of my friends classify themselves as social conservatives and fiscal liberals (I'm not sure where they fall on the libertarian third axis). This can be a perfectly consistent position in principle; indeed, both are motivated by fidelity to historical Christianity, including a concern for social justice and the needs of the poor. But in practice—that is, in contemporary American politics—their position is well nigh untenable. A large majority of fiscal liberals in this country are united in ferocious opposition to the tenets of historical Christianity. The Democratic Party has not earned the appellation “the godless party” for nothing, even if some groups largely within its borders—black Americans, for instance—remain fervently religious.
My own alignment is socially conservative, fiscally conservative, and moderately libertarian. But like my friends described above, I do have points of contention with some of those with whom I share a general worldview. Although still a Protestant, for instance, I find American-style evangelicalism increasingly wearisome, and my dissertation research is not likely to win many admirers amongst my coreligionists. Nonetheless, I find my fellow travellers generally agreeable (fringe elements excepted, of course).
Well, bully for me. Yet there is a problem: those who label themselves as both social and fiscal conservatives (whether religious or not, or inclined towards libertarian ideals or not) are a sizable minority of the voting public—but a minority nonetheless. And there is reason to believe that, considered as a percentage of likely voters, the number of such conservatives is shrinking. In the end, I expect (and this is a guess, nothing more) that percentage to stablize somewhere around 20-30%. Still a force to be reckoned with: but elections are not won with one-fourth of the vote.
Hence the future success of my kind of conservatism will depend upon coalition building. The big question, then, is: coalitions with whom?
Yesterday Roger Simon gave the most plausible answer.
Consider this: If a candidate like Giuliani or Schwarzenegger (I know, he can't, but arguendo…) were running for President right now, he might sweep to a huge victory. Strong on defense, fiscally responsible, but (unlike Bush) socially liberal… sounds like a large part of the electorate to me - the growing American middle. No wonder those are two of the keynote speakers at the Republican Convention.
Two years ago, Stephen Stanton voiced similar thoughts in the provocatively-titled “South Park Republicans”:
If Republicans are so different from mainstream America, then who voted for them? The nation has more Republican congressmen and state governors than any other political party, plus control of the White House. There are not enough Alex P. Keatons to account for these election results. Our nation is among the most diverse on earth. Half of the voters are women, a quarter are minorities. There are millions of union workers, retirees, immigrants, government workers, customer service employees, and individuals in low paying jobs, unemployed or on some form of public assistance. All of these groups are expected to lean left. Surely, the stodgy, affluent, religious white guys are outnumbered in the electorate by a huge margin. Yet Republicans candidates still do well. How is that possible?
The answer could very well be the “South Park Republicans.” The name stems from the primetime cartoon “South Park” that clearly demonstrates the contrast within the party. The show is widely condemned by some moralists, including members of the Christian right. Yet in spite of its coarse language and base humor, the show persuasively communicates the Republican position on many issues, including hate crime legislation (“a savage hypocrisy”), radical environmentalism, and rampant litigation by ambitious trial lawyers. In one episode, industrious gnomes pick apart myopic anti-corporate rhetoric and teach the main characters about the benefits of capitalism.
South Park Republicans are true Republicans, though they do not look or act like Pat Robertson. They believe in liberty, not conformity. They can enjoy watching The Sopranos even if they are New Jersey Italians. They can appreciate the tight abs of Britney Spears or Brad Pitt without worrying about the nation's decaying moral fiber. They strongly believe in liberty, personal responsibility, limited government, and free markets. However, they do not live by the edicts of political correctness.
When Stanton's article first made the rounds, just before the 2002 midterm elections, I was underwhelmed. But grudgingly I've come to accept that he, and now Simon, are on to something. If socially liberal/fiscally conservative voters wish to identify as Republicans, then by all means let them do so. Better that than the tiresome fetishizing of their “independent” status, which is only slightly less annoying than the preening self-regard of movement Libertarians.
