The title comes from the question plaintively asked some months before the 2008 presidential election by a friend who's a businessman. Like me he's well on the wrong side of Fifty, and like me he was raised a Republican. I think we'd both describe ourselves as conservatives (note the small c).
Max Hastings, a right-wing British journalist, put it in a slightly different fashion when he noted during the campaign (I'm paraphrasing) that the Republicans had become the party of the poorly educated, superstitious, and rural. You only have to listen to one of Sarah Palin's campaign speeches to see that he has a point.
The Republican Party my friend and I identified with was the party of business. Republicans were neither exciting nor cuddly, but you could trust the economy to them and expect them to avoid foreign military adventures. We liked Ike.
In 1983 I became rewrite man for Newt Gingrich on the book which became Window of Opportunity. Newt is a very smart, very dynamic man; working with him was both an honor and an education.
In the course of our first meeting, Newt told me that he was going to engineer a Republican majority in the House of Representatives. Thank goodness I didn't say, "Right, and pigs will fly," but I certainly thought it. I was colossally ignorant, though in 1983 most people would have agreed with me. The only smart thing I did during the exchange was to keep my mouth shut.
Newt continued to work from within to change the Republicans from a party of the elite and privileged (people like me, not to put too fine a point on it) into a real populist movement. In 1994 he achieved his end: Republicans took control of the House.
There has been quite a lot of movement since then, but not--from the vantage of hindsight--a great deal of progress. The House Republicans didn't seem to know what to do with their victory. Newt himself left the House and elective politics. His economic mantra had been, "Reduce the national debt." His majority spiraled into a wasteland of tax cuts and deficit spending.
The populist majority fell away, not so much in anger as boredom. Quite a lot of people dislike Bill Clinton, but very few would say that it was worth shutting down the government of the United States to delve into his sex life.
What remained isn't the Republican Party of Eisenhower (or Dewey and Taft): it's a populist fringe. It certainly represents a significant portion of the citizens of the United States, just as the Taliban represents a significant portion of the citizens of Afghanistan, but it isn't the business party, the Safe Hands party.
It's a party which has turned away from people like me and my businessman friend. And, though he worked with the fringes too in putting together his majority, I believe it's a party which is equally alien to Newt Gingrich,.
It's a shame. I still like Ike.
Max Hastings, a right-wing British journalist, put it in a slightly different fashion when he noted during the campaign (I'm paraphrasing) that the Republicans had become the party of the poorly educated, superstitious, and rural. You only have to listen to one of Sarah Palin's campaign speeches to see that he has a point.
The Republican Party my friend and I identified with was the party of business. Republicans were neither exciting nor cuddly, but you could trust the economy to them and expect them to avoid foreign military adventures. We liked Ike.
In 1983 I became rewrite man for Newt Gingrich on the book which became Window of Opportunity. Newt is a very smart, very dynamic man; working with him was both an honor and an education.
In the course of our first meeting, Newt told me that he was going to engineer a Republican majority in the House of Representatives. Thank goodness I didn't say, "Right, and pigs will fly," but I certainly thought it. I was colossally ignorant, though in 1983 most people would have agreed with me. The only smart thing I did during the exchange was to keep my mouth shut.
Newt continued to work from within to change the Republicans from a party of the elite and privileged (people like me, not to put too fine a point on it) into a real populist movement. In 1994 he achieved his end: Republicans took control of the House.
There has been quite a lot of movement since then, but not--from the vantage of hindsight--a great deal of progress. The House Republicans didn't seem to know what to do with their victory. Newt himself left the House and elective politics. His economic mantra had been, "Reduce the national debt." His majority spiraled into a wasteland of tax cuts and deficit spending.
The populist majority fell away, not so much in anger as boredom. Quite a lot of people dislike Bill Clinton, but very few would say that it was worth shutting down the government of the United States to delve into his sex life.
What remained isn't the Republican Party of Eisenhower (or Dewey and Taft): it's a populist fringe. It certainly represents a significant portion of the citizens of the United States, just as the Taliban represents a significant portion of the citizens of Afghanistan, but it isn't the business party, the Safe Hands party.
It's a party which has turned away from people like me and my businessman friend. And, though he worked with the fringes too in putting together his majority, I believe it's a party which is equally alien to Newt Gingrich,.
It's a shame. I still like Ike.
Dave Drake
2 comments:
What did they do with your party? They hijacked it. Now they're in the process of wrecking it in the high-speed chase they provoked.
Reading (or rereading) Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative is an eye-opening experience. Goldwater believed that the essence of the conservative philosophy was the belief that the sole purpose of government should be to maximize individual liberty so as to allow each individual to achieve to the full extent of his or her abilities.
The people who've seized the Republican party in the name of conservatism would laugh in Goldwater's face. (Well, one time, probably...) The big-government conservatives and their social conservative allies are interested in maximizing the power of government so as to impose their standards of morality on everyone. The neoconservative chicken-hawks are interested in projecting the power of their government into all corners of world so as to impose their standards of economics and politics on everyone.
Clearly, none of these people have the least interest in maximizing individual liberty; indeed, they are functionally opposed to the concept.
In order to sell this philosophy to the voters, they have become masters of playing on the ignorance and fears of a very large fraction of the population. Thus, it is no longer possible for people to disagree about politics and to settle those disagreements at the ballot box. Rather, anyone who disagrees with the right-thinking people-- Palin's "real Americans"-- is not wrong; he's evil, and he must be opposed by any means necessary and at any cost.
Unfortunately, it appears that the lesson learned in the recent election by the conservative heavies seems to be that the GOP's error was in tolerating the moderates in their midst. They would have won the election with a "real" conservative, one who campaigned on prohibiting abortion, mandating school prayer, eliminating the IRS, criminalizing homosexual behavior, etc.
This does not bode well for the future of the Republican party. I tend to agree with Glenn that it is in real danger of becoming marginalized permanently.
I am also dismayed by the current state of what passes for conservatism. My politics are much in alignment with what is referred to as classical liberalism. As far as I can tell, the "liberals" in this country aren't liberal in the original sense of the word - they are panty-waist socialists and the "conservatives" in this country are economic dolts and military and cultural imperialists.
The "liberals" want to take my money and my rights slowly, softly, paternalistically. The "conservatives" want to take it outright by force of law and reckless spending. I want option "C" please.
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