Friday, November 21, 2008
The future, part III: Where do we go now?
After an election loss, recriminations are inevitable. Everyone believes they know what went wrong and who is to blame for it. Conservatives in the Republican Party are blaming the corruption and apostasies of senators like Ted Stevens (R-AK) for the party’s tarnished image, while more elite conservative opinion-makers like Kathleen Parker and David Brooks are arguing that the party must head left, and specifically jettison social conservatives, to appeal to a broader base of the electorate.
Most of these arguments are not credible. For instance, the latter group cites poll evidence showing that such-and-such demographic groups, who had voted for Bush in 2000 and 2004, all of a sudden switched to supporting Obama and other Democrats. That is a true observation, but it does not necessarily follow that the GOP should act more Democratic to appeal to these groups. The problem is that all demographic groups favored the Democrats more this year than they did last election. The GOP lost ground among men, women, all educational and income levels, minorities, and age groups. There is no group here that can be targeted for a specific appeal, no Rovian strategy that will woo a particular demographic. The GOP simply lost.
That is the difference between an election year that simply favors one party and a realignment election. In a realignment election, one or a few identifiable groups switch their party allegiances while the rest of the country votes as it normally has in the past. That is why we can consider the electoral movements of the South and New England to be “realignments,” while we cannot consider this year’s election, nor any of the elections in this millennium to be realigning events.
Furthermore, compare the following maps:
Aside from Wisconsin, where Obama carried considerably more of the counties than Kerry did, the county-by-county maps from 2004 and 2008 are nearly identical. By implication, Obama’s victory can be explained by the fact that fewer Republicans in Republican counties turned out than Democrats in Democratic counties. This is actually an intriguing finding. Based on the election night results, I expected that Obama had expanded by a marked degree the geographic base of Democratic voters. On the state level this is true, but at the far more important county level he did not. Ohio is a particularly interesting bellwether for this analysis. Obama’s victory did not look like past Democratic victories in Ohio, which relied upon extending the Democratic “C” from the eastern border (where Cincinatti and Cleveland are located) westward toward the rural areas. Instead, he appears to have run up his totals in the Democratic strongholds, ceding the rest of the state to McCain. No doubt many of McCain’s margins in the Republican counties were lower than Bush’s, but that Obama could only flip a few Bush counties from 2004 is quite surprising. It is certainly not easy ground for him to rest on.
In any case, this article is not intended to primarily be about election recapping. The above analysis was only to show why arguing about the GOP’s future based purely on election results is a futile enterprise. A more thorough and penetrating prescription is required.
The matrix of the conservative position
“Now there are some who say, strong family values, you better put that aside, to win the election. But if you take off one of the legs of that stool, like I just did, something happens. The stool falls down. That’s not the answer. The answer for our party and for our country is to continue to fight for all three legs of that stool.”
----Mitt Romney
Mitt Romney became famous in the Republican primaries for his description of the conservative platform as a “three-legged stool” composed of “strong military, strong families, and strong economy.” In his telling, unscrewing one of the legs of the stool, such as the socially conservative leg represented by the argument for “strong families” causes the entire party to collapse.
I agree with Romney in principle. Generally speaking, a party that has just lost an election jettisons a core group of its supporters at its peril. The Democrats certainly did not react to their string of losses at various levels from 1980-2004 by suddenly becoming pro-life. Certainly, the platform was tinkered a bit, some issues were emphasized over others and the like, but the core of the Democratic Party did not change. Only when faced with a realigning election do parties tend to change their core principles. 2008 was not such a year for the Republicans.
I do not, however, agree with Romney’s particular formulation of what that stool should look like. It is not that I oppose strong families, a strong military, or a strong economy. I doubt anyone but the most hardcore of leftists would oppose these things if you asked them. I disagree with Romney’s formulation because the implicit suggestion behind each of these principles is “strong government.” Particularly on the principles of a strong military and a strong economy, Romney’s consistent prescription throughout the primaries was that the government could guarantee these ideas by growing larger and becoming more activist. His recent editorial on Detroit notwithstanding, Romney showed consistent enthusiasm for government largesse to automakers and manufacturers, along with consistent enthusiasm for military adventurism and government control over social life through various means.
This is what I mean when I say that Republicans have come to believe that a big government is fine so long as they get to control it. For the Romneys of the world, the principle problem with American politics is that the opposition gets a vote; if only men like him had control over the vast machine that is the federal government, things would get a lot better. Hence, the matrix of the conservative position – fiscal, defense, and social conservatism – has become completely ensnared by a big-government philosophy. In the case of “defense conservatism,” this is actually not incongruous; a large, active military requires a large government to manage and fund it (it is no accident the Republican Party until the Vietnam War was instinctively isolationist). If the GOP is to make a credible small government argument after the Big Crunch, its enthusiasm for a massive military and foreign wars will have to be curbed. Given my background (as many of you know, I was in training with the Marines for a while several years ago), it pains me to say that, but it is the truth.
