The Republican Party is in trouble: In the wake of the presidential election, everybody has said so, and everybody is right. From there, however, a hundred paths diverge and a thousand voices have been heard. The relevant questions are these: How deep is the trouble? How much of it is self-inflicted and how much is a function of circumstance? Can the problem be repaired, and if so, by what means?
These questions are ones the Washington Post’s Michael Gerson and I take up in the forthcoming (March) issue of COMMENTARY magazine.
The essay recapitulates presidential elections 1968-1988 v. 1992-2012 to show how dramatically things have shifted against the Republican Party; argues that the GOP faces systemic, not transient, problems; and provides a brief history of what Bill Clinton and Tony Blair did to revivify their parties. We believe the Republican Party is nearing a Clinton-Blair moment, meaning a substantial recalibration is necessary. It faces more than a “messaging problem.”
From there we argue that the GOP faces five challenges, including (a) appealing to the economic concerns of working- and middle-class America; (b) becoming a party that welcomes rising immigrant groups; (c) demonstrating a commitment to the common good and social solidarity; (d) engaging vital social issues forthrightly and in a manner that is aspirational rather than alienating; and (e) harnessing the Republican Party’s policy views to the findings of science.
We supply policy suggestions within each category — policies we believe to be substantively right and symbolically useful. We then argue that the challenge for primary voters, party activists, and party leaders is to create the conditions that will give the talented field Republicans do have the intellectual support and leeway to an agenda relevant to our time.
For more, a link to the essay can be found here.
I don't know. A little tweaking maybe. We have a majority of governors and a great youthful bench. The Democrats are thinking of putting up Hillary or (gulp) Biden in 2016. I do not see much of a future there. Weak youthful bench. Obama won by a smaller margin in '12 than in '08, against a qualified, but politically inept candididate.
nThe Republican Party will be in trouble if it keeps putting up these RINO’s to run for president. If the GOP sticks to a conservative message they will be fine. The best thing the GOP could do is dump the characters like John Boehner and Eric Cantor, both of these guys have been a train wreck as leaders.
I agree that the continuing relevance of the Republican party depends in part at least on its ability to address these five challenges. Perhaps your article (which I will read with interest) addresses this, but my concern is that these five challenges do not go far enough, range broadly enough, or probe deeply enough. Here are four concerns that emerge from last year’s election debacle. n n–Whither the welfare state? The modern history of the Republican party, since FDR, has been one of trying to formulate a response to the welfare state. Are we going to reject it, roll it back, manage it more efficiently? Now, with the budget crises and unsustainable entitlement obligations, this is perhaps the most urgent and important question not only for Republicans but also the Republic. What will be the Republican remedy? And how can Republicans foster trust in the public so that their reforms cannot effectively and relatively easily be demagogued as a return to Social Darwinism or pushing granny off the cliff? n n–Whither the world? Whatever its long- and short-term successes, and they are and will be considerable in my opinion, neo-con nation building has been a public relations disaster. It has cost the Republicans their generations-long edge on foreign policy. To regain the public’s trust, the Republican party needs to articulate a more modest foreign policy, one that recognizes the restraints imposed by our budget and distaste for grand adventures, but yet promises to protect our vital national interests and the threats they face. n n–Who’s next? Try as I might, I cannot erase my memory of how this party was forced to turn to the likes of Michelle Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, and finally Mitt Romney, while the Mitch Danieles and Chris Christyes sat on the sidelines. And now I’m supposed to take seriously a guy named after a third-rate imitator of a second-rate disciple of Nietzsche who carries Robert Taft, Jr.’s Fortress America in one hand, and the Articles of Confederation in the other. How will Republicans ensure that whatever their policy re-calibrations, they’ll entrust them to the best – and an electable – candidate? Or at least one who will not combust or melt under the glare of the liberal media? n n–Whither the poetry? Policy wins heads, but political poetry wins hearts. The old Reagan music of free enterprise and small government has fallen out of the top-40 hits. Obama is making sweet political music with his talk about fairness and actions perceived to provide security; in this age of anxiety and uncertainty, that is what people want to hear, not paens to a free market that still bears the taint of the recession. What will the new Republican music sound like? What will be its theme? n
Nothing you said there makes sense… There is nothing wrong with Michelle Bachman, she's a true conservative.
What about this poetry: We are here to save Medicare by offering a plan that will appeal to all. n nMeans test Medicare. those who want to bend the famous cost curve will be satisfied. Those who want to preserve Medicare will be satisfied. Those who want to take care of those who need help will be satisfied. n nWho can be against this?
