This is from an essay I wrote nearly a year ago. I don't wouldn't try to assert now all that I did then, but the essay is what it is. I was attempting to diagnose the disaster that Republicans had put themselves in, and predict where it could take them. Part I discusses the kind of Republican that I feel has taken over their party. Part II will discuss their takeover of the party. Part III discusses how this is a recipe for disaster if they aren't toppled by other Republican factions.
The Southern Party
I believe that the rise of Southern conservatives in the Republican Party will lead to an extended period of defeat and marginalization for that party. We have observed not only the movement of the South into the Republican Party, but a takeover of the Republican Party by a particular kind of Southern, populist conservative, which has alienated not only other kinds of conservatives, but broad swaths of Americans in general from that party. In order to establish my case, though, I must bring into light who these Southern conservatives are, and also illuminate the cleavages which exist between them and other conservatives.
Dixiecrats
First, I should make clear that Southern conservatives are not necessarily Southern. This is merely a title conferred to an ideological faction currently within the Republican Party which appears to have been concentrated somewhat in the South. Southern conservatives do not agree with other conservatives on the size or role of government, as they have traditionally supported government programs such as the New Deal. This is a manifestation of the populism in Southern conservatism, whereas traditional conservatives are more elite, intellectual, and cosmopolitan. Southern conservatives also tended to have a more static view of society than other conservatives, and as a result are much more resistant to change. Perhaps this is a result of the greater religiosity among Southern conservatives, which has driven a wedge in the coalition as well. Finally, I would argue that Southern conservatives are more bellicose than other conservatives, based on ideas of manifest destiny, which sometimes divides the coalition on foreign policy.
Southern conservatives are a group who has come into conflict with libertarians and traditional conservatives because of their disagreements over the size and role of government. Southern conservatives, as former Democrats, were big supporters of the New Deal when they believed it benefitted them. As Professor Joseph Lowndes wrote in From the New Deal to the New Right, in addition to bringing Southern conservatives into the conservative coalition on states’ rights issues, the "[National Review] also aimed to move segregationists away from their otherwise statist orientation and dependence on federal aid. The magnitude of Brown, the editors hoped, had shaken ‘inchoate states-righters out of their opportunistic stupor,’" (Lowndes, 51). Not only did other conservatives disagree with Southern conservatives over their support of "big government," they also mocked them for it as unprincipled and unintelligent. Lowndes states that in order to build their new coalition, "southerners had to... extend their racial states’ rights stand to all conservative ideas and abandon populist New Deal commitments," (52). The extent to which this actually changed their belief in a powerful state, though, is debatable. Since, as I will later argue, Southern conservatives took over the Republican Party, that party’s leadership has violated its former limited government beliefs with federal legislation intruding into education policy (No Child Left Behind), the Medicare prescription drug expansion, and among other things, a massive budget deficit. The size of government is bigger than ever.
Self-avowed traditional conservative George Carey, in his essay "The Irony of Conservative Success," expressed his frustration with just this when he stated that "Congressional Republicans, following the lead of the [Bush] administration, seem unconcerned about expansive and expensive long-term federal programs, centralization, and the growth of the bureaucracy, a growing debt, or balanced budgets," (32-33). And this is not just an issue of interfering in the economy as conservative George Nash also points to the expansion of government power under Republican rule as a threat to the party’s coalition, particularly that President Bush’s "audacious assertion of executive power in the war on terrorism has rattled libertarians and others for whom the restraint of executive power is a settled conservative principle," (16). Carey, however, does not link this simply to opportunism, as the editors at the National Review did. Carey attributes it to a change in the values of the Republican Party. He states that these deviations from traditional conservatism "reflect a mindset... that government is omnipotent, that the ills that plague society and individuals can be cured through legislation," (40). Carey, in the essay, again and again indicates that he feels like the conservative Republican Party has been taken over by people who are not actually conservative, and that actual, traditional conservatives are being pushed out.
