Tierney Asks: Can the GOP Survive?

My response can be stated in three little words: "I hope not."

Can This Party Be Saved?
By John Tierney
The New York Times

Republicans in Washington did not abandon their principles lightly. When they embraced “compassionate conservatism,” when they started spending like Democrats, most of them didn’t claim to suddenly love big government.

No, they were just being practical. The party’s strategists explained that the small-government mantra didn’t cut it with voters anymore. Forget eliminating the Department of Education — double its budget and expand its power. Stop complaining about middle-class entitlements — create a new one for prescription drugs. Instead of obsessing about government waste, bring home the bacon.

But as long as we’re being practical, what do Republicans have to show for their largess? Passing the drug benefit and the No Child Left Behind Act gave them a slight boost in the polls on those issues, but not for long. When voters this year were asked in a New York Times/CBS News Poll which party they trusted to handle education and prescription drugs, the Republicans scored even worse than they did before those bills had been passed.

Meanwhile, they’ve developed a new problem: holding the party together. As Ryan Sager argues in his new book, “The Elephant in the Room,” the G.O.P. is sacrificing its future by breaking up the coalition that brought it to power.

A half-century ago, during the Republicans’ days in the wilderness, a National Review columnist named Frank Meyer championed a strategy that came to be known as fusionism. He appealed to traditionalist conservatives to work with libertarians. It wasn’t an easy sell. The traditionalists wanted to rescue America from decadence, while the libertarians just wanted be left alone to pursue their own happiness — which often sounded to the traditionalists like decadence.

Meyer acknowledged the fears that libertarianism could lead to “anarchy and nihilism,” but he also saw the dangers of traditionalists’ schemes for moral regeneration.

“If the state is endowed with the power to enforce virtue,” he wrote, “the men who hold that power will enforce their own concepts as virtuous.” The path to both freedom and virtue was the fusionist compromise: smaller government.

The coalition started with Barry Goldwater but persevered to elect Ronald Reagan and take over Congress. But then Republicans’ faith in small government waned, partly because they discovered the perks of incumbency, and partly because they were outmaneuvered by Bill Clinton, who took their ideas (welfare reform, a balanced budget) and embarrassed them during the government shutdown of 1995.

The shutdown didn’t permanently traumatize the public. In poll after poll since then, respondents have preferred smaller government and fewer services. But the experience scared Republicans so much that they became big-government conservatives.

Soccer moms were promised social programs; the religious right got moral rhetoric and cash for faith-based initiatives. Meyer’s warnings about enforcing virtue were forgotten, along with the traditional Republican preference for states’ rights. It became a federal responsibility to preach sexual abstinence to teenagers and stop states from legalizing euthanasia, medical marijuana and, worst of all, gay marriage.

Big-government conservatism has helped bring some votes to the G.O.P., particularly in the South. But as Sager writes: “It’s not as if the Republican Party could do much better in the South at this point; it’s not really the ideal region to which to pander.”

The practical panderer should look West — not to the Coast, which is reliably blue, but to the purple states in the interior. Sager notes that a swing of just 70,000 votes in Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico would have cost Bush the last election, and that he lost ground in the Southwest between 2000 and 2004.

The interior West is growing quickly, thanks to refugees from California seeking affordable housing. These Westerners have been voting Republican in presidential elections, but have also gone for Democratic governors. They tend to be economic conservatives and cultural liberals. They’ve legalized medical marijuana in Nevada, Colorado and Montana. They’re more tolerant of homosexuality than Southerners are, and less likely to be religious.

They’re suspicious of moralists and of any command from Washington, whether it’s a gun-control law or an educational mandate. In Colorado and Utah, they’ve exempted themselves from No Child Left Behind.

They’re small-government conservatives who would have felt at home in the old fusionist G.O.P. But now they’re up for grabs, just like the party’s principles.

Photo credit: John Tierney. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

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