(a) appealing to the economic concerns of working-and middle- class America; and (b) becoming a party that welcomes rising immigrant groups; are mutually exclusive. You can do one or the other but not both. Continuous immigration only exacerbates the competition for scarce jobs in this wonderful jobless economic recovery Obama has perfected. Unskilled immigration also harms the employment prospects and wages of natural born American working-class citizens. We should face facts and acknowledge that neither Republican nor Democrat elites give a rat's ass about American citizens. Big business wants cheap labor and Democrats want millions of new Democratic voters. The treachery and betrayal involved is breathtaking.
In 1969, the historical Swedish conservative party changed its name from “The Party of the Right” to “The Moderate Coalition Party”, signalling its acceptance of the 20th century. It is not too late, 44 years later, for the Amerian GOP to likewise begin to accept the 20th century.
"The advance of gay marriage does not release them from their responsibilities to help fortify that institution and speak out confidently on the full array of family-related issues." n nThe support for gay marriage comes from the same attitude of "I-have-the-right-to-whatever-I-want-because-I-want-it" that weakened marriage in the first place. Are you naive enough to expect those people pushing for the "right" to gay marriage today to then lend support for an effort to stigmatize co-habitation, single parenthood, or divorce? n n"Republicans need to make their own inner peace with working with those who both support gay marriage and are committed to strengthening the institution of marriage." n nYes, all three of them. n n"…informally encouraging Hollywood to help shape positive attitudes toward marriage and parenthood." n nYou didn't really write that, did you? You might as well ask neo-Nazis to help shape positive attitudes toward Jews.
Interesting essay, I noticed you and Mr Gerson laid out a more populist and middle.working class based economic approach that goes after beltway cronyism and corporate welfare. Interesting. I wonder, are you aware which prominent Republican actually talked about that quite a bit in 2011/2012, way before you ever mentioned it? That there actually was a potential 2012 candidate who already had just the platform you espoused as what the party needs? n n
You wrote: n nBut gaining a fair hearing on any of these issues requires changing an image that the GOP is engaged in class warfare on behalf of the upper class. Republicans could begin by becoming visible and persistent critics of corporate welfare: the vast network of subsidies and tax breaks extended by Democratic and Republican administrations alike to wealthy and well-connected corporations. Such benefits undermine free markets and undercut the public’s confidence in American capitalism. They also increase federal spending. The conservative case against this high-level form of the dole is obvious, and so is the appropriate agenda: cutting off the patent cronyism that infects federal policy toward energy, health care, and the automobile and financial-services industries, resulting in a pernicious and corrupting system of interdependency. “Ending corporate welfare as we know it”: For a pro-market party, this should be a rich vein to mine. n n
Are you aware that in 2011 a leading Natl Republican gave a speech in a major primary state that stated the following: n nThere is so much waste. And there is a name for this: It’s called corporate crony capitalism. This is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk. No, this is the capitalism of connections and government bailouts and handouts, of waste and influence peddling and corporate welfare. This is the crony capitalism that destroyed Europe’s economies. It’s the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest… n nand this: n nBut here’s the best part…we eliminate corporate welfare and all the loopholes and we eliminate bailouts. This is how we break the back of crony capitalism because it feeds off corporate welfare, which is just socialism for the very rich. We can change all of that. n nI wonder if you're aware of who this Republican is and if not I'd reckon you'd probably be pretty surprised when you found out.
Wehner’s article appears to be a response to a symposium in COMMENTARY about the future of the Conservative Movement. I sent the following in response, and believe it is relevant to this discusison:
The symposium poses the wrong question. Although Obama likes being identified as a Leftist, he really isn’t one. Rather, he is a narcissist whose one strong political belief is that he should have power. Being seen as a Leftist serves his purposes in two ways. First, people who are Leftists will regard him as one of their own and back him. Second, it undermines the ability of the Right to deal with him successfully.
The right question would have been “Why did Americans re-elect the worst president in American history?” That question focuses us immediately on the reality of Barack Obama, both as president and as campaigner, and should
lead to certain insights into where the Republicans need to go now. If Republicans retreat into an ideological funk, it will only help Obama with what appears to be the primary goal of this term, destroying the Republican
Party and all opposition to his very personalized rule.
We need to understand that the Left has an important strategic advantage over the Right: They are primarily interested in holding and extending their power and they are rather flexible about what they have to do to get there, including what policies they will embrace. The Right, by contrast, consists of several factions committed to various policies and/or ideas, social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, neo-cons, libertarians, etc. When seen as the party of the Right, the Republican primaries are necessarily competitions between those groups, as well as contests between politicians. Somebody must lose, and the losers don’t always react in a sensible manner, preferring that the Left win so they can take another shot in the next election.
