Toward reconstituting the Republican Party

A few months following the 2006 mid-term elections that saw the Republicans routed from power in the US Congress, I continued to marvel at the self-destructive politics displayed by the party’s leadership, writing at the time:

“While President Bush continues to bear the brunt of the bad press, the Republicans’ congressional leadership of the past six years deserves an equal share of the blame for the parade of incompetence and corruption that has taken place. We are scarcely two months removed from the mid-term elections, and already, my Republican acquaintances seem content in chalking up the losses to ‘Bush’s War.’ But this past election was about much more than Mr. Bush or Iraq, and until Republicans acquire a stomach for confronting the enemy within, they will not recapture the middle of the political spectrum any time soon…”

Last night, the circle of electoral folly was completed, as the Republicans lost control of the White House, and the party’s numbers in Congress shrank considerably. There is now a sense of complete and utter disarray that is setting in, but of course, the sentiment is two years late in coming.

When I wrote of “confronting the enemy within” nearly two years ago, I was not particularly hopeful that the Republicans would have their come-to-Jesus moment before the 2008 presidential election, primarily because few Republicans that I knew understood the root causes of the mid-term meltdown, a meltdown that was repeated Tuesday night.

It should be abundantly clear by now that the party’s political brand, as GOP bête noire James Carville gleefully explained on CNN, has been heavily damaged in the last eight years. Repairing that brand means understanding what damaged it in the first place:

1. Incompetence. In government, rarely is incompetence the exclusive domain of one party, but over the past four years, the incompetence narrative has been applied to the GOP in force, and it has stuck, rightly so, by my estimation. While we cannot blame George Bush and the Republicans exclusively for New Orleans’ levees or Minneapolis’ overpasses, we can blame them for the ham-fisted manner in which they managed crises. In almost every instance, Bush and company have come off as aloof, distant, and out of touch. On top of that, nearly every initiative put into place by the administration and GOP congressional leaders has ended in disarray or, worse, disaster.

2. Mendacity. Calling a politician a liar is like calling a fish wet; however, the GOP deserves special mention here as well. The Iraq War is the first and last exhibit of why and how mendacity can ruin a political party. The administration and its supporters haven’t been right about a thing, excepting General David Petraeus’s surge strategy, which was the Pentagon’s Hail Mary pass into Iraq’s end zone. But when you examine the WMD casus belli, the temperament of the Iraqi people upon our invasion, the troop levels needed to occupy the country, the theory that the war would pay for itself via Iraqi oil receipts – all of this has been horribly and irretrievably wrong. Further, I feel that the administration, for the most part, knew it was wrong and simply lied. If on the off chance I’m wrong here, then assign all of this to Reason #1 above…in short, Bush & Co. were either incredibly dishonest or incredibly naïve, take your pick.

3. Loss of values. The Republican Party might have been the party of Lincoln and emancipation, but for over 100 years, it has also been the party of merchants and entrepreneurs. The GOP has always been the Party of Private Capital, of those who have it and want it to grow. And this was the case long, long before the Bible-beaters decided to set up camp inside the party. Since Ronald Reagan cobbled together his winning coalition in 1980, however, the party has drifted ever further from its historical principles of small government, low taxes, and fiscal responsibility. George Bush has increased the size of government – and its associated debt – to historical highs, and the GOP for all intents and purposes has forfeited its traditional mantle of fiscal responsibility. If the party has any designs on future success, it must reassert the economic principles that have underscored its prior efforts, and that necessarily means weeding out of the party machinery those folks who seek to divide the electorate over social issues like abortion and gay marriage. These people have a place in the party, but not in party leadership. Despite the Democrats’ recent gains, the political center of the US is still responsive to the GOP’s economic platform, and Republicans would be wise to put down their Bibles and pick up their Adam Smith. That means the Ralph Reeds and James Dobsons of the world need to be purged from party leadership and sent packing.


The road ahead

As I researched this year some of the US House and Senate races taking place around the country, I was struck by the utter lack of what I would call “intellectual capital” in the Republican Party. Again and again, the brighter and younger candidates were almost exclusively fielded by the Democrats, particularly in the South, where Democrats are once again competing in formerly “red” districts and states. This lack of intellectual capital is potentially more damaging than any single factor, and I can only imagine that the dearth of political talent on Republican tickets nationwide is due to a national party leadership that has failed its constituents.

The Democrats have tasted success in the South because they have refused to submit candidates to overly rigid ideological requirements. As a result, the numbers of conservative Democrats serving in Congress have swelled. Conversely, Republican candidates and elected officials all seem to be carbon copies of one another, all beholden to an inflexible ideology determined by guns, abortion, creationism, and ugly anti-immigration rhetoric.

If the Republican Party is to succeed as a national party in the future, it must purge these nabobs from the leadership ranks and fast. It is an embarrassment that, after this week’s defeat of Rep. Christopher Shays (R-CT), the Republican Party does not have one single member in the US House of Representatives from New England. Not one. You simply can’t cede a whole region of the country to the other party and hope to find enough votes elsewhere to compensate, and to win in New England, it won’t do to recruit people who hold fast to a Southern-fried version of conservatism. They inevitably get slaughtered in the general election.

The intellectual capital problem is nothing new. In his landmark book The Conservative Mind, a book largely credited with kick-starting the conservative movement of the 1950s to which Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan hitched their political wagons, Russell Kirk introduced his tome by writing, “‘THE STUPID PARTY’ – this is John Stuart Mill’s description of conservatives.” Conservatives have always had to suffer the smug and supercilious derision of progressive types who promote their political beliefs as if they were immutable facts of nature.

The problem is, lately, the Left really has been more intellectually vigorous than their counterparts on the Right. This is mildly disconcerting for someone who grew up in the 1980s. I was nine years old when Reagan was elected president; I was in my first semester of college when he left office. The intellectual firmament on the Right was populated by thinkers like Kirk, William F. Buckley, and Milton Friedman, while the Left merely cycled through its postwar retreads. During my youth the Democratic Party was so intellectually bankrupt that even its young stars, at least those from the political center, sought instruction from conservative thinkers and academics. This state of affairs instilled in me a false sense of permanence regarding the Right’s capacity for intellectual capital, because, surely, the bounty of my youth is gone, and the GOP is now as much an intellectual desert as was the Left in the 1970s and ‘80s.

This must change, and the first step is to begin purging the collection of village idiots who have their mitts on the levers of party power. I am not particularly hopeful that this will occur, for at the moment, the Republican Party seems likely to waste away, becoming merely the redoubt of disaffected white evangelical Christians who seethe with nostalgia for a world that is gone, and that probably never existed in the first place.