Where Is The Republican Core?
While campaigning for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, former Maryland Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele has admonished party conservatives to driving away moderates. Steele’s argument is a rather old one in its vague terms — that the party needs to have a “big tent” where different perspectives on various issues can be accommodated by a shared commitment to certain core issues. But this approach begs the question to many conservatives — what are those core issues to be?
Social conservatives who have dominated the Republican Party for the last decade define those core issues in harshly didactic terms deriving from religious roots. Abortion, gay marriage, and a more nebulous but passionately held commitment to “family values” are what they see as the heart of the Republican Party. They tend to resent calls by “moderates” to compromise as they see such calls as nothing less than an effort to read God Himself out of the party. More pragmatically, social conservative leaders note the longstanding success of such principles in successfully building and maintaining a movement with strong double roots in both rural and suburban regions.
In recent years, social conservatives have been reinforced by an alliance of convenience with some rather questionable characters arising from the migration of Dixiecrats into the Republican Party. With strong roots in the South, these cultural conservatives have supplemented social conservatism with disdain for immigration as a threat to American cultural identity. Stopping “amnesty” and demonizing any cultural or educational institution not encapsulated by a NASCAR race is the core issue for cultural conservatives.
Cultural conservatives also linked together with national security conservatives left over from the Cold War. These national security conservatives were reinvigorated by 9/11 and place the strong pursuit of the global war against Islamic extremism as the core cause of the party.
In the aftermath of electoral meltdowns in both 2006 and 2008, however, this tripartite hegemony has come to be identified as pathological by old-style fiscal conservatives, usually dubbed as “moderates” due to their dissent from social and cultural conservatives. The argument from the fiscal conservatives is that both events and demographic trends have intervened to destroy the viability of the tripartite coalition. The myriad failures in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have served to undermine Republicans’ claim to be the safest stewards of national security. This whittled down the numbers and enthusiasm of the national security conservatives. Meanwhile, shifts in the cultural and moral ethos of younger generations have eroded the numbers that could be marshalled by social conservatives even while intensifying their self-perceptions as a beseiged minority. And the undertones of racism and intolerance that too often infest the anti-immigration movement served to make cultural conservatives toxic, further driving away younger voters and centrists. Fiscal conservatives thus argue that to renew the commitment to any of the tripartite groups’ preferred core is a suicide pact for the party, condemning it to permanent minority status regardless of the particular virtues of their moral claims.
The only option left, say the fiscal conservatives, is therefore to return to the party’s generational roots in pro-business, low-tax, pro-growth economics.
The trouble is how to craft that into a workable message during times of economic meltdown, necessary-evil government bailouts running into the trillions of dollars, and spiraling deficits in the midst of two continuing wars. No horror movie hack writer could top this monster of a political problem. But it is exactly the monster that the Republican Party will have to find a way to slay if it is to be able to function as an effective opposition, let alone a credible challenger in future elections.
The fundamental truth here is that Steele and the fiscal conservatives are right — the key issues of the day are economic and demographics make cultural and social conservatism secondary bases for the party anyway. Any new Republican coalition will have to be built around responses to economic issues, not attempts to reconstitute the crumbling social or cultural bases. In selecting which issues are “mandatory” for Republicans versus those with which the party needs to accept compromise and dissent, Republicans will need to take lessons from Democrats’ successes in dealing with their peacenik elements — accommodating and including, but not allowing them to control and purify everything.
And time is short.
Hopefully I’m not seen as trying to “control or purify” but I’d suggest the nexus is:
-smaller government or at least a healthy skepticism toward governmental solutions and therefore
-less taxation (i.e. a smaller government needs less revenue) and smaller taxes allow individuals to pursue their personal goals/benefits
-individual liberties
-free and open markets
-fiscal responsibility (smaller AND BALANCED [when possible] budgets)
-(HERE’S THE TOUGH ONE!)advocacy of individual responsibility and “public morality” (there’s a better term out there but I can’t recall it)
On a separate note I’m struggling to understand why a party that had a major electoral setback is trying to make itself smaller (and by definition) less appealing to a broad swath of the American electorate.