But Southern conservatives do not only disagree with other conservatives on the size and role of government. I assert that Southern conservatives often have a crusading spirit which clashes with more traditional conservatives, who tend to be non-interventionist in foreign policy. For many years the Democratic Party was the belligerent party. Democratic politicians were eager to go to war with Britain in 1812. Democratic politicians led the nation into war with Mexico, and into the First World War. And in all of those years, the solid South was the backbone of the Democratic Party. It was the party of expansion and manifest destiny. It was the party of militant liberal evangelism.
Traditionally, according to George Nash, conservatives had been "skeptical of ‘global democracy’ and entanglements over seas" (13), and when Southern conservatives migrated from the Democratic over to the Republican Party, they brought some of their old Democratic foreign policy with them. Nash calls the current administration’s foreign policy "hard Wilsonianism", but admits that unlike Wilson, at least President Bush is not a "supranationalist" (16). Carey also cites the Democratic President Wilson in reference to Bush’s foreign policy, when he states that Bush’s "aggressive foreign policy, perhaps best described as Wilsonianism on steroids, has its roots in the traditions of the Democratic Party and clearly runs counter to well-established conservative principles," and he traces the heritage of that policy back, through a speech by Condoleezza Rice, to the principles of the French Revolution (33).
When Charles Kesler described the Bush Doctrine of foreign policy, he said that "those regimes" which we determine to be dangerous
must... in the long run be changed into peaceful, commercial democracies... Regimes that export terrorism must in the long term be reformed, too. It would be far better to transform all these menacing regimes by subversion or conversion, however, than by preventive war, though the latter option is, as they say, never off the table. Hence arose that combination of soft and hard power which, in theory at least, characterized the Bush Doctrine's ‘forward strategy of freedom’ in the Middle East. (2)
Kesler also says this is a harkening back to "America's own founding principles, or at least in a 20th-century, Wilsonian version of them" (2). But then Kesler goes on to describe how this kind of doctrine, in which our liberty is only guaranteed by the domestic policies of other states, can mean "an imperial policy of democracy promotion or perhaps colonization, like the French in the early stages of their Revolution or Athens in the Peloponnesian War," (3). But just as when we joined Napoleonic France in the War of 1812, just as when we opened up the West to America in the Mexican War, and fought the Great War in the defense of democracy, all at the Democrats behest, today we are fighting expansionist wars which express our manifest destiny, or as it is more often spoken of now, American exceptionalism, only today it is under a Republican administration. As it has come down to us, it very much still resembles the words of John O’Sullivan, notably, a Democrat. America’s divinely inspired purpose, he thought, was
to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man -- the immutable truth and beneficence of God. For this blessed mission to the nations of the world, which are shut out from the life-giving light of truth, has America been chosen; and her high example shall smite unto death the tyranny of kings, hierarchs, and oligarchs, and carry the glad tidings of peace and good will where myriads now endure an existence scarcely more enviable than that of beasts of the field.
These notions were originally associated with the radical liberals of the French Revolution and Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans in America. As it was a part of the Democratic Party while the South was present, when much of the South left the Democratic Party, now these ideas are part of the Republican Party. Perhaps they are not conservative ideas after all.
Southern conservatives also tend to disagree with other conservatives on the optimal level of interaction between the state and religion. In this, Southern conservatives are what are popularly termed social conservatives, who generally take a view that abortion should be illegal, oppose rights for gays and others with "alternative lifestyles", support traditional gender roles, traditional family units, moral standards for media, the teaching of religious materials in schools (through public schools or voucher-subsidized private education), among other things, on the basis of their religious views. Nor should it be surprising that Southern conservatives and social conservatives often overlap, since the South is the greater part of the Bible Belt. Many of the leaders of the social conservatives are from the South, including the late Jerry Falwell of Virginia, Pat Robertson of Virginia, and Ralph Reed of Georgia. Reed was more than a leader among Christians, he was also a Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor. Regardless of his loss, in recent years the ranks of Republicans, and particularly Southern Republicans, have been filling up with social conservatives.