The Republicans should reposition the party as the one that seeks to solve problems, rather than one that is the voice of the feuding Conservative factions, as it is today. This would also contrast with the Democrats who
seek to hold power by doing whatever they think will bring in the votes, even when that harms the general interest. This repositioning would offer three critical advantages:
1) It would enable Republicans to focus on the failures of Democratic policies without having to worry about this focus being seen as personal.
Obama won in 2012 largely because he was willing to pound home a false image of Romney while Romney, for whatever reason, failed to respond with an accurate image of Obama or even of his presidency. One possible reason for
that is that the reality of Barack Obama approximates the discredited stereotype of black people, and calling attention to the reality would have invited allegations of racism. Presenting him as the worst president in history would have forced the Democrats to discuss his record, because implicit in this claim is that George W. Bush was a better president and the Democrats continue
to make their claims based on how bad he was. If voters shouldn’t vote for a candidate because he is like Bush, why should they vote for someone who is worse? Obama made a point of not defending what he had achieved, or more accurately failed to achieve, during his term; that should have been a tip-off that he knew he was vulnerable on that.
2) It would permit Republicans to make Obama’s campaign strategy an issue. There is much evidence that Obama’s victory was made possible by micro-targeting, using available data to determine what pitches voters would
respond to on an individual level, and then telling them what they wanted to hear. This strategy is very effective for a campaign, but it comes with some unavoidable consequences. An official elected after doing this has no mandate for anything because there is nothing in particular that motivated his voters to support him. No ideas were put to the test. Voters may
have very different ideas about the important issues and thus when it comes to governing, the strategy becomes a liability.
A party committed to solving problems would point this out and then follow up by emphasizing that the strategy requires a substantial invasion of each voter’s privacy, perhaps documenting this with how such a strategy is
actually pursued. It is probably no coincidence that Obama’s iconic poster fits what I would expect from 1984′s “Big Brother.” Presenting him in this light might break through his cool-pose and the temper tantrum that would follow would make him toxic; the Democrats wouldn’t want to be associated with him.
3) It forces Republican candidates to campaign by offering solutions to specific problems. These solutions should call upon conservative principles, individual autonomy and responsibility for example, that should
appeal to all of the factions.
There are lots of major problems to choose from these days, but let me offer one that wins on several dimensions: Global warming. Prof. Stuart Licht of George Washington University has developed a process that uses solar thermal energy to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by electrolyzing it into carbon and oxygen. He believes his process could reduce the CO2 load in the atmosphere to pre-World War II levels in about ten years.
Particularly in light of Obama’s focus on global warming in his inaugural pep-talk, Republicans should advocate using this process to combat it. If it works as Prof. Licht claims, at a reasonable price, one Republicans should agree to pay even it is through a tax, this is a solution to the problem. Solving the problem would make unviable the Left’s plans to use global warming as a pretext for seizing control over large parts of the economy. Meanwhile if the process reduces the CO2 load and global warming continues, then the theory that climate change is being caused by burning carbon is
disproved. This is a win-win situation for Republicans. And here’s the kicker: I have worked for about a year to get the MSM to cover this, to no avail. A success here would make it very difficult for the MSM to present Republicans as troglodytes; after all, we were willing to let science solve this problem, while the Democrats ignored it.
Because the results would be visible in a very few years, adoption of this solution would lay the groundwork for presenting Republicans as the party of solutions, and should make the entire electorate more responsive to the
Party. Then it is only a matter of making the primaries a venue for identifying solutions and the Republican Party steals the thunder of the Democrats as the party of “change,” and gains the advantage in future
elections.
You can't have a one time amnesty twice. If it is hard to resist amnesty this time it will be impossible to resist next time. n nUNLESS: You end birthright citizenship-make a law that says if you ever enter illegally neither you nor your children can ever become citizens-use e-verify. Anything else won't fool anyone and if you try it will just break the bond between the Republicans and those who pay attention to public policy. n nSincerely, n nGeorge n nIs this correct ? I stand ready to be corrected. n n
I've been a commentary subscriber for 11 years but when this subscription is up I'm probably going to let it lapse due to the magazine's blinders on immigration. n nIt is interesting that the flagship pro-Israel publication in the United States has never stopped to ask what the importation of millions of third world people to the United States electorate will do to Israel's standing here given the low station that Israel has in the third world.