Another GOPocalypse
Republicans are shellshocked over losing a third House seat in a special election this year. Much as a series of special-election defeats by Democrats in 1994 augured that the first midterm election of the Clinton years would be bad for the party, the GOP now worries it could lose up to 20 House seats this fall. That would place Republican numbers in the House in the range of their pre-1994 levels – and make the party a hopelessly outnumbered minority. ~John Fund
“This was a real wakeup call for us,” someone named Robert M. Duncan, who is chairman of the Republican National Committee, told the New York Times. This was after Mississippi. “We can’t let the Democrats take our issues.” And those issues would be? “We can’t let them pretend to be conservatives,” he continued. Why not? Republicans pretend to be conservative every day. ~Peggy Noonan
“There comes a time when you can’t hide from the things that you’ve done anymore.” ~Battlestar Galactica
One thing about the Mississippi election that has puzzled me is why so many conservatives have expressed some form of despair or anxiety about what it portends. Suppose for a moment that this means the decimation of the Republicans in the House and Senate as many more conservative Democrats are elected. Conservatives have some reason to take solace from this, since it means at once the repudiation of a party that abandoned restraint, prudence and wisdom and the opening up of something like a real competition for the votes of cultural conservatives. Republicans betrayed their promises, and so another people shall inherit what they were given.
Conservatives have suffered from the effects of living with a political monopoly, since they have felt compelled time and again to swallow their disagreements with the GOP and continue backing it for fear of the alternative. The lack of a tolerable alternative made this seem unavoidable. But what if the alternative begins to include ever-larger numbers of blue dog Democrats and the like? They may take cultural issues no more seriously than the GOP, but their mere existence creates more competition for conservative support and so might potentially give conservatives some minimal leverage and might lead to the GOP serving their interests more faithfully than they have done. No one should invest too much into this idea, since we have cheered Webb and then found him in practice to be pretty much the conventional Democrat that he had become. On the other hand, the Heath Shulers in Congress have proven to be reasonably good on immigration. Perhaps the prospect not just of losing in the fall, but also of seeing its entire coalition evaporate before its eyes will stir the GOP to abandon its embrace of the war and its attachment to centralised power. Of course, that would still leave them in search of a positive agenda, which they haven’t had for years and years. Remember how Republicans used to trumpet that they were the party of ideas? No one says that anymore, or at least not with a straight face.
Filed under: politics
It might just be that old habits die hard, but I continue to put more faith in the possibility of a reformed GOP than the rise of the conservative Democrats. (There’s got to be a reason why Ron Paul hasn’t just jumped ship!) I do think, though, that Republicans will always govern - or rather, keep Democrats from governing - most effectively when they’re in the position of the embattled and embittered minority; in other circumstances, the allure of power just becomes too great to stand.
The greatest problem with all of this, of course, is that the militarism - which is the greatest threat of all to limited and decentralized government - seems unlikely to go away any time soon. Unpopular as the current misadventure may be among the nation as a whole, the GOP knows that they can still whip a sizable portion of the country into a veritable frenzy by bashing our “enemies” and pledging to flex their muscles - and if that’s the coalition that’s going to keep them present on the national scene, then so be it. It’s hard to imagine the party leadership telling the Lovers of Foreign Wars to shove off, though I suspect that if they did, then a good number of those people would change their tune and fall back into line pretty quickly.
Sigh. Ultimately, as you’ve said many times over, conservatives need to be focusing their attention on empowering and revitalizing local governments and institutions, rather than reforming the national ones - a thousand points of light, and all that. Washington be damned, I’m going in for urban gardening.
Let’s not pretend that Childers or Cazayoux are nothing more than GOP clones. It may make GOP strategists feel good to think that, but it’s not true. Childers and Cazayoux oppose the war in Iraq, they oppose Social Security privatization, oppose “free-trade” agreements, and favor expanding SCHIP. This doesn’t sound like the Republican platform to me.
I would not pretend this. GOP clones would be undesirable, so long as the GOP continues to go down the wrong path. Clearly, they were successful because they co-opted social conservative positions and maintained the rest of their Democratic positions. From my perspective, two out of four of those positions mark an improvement over what the Republicans are offering. On the others, I don’t agree with them, but to be right on the war and trade and wrong on pensions and entitlements seems like the start of a good alternative.
There is a nice - by my lights, anyway - piece in tomorrow’s Times about what the rise of the conservative Democrats means for the party. It’s worth a look:
The question will be whether those Democrats who tend rightward on certain issues will be able to bring themselves to align with the conservative members of the Republican coalition and make a real difference. Otherwise the occasional dissenters are just going to be voices crying out in the wilderness. But I suppose that’s better than nothing - someone needs to prepare the way, and all that.