One month before last November's election: THE COMING HIBERNATION OF THE NATIONAL REPUBLICAN PARTY
For years I have believed that the national Republican Party, beginning in 1994, has been on a self-destructing course. Even at the height of their electoral power (from 2000 through 2006), the Party was in a no-win situation.
The "Reagan revolution" began to bring to power various groupings of people who sought elected office for many reasons, but who shared just one common underpinning: the absolute distaste for the national government, in all its forms, except for the military.
That shared frame of mind set the Party on a course of eventual self-diminution. The Party began to retract seriously in 2006, and, with the massive loss of standing by President Bush, the impatience with the Iraq war, and the dramatic challenges of the economy, the hibernating phase of the Party is now in earnest.
More after break ...
Anti-government conservatives of the past 25 years have always lived in a fantasy world, much like being in an historical theme park. Whether they derived their beliefs from Edmund Burke or Frederick Hayek and Barry Goldwater, they just could not see that the world, for better or worse, was not the world of 1750 or even of 1964. An urbanized America in a consolidating world is not the theme park construct of a loosely-connected nation consisting of rural, small town, libertarian folks who have only experienced government as an intruder in their otherwise bucolic lives. That world may have once existed; it does so no longer.
And the primary reason for its disappearance is not a conspiratorial attack by extremist liberals. It is that the very myth-believing people who are the "bedrock" of the "new conservative" movement no longer exist in any great numbers.
Let’s look at the geography of the current national Republican Party power base. For a long time, the South, the Plains states, and the Western states have provided the core of the conservative electoral movement.
The civil rights movement grew two generations of Southerners who saw the Federal government as interlopers, destroyers of a culture steeped in the past failure to secede from that Federalized nation.
The Plains states saw the Federal government as the worst example of Eastern liberalism. To them, the East produced the bankers who kept hard-working agricultural people from succeeding.
The Westerners, removed they thought, from the entanglements of Eastern politicians who controlled the Federal government, were "independent" souls. (By "the West" I mean the states from Texas and Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, Wyoming and Montana, and Alaska.)
The basic trouble with this is that, in varying degrees, all three geographical power bases talked a good game but played a miserable one.
Racial integration in the South has been dramatic. But, it is possible that integration of the South with the nation is just as dramatic. Whether the acculturation television provides, immigration from other regions, commonality of public education, the movement away from a cash crop agricultural economy to a 21st Century technological economy, or just plain time has done it, each decade brings less distinctive regional differences between the South and the rest of the nation.
The Plains states have moved from the strong anti-government stance that they had in the late 1800’s as, more and more, the central government, using agricultural price supports, became the chief agent of wealth. And then, beginning in the 1960’s, more and more of the agricultural sector became both more corporate and more international in scope.
Westerners held the greatest myth – that of those completely divorced from the need of a strong central government. Yet, four simple facts have put the lie to that sense of independence.
First, the West could not have been established and could not have survived without the power and protection of the central government. Whether it was in the establishment of land grants in the 1850-1880 period, or the presence of the U.S. Army to combat resistant Indian tribes, or the construction of the coast-to-coast railway system, the West would never have developed. There was not enough money anywhere but in the central government to do expensive things for relatively small populations.
Second, the West is a desert. Deserts can support human life, but never in the way we do now unless there is a total fight against nature. That fight brings water to the West and makes it habitable. The massive water control projects of the New Deal and the willingness of the national government to referee water claims from the various Western states allows for the habitation of places that, by all rights, should have sparse populations.
Third, many of these states are the largest recipients proportionally of Federal monies and have been for a good long time. They have gigantic tracts of lands under Federal control. They have proportionally higher amounts of Federal government employment or indirect employment (serving military bases, for example).
Fourth, the demographic basis of the West is changing rapidly. Hispanics are growing in serious numbers in every one of the Western states, except Alaska. Hispanics hold less dislike for the central government than the majority of people they are joining.
So, while the political class of these regions was talking about "states’ rights", or "Plains populism", or "rugged Western individualism", the people, to one degree or another, were seriously dependent on the central government they said they despised. Today’s Republican Party is built upon the myths of these three regions. It is only natural when the myth is exposed, like the Wizard of Oz, that the fantasy would collapse.
Now those are the geographic fault lines of the Republican Party. What about the ideological fault lines?