Why is fiscal/libertarian “purity” any better than “social”/values purity? Sometimes I get the sense ficons blame the socons for the financial problems “because GW was a socon and his ‘compassionate conservatism’ lead to excessive spending….and besides its looks like Huckabee’s heading in the same direction…”
It all seems so…so….puritanical!
PS
Claudia has alluded to a “non-religious” rationale for a pro-life stance. I would suggest the origins of my “pro-life” stance come from that direction. though they are not inconsistent with my other conservative (and dare I say “christian” world viewpoints) they aren’t “knee jerk” christian conclusions. And referring to above I might suggest that one could get a “pro-life” viewpoint from a conviction toward individual liberties. (i.e. the life of the unborn). the obvious difficult: the individual liberty of the person carrying the pregnancy, the woman.
As a quick aside to C3, though I myself am pro-choice, I do not necessarily think that being pro-choice is the necessary conservative position. Though it could be argued that a pro-choice position promotes more freedom and less governmental intervention, that is not the case if you accept the premise that a fetus is a human life. I believe even the most libertarians among us would agree that the federal government should keep murder illegal. Hence, the real issue comes to deciding when life actually begins, which is anything but easy. I argue that pro-life positions must be made in non-religious terms because the problem with justifying things on solely religious terms is that you open yourself to having the exact opposite justified on other religious terms. It’s everyone’s right to be pro-life based on their religious view, but I believe that it’s important to find secular reasons for the position. I think it’s a very very difficult subject and hence I think that expecting conservatives to “lighten up” on the issue of abortion is maybe asking a little too much. If I believed as they do, I think I wouldn’t be able to lighten up in the slightest.
Jason you bring up an interesting point that I will proceed to dwell on. Very briefly you say
It actually shows how dominant social conservatism has been. A populist, protectionist person who wants money set aside for farm subsidies and foreign companies heavily taxed and thinks being gay is “curable” and that a massive invasion of Mexicans in imminent would undoubtedly be called a conservative. Yet someone very much for market deregulation, lowering taxes and free competition but who thinks gays getting married doesn’t hurt anyone and happens to be pro-choice will be called a “moderate conservative”.
It seems that being culturally conservative is the litmus test for getting to be called conservative with no add-on.
I’ll admit I’m very biased. Though I have my disagreements with foreign policy hawks and fiscal conservatives, I can see a common ground, as well as a true philosophy and intellectual rigor behind their ideas. Even if I don’t agree with a lot of things, I feel that they are steady hands, people who value competence and intelligence. The undercurrent of hysteria and anti-intellectualism that I feel in the Sarah Palin wing of conservatism I find much more worrisome.
But they have been loyal foot soldiers in conservatism for years and I can see why they would highly resent being kicked out or asked to shut up. There are also a lot of social conservatives who are also fiscal conservatives. They are natural allies for the purely fiscal conservatives, but may resent it if their social conservatism is ridiculed or portrayed as a drag on the movement.
“Moderate” is a word that is subjective to the times. 150 years ago, the notion that a black person could be free was quite radical. Slowly it become a moderate position, and these days, the notion that a black person could be enslaved is radical.
50 years ago, the idea that a gay couple could happily be together was considered radical. Now it’s quickly approaching the moderate position, and someday the idea they couldn’t will be radical.
Claudia, where does all of this come from. It is such a mish mash of misperception and popular meme. If conservatism is historically anything it has been its hesistancy to quickly and strongly change laws, norms etc. From that perspective you can certainly see how a “conservation”, social or otherwise would hesitate to approve gay marriage.
I’m getting very of that the knee jerk assumption that a social conservative is “anti-intellectual”
that should read: “conservative”, social or otherwise…
and should read “I’m getting very tired of that knee jerk assumption that a social conservative is “anti-intellectual”
PS Not that I’m a hard and fast social conservative but all of my typos don’t help my case
At least in my case, the argument that social conservatism is anti-intellectual is derived from experience, not “knee-jerk assumption”. I think there are a couple of reasons that people assume social conservatism is anti-intellectual:
1) The citation of God and the Bible as the dispositive source of all moral authority implies (and sometimes states explicitly) that human reason is secondary, irrelevant, or even actively wrong (e.g. the political extension of the “fallen state of man” theology).