[Lest I be accused of hypocrisy: yes, my bio on this site says that I am a conservative and small-r republican—in short, not a member of the R party. True enough. But my emphatic loathing of the Democratic Party renders me a capital-R Republican in practice, and as such I have no objection to anyone so categorizing me.
A distinction without a difference? Yeah, probably.]
Yet I am in no way suggesting that social conservatives simply roll over on issues of import, such as abortion (to take only the most prominent example). Nor should we try to conceal our intentions. How, then, can the Republican Party continue to attract, and retain, the loyalty of more liberally-inclined voters, without alienating the traditional base?
Well, now—that is a challenge. But the solution might be relatively straightforward, and would not require resort to the elaborate smoke-and-mirrors tactics employed by the Democratic Party in papering over the chasms which separate its constituent interest groups.
In short: Make a commitment to federalism front and center in the Republican Party's long-term strategy. Simple, principled, and it might even work.
Consider abortion again. There is broad and consistent support among the general public for at least some restrictions: polls show something like 80% opposition to partial-birth abortion, for instance. But it is hardly news that efforts to legislate such limitations—on both the state and federal levels—have been eviscerated by the federal judiciary.
What if the Republican platform were to call for reversal of Roe v. Wade and associated federal rulings, with the explicit goal of returning the matter to the states? And what if pro-choice Republican politicians—Schwarzenegger, Giuliani, Pataki—could be convinced to endorse such a position? (They should be so inclined, unless they are at heart true abortion absolutists—in which case they are affiliated with the wrong party.) O how the pro-abortion Left would howl, but it is not as if the rhetoric from those quarters can be ratcheted up that many more decibels anyway.
And in the end, such a strategy just might be effective—by appealing to the majority of voters who do favor at least some abortion restrictions; by persuading social moderates and honest liberals that a political party can in fact be principled; and eventually by allowing states to regulate abortion as they see fit. A threefold win: and for social conservatives, the end result would be a considerable improvement over the present reign of an imperial judiciary.
Similar tactics might be useful in combating court-mandated homosexual marriage. The Federal Marriage Amendment seems doomed to fail: but a robust federalism would ensure that gay marriage in Massachusetts could not impact the laws of (say) Nebraska. For social conservatives, this would be an imperfect solution. But it is nonetheless better than the other realistic alternatives.
And consider now if advocacy for a revived federalism were to be coupled with the message of the “ownership society.” Here's Michael Barone:
In the 1940s and 1950s, the FHA and VA home mortgage guarantee programs helped convert America from a nation of renters to a nation of homeowners. In the 1980s and 1990s, 401(k) plans and similar tax-free vehicles have helped convert America from a nation of noninvestors to a nation of investors. In 2002, about 60 percent of Americans were investors. And many of the young, who have not yet accumulated any net worth, expect to be—and will.
Government programs helped most Americans accumulate wealth in the form of real estate. For today's economy, George W. Bush has proposed government programs that would help most Americans accumulate more wealth in the form of financial investments. The most important of these is inclusion of personal retirement accounts in Social Security, which Bush campaigned on in 2000 but has not pushed in Congress. They also include deferred savings plans in his budget this year, programs to increase homeownership, and expansion of health savings accounts, a form of which was included in the 2003 Medicare bill. On occasion Bush has referred to them together as programs designed to create an “ownership society,” to help people accumulate wealth and economic independence. […]
Back in 1999, Bill Clinton talked about an investment component in Social Security, and leading Democrats like Sens. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Bob Kerrey were in favor. Now, almost all congressional Democrats are against, so the votes will have to come almost entirely from Republicans, many of whom are now queasy about the idea. They won't vote yes unless Bush makes his case for the ownership society in his campaign. Once again, as in 1999, we may miss a chance for government to help ordinary Americans accumulate wealth—a chance that might not come again for many years.
If “South Park Republicans” are indeed a force to be reckoned with, then which message will have greater resonance this season: entitlement, grievance, welfare, and the Two Americas; or opportunity, optimism, independence, and self-reliance?
Carpe diem, Mr. President.
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