A 1993 article in the New York Times highlighted this trend as it was taking off. It discusses the situations in Virginia and South Carolina as social conservative activists were taking over the apparatus of the Republican Party at the state and local levels, and nominating social conservative candidates. This was upsetting conservatives who had long been involved in the Republican Party. The outgoing chair of the South Carolina party organization was quoted in a letter to their big contributors asking them to end their support for "intolerant, un-American and un-Republican" party (Ayres, 2), in the context of the party being taken over by social conservatives. A county part chairman was quoted as saying "These people aren't interested in politics. They are interested in establishing a theocracy," (Ayres, 2). One of the new Republican leaders stated that "when it is the word of God you are talking about, you don't compromise," (Ayres, 3)
Over the years, the Republican Party mainstream became more religious. Among the crop of Republican presidential candidates in 2008, only one was in favor of legal abortion and gay rights, Rudy Giuliani of New York. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts had held those positions as a governor, but as a presidential candidate opposed abortion and gay rights, and as the only Mormon candidate had some credibility among certain segments of the Republican rank and file. Among the other prominent candidates were Fred Thompson of Tennessee, John McCain of Arizona (who was raised in Virginia), and Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, all of whom have taken social conservative positions, and all of whom are Southerners. Charles Dunn notes that one of the leaders of the social conservatives is James Dobson (viii), who endorsed Mike Huckabee (Gomez). Huckabee won much of the South in the primaries. A former preacher, he touted his faith as one of his key traits during the race. This is common of Southern conservatives, as one could tell by looking at the records of Southern members of Congress. Even among Southern Democrats, social conservative positions are common, as in recently elected Democratic Representative Don Cazayoux of Louisiana, who notes his Catholicism and his pro-life beliefs on his campaign website ("Don"), or Travis Childers of Mississippi, ("Democrat Travis"), or former Governor and current US Senate candidate Ronnie Musgrove of Mississippi, who also supported the inclusion of the Ten Commandments in government buildings and opposes gay rights (Elliot).
Similar to the views expressed above by Republicans who were alarmed by this new religiosity, Dunn also notes that while social conservatives support eradicating things like abortion, libertarians "often oppose governmental action to limit or ban abortion, [and] measures to allow school prayer," among other policies which social conservatives promote (vii). Conservative Allan Carlson, in his essay "From Reagan Democrats to Social Conservatives," discussed how when the values of social conservatives clashed with business interests, "in each case the Republican Party sided in the end with business," (111), because the party is not united in favor of social conservative policy. Carlson quotes a Republican lobbyist calling social conservatives "wackos" and says the party treated them like "slightly lunatic children" at the 2004 convention (112).
Another of the qualities which I would also attribute to Southern conservatives is that they have difficulty dealing with change; they have a problem with the notion that we can reinterpret our principles over time. Perhaps, as many are religious or social conservatives, this is because they prefer knowledge derived from revelation rather than reason. Regardless, Lowndes tells us that a regular National Review contributor, Richard Weaver, "invested the South with the quality of being the most anti-liberal region in the country, because of its commitment to the preservation of history, ‘principles of exclusion,’ and rigid hierarchies," (49). Perhaps the principle that has been most important has been that of racial equality, or more precisely, inequality. Southern conservatives stood opposed to racial equality during the break up of the Democratic hegemony before the Civil War, and after that at every step have opposed efforts to improve the status of blacks in America. After desegregation and the Civil Rights Act, efforts moved to opposing things like affirmative action and busing, and in fact one of Richard Nixon’s advisors informed him that he must oppose busing in his efforts to appeal to Catholics and union members, groups which traditionally had been part of the base of the Democratic Party, and George Wallace ran on his opposition to busing in 1968, winning victory after victory in the Democratic primaries on that issue (Lowndes, 137). Why was this so fundamental an issue? To Southern conservatives, the preservation of the racial order is an important principle. George Wallace, the great Southern conservative champion of racial segregation during the 1960s, described his home of Alabama as the "very heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland" (Lowndes, 81). Wallace apparently even called more recent white immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe "lesser breeds" (Lowndes, 86). Race is traditionally such a fundamental issue for Southern conservatives, and the racial hierarchy is an important part of the social order.
Look for Part II tomorrow late afternoon PST.