2) Many social conservative leaders, especially in talk radio, are openly and explicitly anti-intellectual in their frequent blanket condemnations of academia and/or the intelligentsia. As a moderate conservative who is in academia myself, I have emailed several such people to object to specific excesses in their sweeping condemnations. I have never even received the courtesy of a response, let alone an explanation or modification of their comments. That pattern at least implies that they stand behind their anti-intellectual prejudices and aren’t even willing to acknowledge exceptions to the overall tendencies in academia.
Jason, I don’t think you are guilty of the knee jerk bigotry against social conservatives, but I still don’t agree with your position as stated here. You mention that social conservatives extend their belief in the fall of man theology into the political arena- but how is that an example of anti-intellectualism? I suppose for some religious believers that part of theology is just accepted blindly, but it’s not at all incompatible with a rational and intellectual viewpoint (in fact, I have come to my own belief in that theology specifically because of the highly developed and highly intellectual theology that I feel is the best explanation for human behavior as I observe and experience it. Simply put, I see no better hypothesis to explain the divergent human tendencies toward good and evil than the theology which explains that we were created with potential for good but the free will to choose evil in our own perceived self-interest.
Your second point of course is less arguable; certainly there is a very vocal contingent of socons who are explicitly anti-intellectual (my only argument there would be that I see it as reactionary to the intellectuals who are dismissive of those who are less educated even if those individuals might have valid views formed through common sense and life experience.)
It seems to me to imply a reflexive rejection of all products of human reason as intrinsically flawed unless directly supported by scripture.
But my second point was my main basis anyway. Regardless of the provocation, many social conservatives have gone WAY off the deep end in their reflexive rejection of anything and everything that comes out of academia. It seems that the fastest way to get dismissed from some conservative circles is to preface your remarks with “I am a professor”. The anti-intellectualism of this type is so prevalent, in fact, that it sometimes even works to get one dismissed when one is agreeing with the social conservative position!
It seems to me to imply a reflexive rejection of all products of human reason as intrinsically flawed unless directly supported by scripture.
Well, I’ve mainly read Catholic theology (and can’t say I’ve studied it thoroughly) but I wouldn’t say that’s generally the case. There’s skepticism of products of human reason that seem to contradict scripture, but then also attempts to reconcile the two which sometimes leads to a different interpretation or a less literal reading of the scripture(not a reflexive dismissal.)
(Please don’t assume that I believe Catholic doesn’t equal Christian. I just categorize them differently. Notre Dame is different than North Park University)
Heh, well perhaps using other terms for Christian would be more apt- Evangelical or Protestant, or even non-Catholic Christian. I’m not offended because I knew what you meant (but did appreciate the explanation.) It does get annoying when living in an area dominated by Southern Baptists who often really don’t believe that Catholic = Christian.
It would be nice to see the Republican Party get back to its roots and do some actual republicanism – inalienable rights and so on.
I read a few lines a while back, from a hardline Christian guy in the American Baptistlands, and he reckoned that he would prefer a Muslim president for America over an atheist, because he recognised the spirituality of Muslims, and said that atheists basically had none. Although I think that’s a bit stern, I see where’s he’s coming from. It *is* a more republican view than you find emanating from the GOP these days, and I think that one the reasons for the party’s recent fall from favour, is that its leadership and its most vocal supporters (hardline Protestant right), do not believe in republicanism. Before the liberalisation of the Democratic Party, the GOP was the soft-line party on social issues, because its adherents believed in the republican ideal of inalienable rights for all humans. That ideal was manifested in the drive to end slavery – something that most people would never want to return. But with efforts like the prison at Guantanamo Bay, extraordinary rendition, and frankly, a tax shift from the very richest to the less well-off, the Republican Part doesn’t look in any way, shape or form, republican.