Charting a future for a crippled GOP
Let’s assume, for the moment, the worst for the Republican Party. (Which I view as one of the five or six most important civic institutions in America.)
It’s November 5th. Barack Obama — a man described by his enemies as the most liberal man in the Senate — is president-elect.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, from dreaded San Francisco, presides over a Democratic majority of nearly a hundred seats.
Democratic Senate majority leader Harry Reid has captured a filibuster-proof sixty-vote majority in the U.S. Senate.
All three outcomes, while far from certain, have entered the realm of the plausible. After a generation of dominance, the GOP finds itself utterly marginalized.
The question on that morning will be, what next? How do Republicans rebuild?
Mainstream journalists will likely compare the event to the 1994 Republican Revolution — suggesting that the GOP can simply follow the Democratic model to fashion a resurgence.
But the truth is that even at their peak Republicans managed only a narrow majority in both houses of Congress.
Democrats will have achieved a level of supremacy not seen for decades in American politics.
Which means that Republicans have a far bigger job ahead. And their cautionary example should be Britain’s Conservatives.
When Labor finally swept aside the Thatcher Tories, in 1997, they ushered in an era of irrelevance for Conservatives that has continued for eleven long years.
To avoid that fate, America’s conservatives will be forced to consider some of the basic assumptions of their movement. These include:
1. A cultural loyalty to traditional, rural values — a tough sell in America’s increasingly urban culture.
2. A half-hearted interest in appealing to racial and ethnic groups. As the U.S. emerges as a white-minority society, the GOP has some soul searching to do.
3. A focus on sexual and bedroom issues, ranging from opposition to homosexual marriage to discomfort with sex education and fierce hostility to abortion. (Yes, these issues matter – but should they be a chief preoccupation of our politicians?)
4. A relative disinterest in the environment. “Drill-baby-drill” might work with the Republican base, but polls show that a growing numbers of Americans want to live and vote green. It’s an economic issue, but it’s also a moral one.
5. Moderates are quislings. Newt Gingrich reserved his angriest rhetoric for centrists within his own party. Tom DeLay was known as the Hammer for the way he treated his own rank-and-file members. But maybe those Rockefeller Republicans have something to teach their party?
Maybe in the new America and the new GOP, the Patakis and the Schwarzeneggers have a brighter future than the ideological firebrands?