The incompatibility between a “strong economy” and a “strong government” has already been shown. A strong government implies a government ruled by machine politics, and that form of politics will corrupt any economic policy it touches. Poorly-designed, poorly-managed systems like Social Security and Medicare are the inevitable outcome of a machine government. After the Big Crunch, the Republicans will have had the small-government/strong-economy case already made for them. Their ability to embrace it will depend on a revision of the GOP’s foreign policy priorities, as I wrote above, and a rethinking of its social conservatism. It is to that problem I now turn.
Re-thinking social conservatism
Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.
Matthew 22:21
Whenever a Democrat wants to point out the inconsistency or hypocrisy of Republican principles, he usually singles out the tension between small government philosophy and social conservatism, traditionally understood. And he would be right – these two priorities, at least as they are currently understood and advocated, are incompatible.
This tension is not an inevitable outcome. Social conservatives either wrongly believe or have wrongly been persuaded by their elites that the only way for their interests to be advanced is through increasingly strict legal codes against vice or enforcing certain values. That view is not wrong because it is or will soon become electorally poisonous; in fact if it were not politically beneficial one of the major parties would not embrace it in its national platform. The view is wrong because it represents a view of the relationship between the state, morality, and citizens that is neither supported by the teachings of Christ nor by most modern secular philosophies of government.
The state, particularly the democratic state, is simultaneously foundationally amoral and viciously anti-moral. It is amoral because any value or priority that it wishes to enforce is based not on any guiding moral principle but upon a vote. Certainly, some or even most voters may vote based on their own supreme principles, but in the aggregate these disparate moral codes add up to a confused morality at best. Since the guiding principle of a democracy is “Which side has the most supporters?” it cannot be said that a democratic government rests on anything but an amoral foundation. At the same time, the state is viciously anti-moral; no matter its method for establishing legitimacy its primary function is the distribution of power and other material resources. Control over these resources does not tend to make the controller a better person; in general, we could say with good reason that such control tends to make him worse. Similarly, those given access to great power and wealth by the government are not made better for it; in general, they tend more toward immorality.
Hence, social conservatives, and particularly Christians, are confronted with a dual problem when they argue that the government must “preserve the family” or “uphold virtue.” First, there is no guarantee a particular “virtuous” policy will remain in place for very long; it is always in danger of being voted out and thereby “discredited” by the democratic process. That a policy is virtuous or morally correct therefore means little in a democracy. Second, in advocating for government action, social conservatives are tying their moral beliefs to an institution inherently corrupted by Mammon. Their principles cannot help but suffer as a result. One obvious case is where “family men” elected into office by social conservatives are corrupted by the powers and privileges of their office, using their positions to build personal wealth or have extramarital affairs. It would have been much better for them to have never been put in that position. Another good example is when the Republican Party, buoyed by the votes of social conservatives, uses its powers to push policies antithetical to Christian or conservative goals to please other constituencies, or else simply ignores the socially conservative segment of its voters.
It is true, however, that social conservatives cannot be expected to sit by as social liberals use the state for their own ends of expanding abortion rights or legalizing gay marriage. An attitude of resignation and withdrawal with respect to secular society is also contraindicated by the New Testament, and it is also condemned by the writings of the saints and Doctors of the Church. As such, telling Christians to “sit out” will not meet with much success. Instead, social conservatives must be persuaded that they should pursue a program of “erasure” rather than “conversion” when it comes to government policy.
That is to say precisely that social conservatives should push not for a wholesale adoption of their beliefs by local, state, and federal agencies. Instead, they should push for the erasure of social issues from the law books – the law should not sanction anything about marriage, it should say nothing of most private decisions or consensual transactions, and so forth. That may sound strange, but it is not. If the state and the secular law become the arbiters of morality, social conservatives and Christians always lose. Socially liberal positions are actually not broadly popular in the country, and I believe they have been made artificially more popular than they otherwise would be because the weight of the law appears to be behind most of them. Social liberals have only “won” because both parties, and by implication both camps of voters, at least implicitly agree that the state should arbitrate these matters. Social conservatives must therefore remove the one leg that their opponents stand on, and return these matters to the churches, communities, and families where they belong.
Conclusion
The coming Big Crunch will provide an opportunity for the GOP to refashion itself as the party of small government, but only if it revises its thinking on the “defense” and “family” legs of its stool. If Republicans are to be a credible voice for small government, they must be a consistent voice. The government is not good at managing the military, the economy, or morality. It is time for at least one of our political parties to stop pretending that it is. That party is not likely to be the Democrats, so it is the Republicans that true believers in smaller government must seek to influence.
