Weather vs. Climate in Politics (Not Global Warming Related)

Rick Moran at Rightwing Nuthouse has a wonderful post up called After the Storm, A Rising Tide where he tries to make some predictions about the future of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.  It’s well worth a read, as he delves into history and quite a bit of detail about the current Republican coalition between fiscons, socons, and neocons.

Towards the end, he concludes his post with something of a gloomy forecast for the GOP:

But no matter who is nominated and elected in 2008, the fracturing of the conservative movement, already well underway, will remain a huge issue. While I wouldn’t expect a rethinking of basic conservative principle, when the dust settles it is possible that conservatism and the GOP will not be as joined at the hip as they are now – especially given the animus between many mainstream conservatives and the social cons. I laid down some thoughts on what a post-fractured conservative movement might need to think about:

For conservatism to survive and even thrive, a new paradigm must be realized that recognizes we live in a different world than the one inhabited by our ancestors and that many of the old verities we cherished are just no longer relevant to what America has become. For better or worse, the United States is changing – something it has always done and always will do. Without altering most of the core principles of conservatism, it should be possible to change with it, supplying common sense alternatives to liberal panaceas for everything from health care to concerns over climate change….

Now I am not saying that conservatives should compromise their principles to gain success in the legislature nor am I saying those principles should be abandoned in order to gain electoral victory. But there is a difference between having a vital conservative movement that shapes and informs government and one that has no relevancy whatsoever to modern America.

Clearly, applying conservative principles to governance should be the goal. And just as clearly, there is no lack of ideas on how to make that happen. The disconnect I speak of above arises from the cage that Republican candidates have been placed in by the various factions of conservatism that makes them slaves to an agenda that is out of date, out of touch, and after 2008, there’s a good chance that it will lead to Republicans being out of luck.

Breaking out of that cage will be difficult unless the party continues to lose at the polls. And part of that breaking free will be making the Reagan legacy a part of history and not a part of contemporary Republican orthodoxy. The world that Reagan helped remake is radically different than the one we inhabit today and yet, GOP candidates insist on invoking his name as if it is a talisman to be stroked and fondled, hoping that the magic will rub off on them. Reagan is gone and so is the world where his ideas resonated so strongly with the voters.

But Reagan’s principles remain with us. Free markets, free nations, and free men is just as powerful a tocsin today as it was a quarter century ago. The challenge is to remake a party and the conservative movement into a vessel by which new ideas about governing a 21st century industrialized democracy can be debated, adopted, and enacted. Without abandoning our core beliefs while redefining or perhaps re-imagining what those beliefs represent as a practical matter, conservatism could recharge itself and define a new relationship between the governed and the government.

But before reform comes the fall. And even if, as Yglesias believes is possible, the party and the movement are able to limp along for a few years with a cobbled together coalition, eventually the piper must be paid and the wages earned. It won’t be a quick or easy process. But it will happen nonetheless. And out of the bitterness and recriminations will emerge a different Republican party, animated by conservative principles and true to a legacy that has as its foundation a belief in individual liberty and personal responsibility.

With all due respect to Mr. Moran, I believe he’s confused weather with climate in predicting storms and rising tides.

Perhaps he’s absolutely correct that we Republicans will face electoral defeat and defeat in 2008, 2010 and beyond.  Perhaps he’s also correct that there will be a fundamental change in the Republican party afterwards.

But if such a thing were to happen, I believe that we will see a return to the center — back to the foundations of modern conservatism.  We’re looking at short term weather patterns, not climate change.

Answering Mr. Moran’s predictions is no easy thing, and I turn to a far better authority than myself to do so.

Americans are hungry to feel once again a sense of mission and greatness.

I don’t know about you, but I am impatient with those Republicans who after the last election rushed into print saying, “We must broaden the base of our party”—when what they meant was to fuzz up and blur even more the differences between ourselves and our opponents.

It was a feeling that there was not a sufficient difference now between the parties that kept a majority of the voters away from the polls. When have we ever advocated a closed-door policy? Who has ever been barred from participating?

Our people look for a cause to believe in. Is it a third party we need, or is it a new and revitalized second party, raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all of the issues troubling the people?

Let us show that we stand for fiscal integrity and sound money and above all for an end to deficit spending, with ultimate retirement of the national debt.

Let us also include a permanent limit on the percentage of the people’s earnings government can take without their consent.

Let our banner proclaim a genuine tax reform that will begin by simplifying the income tax so that workers can compute their obligation without having to employ legal help.

And let it provide indexing—adjusting the brackets to the cost of living—so that an increase in salary merely to keep pace with inflation does not move the taxpayer into a surtax bracket. Failure to provide this means an increase in government’s share and would make the worker worse off than he was before he got the raise.

Let our banner proclaim our belief in a free market as the greatest provider for the people.

Let us also call for an end to the nit-picking, the harassment and over-regulation of business and industry which restricts expansion and our ability to compete in world markets.

Let us explore ways to ward off socialism, not by increasing government’s coercive power, but by increasing participation by the people in the ownership of our industrial machine.

Our banner must recognize the responsibility of government to protect the law-abiding, holding those who commit misdeeds personally accountable.

And we must make it plain to international adventurers that our love of peace stops short of “peace at any price.”

We will maintain whatever level of strength is necessary to preserve our free way of life.

A political party cannot be all things to all people. It must represent certain fundamental beliefs which must not be compromised to political expediency, or simply to swell its numbers.

I do not believe I have proposed anything that is contrary to what has been considered Republican principle. It is at the same time the very basis of conservatism. It is time to reassert that principle and raise it to full view. And if there are those who cannot subscribe to these principles, then let them go their way.

Perhaps I am guilty of rubbing the Reagan talisman, as Mr. Moran suggests.  I counter that perhaps he is too hasty in trying to remake the Republican party and the conservative movement.  In saying that the challenge facing the GOP is wholesale transformation (”remake” is not “reform”), I believe he has bought into the dominant meme amongst liberals that the old ways are by definition outdated and no longer relevant.  From that meme, we get the theory of the “living Constitution” for one example.

There is no need to redefine or reimagine what our core beliefs represent as a practical matter, nor is there a need to “recharge” conservatism and define a “new relationship between the governed and the government”.  That is wholesale surrender.

And it is unwarranted alarmism.  Because the American people have not changed fundamentally in 20 years when Reagan was president, nor in 36 years since he made that speech, nor for that matter in 300 years since the Founders gathered to pledge their Lives, their Fortune, and their sacred Honor to the cause of freedom.

The American people are hungry to feel once againa sense of mission and greatness.  Our people are looking for a cause to believe in.  They are looking for leaders who will boldly proclaim our principles of a people who have a government, not a state that has subjects.

Our problem has not been a lack of a theory of a new relationship between the governed and the government, nor a failure to redefine our core beliefs.  Indeed our problem has been the failure to live up to existing core beliefs.  Our problem has been the corruption of the Republican elite acting exactly as if they had been Democrats once ensconced in the halls of power, including, disappointingly, President Bush.

Before we throw the baby out with the bathwater, before we think a chilly rain is the sign of climate change instead of just a rain shower, why don’t we try actually doing what we say?  Why don’t we elect leaders who actually have principles, and once elected, why don’t we try holding them accountable to those principles?

It is said that politics is the art of compromise.  Well, we’ve been practicing that art for so long that we may as well be Michaelangelo of politics.  It’s time to let the liberals learn to practice the art.  It is time for us to start standing up for what we believe in.

And those who cannot subscribe to our principles, those who would rather redefine or reimagine them… as the Gipper said… let them go their own way.

-TS