To listen to some Republicans, not to mention, the braying of
media outlets such as MSNBC, and even, here and there, a few
economic libertarians, you would think that traditional
conservatives, the defenders of the unborn and the integrity of
marriage as a venerable and ancient institution, were responsible
for two wars gone sour, over-spending at a level to embarrass
Lyndon Johnson, the largest expansion of entitlement spending
since the Great Society, numerous cases of GOP corruption and
betrayal of the public trust centering around earmarks and
political favors and the miserable results in the presidential
and congressional elections just passed.
Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, not this writer’s first choice for
the job of vice president, has now become the target for
patronizing comments by the chattering classes who can’t tell a
moose hunt from an Easter egg hunt. For some of these enlightened
minds, Governor Palin’s loving acceptance of her new baby with
special needs and her stand-up support for her teenage daughter
seem to count for nothing at best or even a big negative. They
view her selflessness as trailer park behavior rather than a
loving parent’s defense of life and love in her family.
“To love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first
principle (the germ as it were) of public affections,” said
Edmund Burke.
Listening to these outcries, one might believe that the global
economic meltdown, the single biggest reason for Senator McCain’s
defeat, was the result of a worldwide conspiracy of the Right to
Life movement, pro-marriage activists, Mormons, Evangelicals,
Mass-attending Catholics, oh yes, and the NRA.
This scapegoating of the solid and most loyal of the three wings
of the Reaganite coalition is inaccurate and just plain wrong. It
is self-defeating in the long run. It is rank blame-shifting and
a libel of a GOP constituency which has always supported low
taxes, a strong defense and a constrained judiciary. All it asked
for was fair consideration of its concerns with family and the
culture of life.
If economic or business conservatives thinks they can win
Midwestern, western, Southern and border states without
Evangelicals, Southern Baptists, culturally conservative
Catholics and advocates for the nuclear family as the first of
all social institutions, they are kidding themselves. President
Gerald Ford’s primary victory over Ronald Reagan in 1976 was the
last gasp of that worldview. You do not find many political
volunteers, or voters, at the Union League or Bogey Clubs.
Political success is about addition, not subtraction. Clearly,
the GOP cannot win with only the social conservatives. That is
why coalitions are a necessary part of political life. This is
equally true for economic and national defense conservatives.
Indeed, one could argue that the apparent singularity of social
conservative support for the GOP ticket this past election was
due, at least in part, to the failure of conservative economic or
neoconservative foreign policies, many of which were radical
departures from the Reaganite model.
This internecine battle has got to stop if there is to be any
chance of regrouping for the off-year elections in 2010 and
beyond.
One might view the tripartite Reagan coalition as a portfolio
approach to political risk management, appealing to diverse
constituencies, programs and messages across a wide and varied
society. Viewed this way, social conservatives, free-market
economic and national security advocates need to cling to each
other while remaining open to the concerns of new emerging
constituencies such as Hispanics who, by the way, are pro-family
and not normally categorized as social liberals.
This is not to diminish substantive disagreements on serious
questions of policy. Indeed, conservative, paleo-conservative and
simple plain-vanilla conservatives have real differences on
preventive war, nation building, civil liberties and the like.
Many will dissent from the GOP’s pronounced tilt in favor of the
humanity of the unborn in public policy. With only two political
parties to choose from, such skirmishes are inevitable. Moreover,
there are new issues that need to be analyzed and addressed
creatively. For instance, entitlement reform may rival tax
cutting as a concern for the long haul. Health care is another
matter crying for creative solutions in an age of economic
uncertainty and personal mobility in the market place.
What do the Girl Scouts say, make new friends and keep the old?