It has been said that the national Republican Party is made up of four power centers: first, economic conservatives; second, national security conservatives, third, social conservatives, and, fourth, libertarians. On all four accounts, almost from the moment that today’s national Republican Party emerged ( using the 1980 Presidential election as the most visible starting point), one or the other of these power bases were proving through the governing acts of the Party that they could not control a national government.
Many of the major power players in each of the bases do not like each other. The national security wing is almost completely divorced from the economic conservative wing. Neither of those wings, except the single-minded tax-cutters, can stand the social conservatives. Libertarians have deep problems with the national security and social issues people.
The spectacular growth in government under this Administration, the swelling of the national debt under Reagan, Bush and Bush (but not under Clinton), and the belated realization that only a strong national government can put the brakes on the excesses of 21st Century capitalism, have seriously damaged the claim that the national Republican Party is the party of adults on the economy. Whether it is the unfounded claims of "trickle down" economics, or the predictions of an Eden-like America in a deregulated world where "markets" took the place of common sense (and, yes, morals), the Party has been damaged in very deep ways.
Social conservatives may never been as important as the national security and economic conservative wings, but they thought that they were, because the others pandered to them, especially at election time.
But the goals of the "values" movement haven’t been even minimally met under national Republican Party rule because those "values" are not shared by a majority of Americans. It has become increasingly clear that they are not even shared by a majority of Christian church-goers. One may push through economic policies not agreed to by a majority, and even carry on a foreign policy opposed by a majority, but no national party is going to be able to impose social values on a nation where most voters are in disagreement. The real national Republican leaders knew that, but never told their social values base that because they relied on them to provide a measure of votes, enthusiasm and money to fight their election battles.
If anything, the national Republican Party has adopted public stances exactly opposite to the goals of their social values wing. Two cases in point: the national Republican Party platform this year, for the first time since 1972, does not call for the outright overturning of Roe v. Wade; and, there is no organized national opposition to extending the rights of marriage (though not marriage itself) to gay partners. The national Party does not even pretend anymore that, on these two issues, they are in step with their social issues base.
Libertarians never had much sway in national Party governing, except on the issue of gun control, or the lack thereof.
So none of the four wings can demonstrate success even when they dominate the Presidency, the Congress, and Federal Court appointments. (On the latter, even what appears to be a conservative Supreme Court is certainly not reliably conservative on a host of issues. National security conservatives dislike the Court for meddling in Executive powers on the terrorist and privacy issues; libertarian conservatives dislike the Court for not meddling enough in those issues.)
But there is one other reason that the Party is about to go into hibernation: the nature of those who have come into the national Republican Party leadership and communications allies. They have been "true believers", and have been bolstered by "true believing" supporters. Their behavior has been those of fundamentalist reformers; small gains are worthless, major gains are crucial. Those who differ on even just some issues are not worthy of the crusade. Compromise is traitorous. So the national Republican Party is driving out of its midst what we would call moderates, many of whom support the Party 80% of the time.
Look at the list of the retiring House members. 15 are leaders in the House who are more moderate than their Republican colleagues. But these are the very people that the Republican Party will need if the Democrats control the Presidency, the Senate and the House. Why? Because they would naturally be the "bridge" to the Democratic majority, which will need no Republican support in the House for legislation, and precious little in the Senate. And those moderates would be the catalyst for the rebirth of the Republican Party when it comes out of its hibernation. But they will be gone. And new ones like them will not be welcome.
Why won’t they be welcomed? Because the survivors are going to reach the following conclusion: we failed because we were not pure enough, not extreme enough. After all, they are the "true believers" with a deep-seated ideology. Few will be moved to do self-analysis. It will always be that the campaigns they run were not run on the "right issues", or that the media is unfair.
Libertarians may already be moving out of the national Republican Party. Moderate success on the international scene will once again show that Democratic Presidents are not ready to abandon national security but also can improve alliances and our standing in the world. Economic conservatives have failed so badly that claims of their superior thinking are likely to be laughed off at least for a decade.
Who is left? Social issue conservatives, the least likely to ever see errors in their ways. They love Palin precisely for the things that the national campaign does not let her talk about: the right to life, unlimited gun ownership, creationism teaching in the public schools, prayer in the public schools, vigorous opposition to any gay rights legislation of any kind, and an ironic opposition to women’s’ right such as equal pay.
So as the national Republican Party begins its hibernation, its loudest supporters will be those who, although they have often been sold out by the economic wing of the Party, have clung to their guns and religion because they feel that they have nowhere else to turn.
And their shrillness will shrink the Party even more. I predict that it will be a long hibernation.