My friend Dan Riehl has a thoughtful post about the fate of
the Christian conservative movement, reflecting on a
much-discussed Newsweek cover
story.
The obituary of the Religious Right has been written many times
before. The defeat of Pat Robertson's GOP primary bid in 1988,
the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, his re-election in 1996,
his acquittal by the Senate in the Lewinsky sex-and-lies scandal
-- all of these were causes for self-congratulatory gloating by
opponents of the Religious Right.
And I should add that this gloating has been, and is now,
bipartisan: Many Republicans have been deeply resentful
of the influence exercised by Christian conservatives. The fact
that John McCain was able to get the 2008 GOP nomination, after
infamously
insulting the leaders of the Religious Right as "agents of
intolerance" during his 2000 primary campaign, is perhaps the
best evidence for any argument about the declining influence of
Christian conservatism.
Whether or not this latest obituary is premature, the Christian
conservative movement was succesful as long as it was successful
because it operated on a sound principle: Politics is about
people. The Democrats have always understood this. Identify
groups of people with distinct interests and values --
farmers, labor unions, women, urban dwellers -- then appeal
to their interests with policies that advance their
interests and rhetoric that resonates with their values.
Roosevelt's New Deal coalition was built by such methods, and it
was not until that coalition unraveled in the crucible of the
1960s that Republicans began their steady ascent to dominance:
Reagan's election in 1980, the "Contract With America" election
of 1994, and the consolidation of Republican hegemony in
Washington after 2000 being the three electoral landmarks of
this ascent.
Christian conservatives were essential to that success, because
they supplied the ground troops, the foot soldiers of this GOP
"Long March." This was true, I should point out for younger
readers, even during the Cold War drama of the Reagan Revolution.
The unshakeable foundation of American opposition to Soviet
aggression was always Christians who were horrified by the
doctrinaire atheism of "godless communism," a phrase I heard
often in my youth.
The schism that developed in the GOP coalition over the
years, and which has become glaringly apparent during
the Republican decline since the 2004 re-election triumph of
George W. Bush, is often described in ideological terms:
Neoconservatives vs. paleoconservatives, or libertarians vs.
social conservatives. But this is a mistake, I believe. The real
schism is between those who see the GOP as being representative
of the values and interests of identifiable electoral
constituencies -- that is to say, the politics of people -- and
those who see politics as a matter of coming up with policies and
rhetoric that are defensible as intellectual truth in "the War of
Ideas."
This might be called a struggle between populists and elitists,
but the fact is that it involves a conflict of identity between
two fairly distinct classes of Republican operatives.
On the one hand, you have Republicans out in the "Heartland" --
Oklahoma, Ohio, Oregon or wherever -- whose main concern is
organizing people to win elections. On the other hand, you have
the mainly Washington, D.C.-based apparatus of policy
specialists, consultants, congressional staffers and --
yes -- conservative journalists, who unfortunately tend to
think of themselves as more important to the Movement than the
tens of millions of Republican votes nationwide.
This class schism within the GOP Big Tent was highlighted
during the 2006-07 battle over the
proposed illegal-alien amnesty legislation pushed by John
McCain and the Bush White House. All you had to do was to listen
to any talk-radio program to understand that there was an intense
grassroots resistance to any proposal to grant permanent
residency to foreigners who were here illegally. "What part of
'illegal' don't they understand?" as it was expressed to me by
one talk-radio host in a 2006 interview.
That grassroots sentiment was disdained, however, by much of the
elite GOP policy apparatus, just as the same policy elite
disdained the pro-life, anti-gay-rights sentiment of the
Christian conservative movement.
For years, Republicans won elections by framing issues in terms
of opposition to an out-of-touch liberal elite in Washington. It
seems to me that Republicans are now losing elections
because of an out-of-touch "conservative" elite in Washington.
