Thousands of words have been spent, at this point, giving advice
to the Democrats in the wake their electoral defeat. How about some
advice for Republicans?
First and foremost, don’t buy the “moral values” hype. The
immediate post-election conventional wisdom — that it was all
about discomfort with “two dudes kissing,” as Jon Stewart put it on
last Wednesday’s trainwreck of a Daily Show (failed
attempts by bitter liberals to be funny followed by an extra-long
interview with Charles Schumer do not, it turns out, make for very
good television) — was wrong, and has been ably debunked by the
likes of Paul
Freedman, David Brooks, and John
Hood. (If you only want to read one of those, Hood’s is the
best.) In the first place, “moral values” can mean a lot of things,
particularly among those rejecting a candidate like John Kerry, who
seemed at times allergic to clear and principled positions, who
seems to take the attitude toward wives that most men take toward
ATM machines (any one will do, as long as it has money), and who
opposed the enormously popular ban on partial-birth abortion. More
to the point, social conservatives are no more important a part of
the Republican coalition than they have been in the past. In fact,
as Hood points out, the percentage of voters who attend church at
least weekly was the same in 2004 as it was in 2000, and while Bush
gained about one point with this group, he gained three to four
points among those who attend church seldom or never. (“Yep, it was
the atheist vote that really put Bush over the top in 2004,” Hood
notes dryly.)
It’s important to keep this in perspective, because if
Republicans are going to maintain and grow their majority in future
election cycles, they need to be able to appeal beyond the
culturally conservative base. Bush did that thanks to a huge
advantage on terrorism: as Freedman points out, voters who listed
“terrorism” as the top concern went for Bush 86 percent to 14
percent, an even larger margin than those who cited “moral values.”
If the president has a mandate for anything, it’s the continuation
of his forward strategy in the war on terror.
Social conservatives deserve a piece of the policy spoils, of
course, and a shift toward originalism in the judiciary is a good
place to start; if that means denying Arlen Specter his
chairmanship, so be it. But pushing much harder than that could be
dangerous to the health of the party.
As John Fund has noted, the dark spot on the GOP’s election came in the
state legislatures, where increasing polarization flipped the
balance in the Democrats’ very narrow favor. “Republicans shouldn’t
forget that their new dominance is tenuous and is unlikely to last
if the party remains uncompetitive on both coasts,” writes Fund,
and he’s right. Governors like Arnold Schwarzenegger in California,
Linda Lingle in Hawaii, and Bob Ehrlich in Maryland are successful
at sticking to Republican principles on economic issues even as
they sit across the divide on cultural issues, but they all face
solidly Democratic legislatures — which this election has made
even more solidly Democratic in the former two cases (Maryland did
not elect state legislators last week). State Republican parties,
it seems, are having trouble striking the balance necessary to win
in Blue territory, particularly during a presidential election
year.
Federalism lights the way out of this conundrum. The recognition
of gay unions should be entirely a matter for the states, and state
parties should be free to differ as to the proper political
approach; if a constitutional amendment is necessary, it is to
restrain the courts rather than to define marriage for the nation.
(Senator Orrin Hatch was toying earlier this year with introducing an
amendment that would be ideal.) Likewise, the overturning of
Roe vs. Wade ought to be the end-point of the pro-life
movement on the federal level; abortion after Roe should
become — as it was before Roe — a state matter.
I’d better admit that I’ll be on the opposite side of many
conservatives in these state-level battles: I favor gay marriage,
and though I’d love to see a judiciary that would overturn
Roe, a proxy for so much judicial mischief, I’d prefer to
see early-term abortion stay legal. But we’ll remain bound on
foreign policy and economic issues in a strong Republican coalition
despite our differences. And that’s the point, isn’t it?
