I actually think J-Rube’s column today is thoughtful. I have been having many of the same thoughts. She begins by making a statement of fact:
Thirty years after Ronald Reagan was president, Republicans are still running on a tripartite alliance of social, fiscal and foreign policy conservatives. Alas, such candidates run on a myth; that coalition has splintered and what will replace it is far from clear.
She then runs through various scenarios involving different alliances before returning to her original point.
The only certainty is that the candidate who comes forward as a cookie-cutter “three-legged-stool” (strong defense, economic conservative, social traditionalist) conservative is going to wind up pleasing no one and running into the same limitations that Mitt Romney did: There are not enough of those voters who follow those prescriptions to win the White House.
I disagree that such a candidate would please “no one.” They would likely please more than 45% of the voters, just as Romney and McCain did in their campaigns. The problem is that they’d be unlikely to win 50% of the voters or to put together a winning Electoral College map.
That means that the 2016 candidates must go in search of new coalitions. Rubin understands this.
I believe it will sort itself out in the primary itself, which becomes more akin to constructing a parliamentary majority (alliances, concessions, truces, compromises of convenience).
What’s actually happened here is that the Republicans have discovered that the strategy they used successfully in 2004 will no longer work. John McCain had a variety of options in 2008 but chose to tack to the right to shore up an unenthusiastic base. Romney repeated the same flawed strategy.
One way to think about this is to look at the three legs of the stool. In Rubin’s formulation, one leg is based on a strong national defense, one leg is based on economic conservatism, and one leg is based on social conservatism. All three legs have been hollowed out by termites. On defense, it’s not just that the Bush administration destroyed the party’s advantage by invading Iraq; they split the conservative movement which now has a powerful new isolationist strain represented most recently by Rand Paul’s 13-hour filibuster focusing on the drone program. That Paul’s filibuster was about more than just some theoretical domestic drone program became clear when Lindsey Graham and John McCain denounced it on the Senate floor. A seam has opened up on the right regarding our role in the world, and the neo-conservatives are feeling isolated.
The strains are showing on the economic front, too, as Tea Party absolutists are forcing a policy on the Republican leadership that they don’t actually support. John Boehner doesn’t want the sequester. He doesn’t want to toy with the debt ceiling. But he doesn’t have a choice. His own party will not allow him to cut a deal and he has given up negotiating with the president because he cannot deliver a deal. This isn’t just dysfunction. This is unacceptable to the business community, from the national Chamber of Commerce, to Wall Street, to countless people who do business with the government, including the entire defense industry. The economy collapsed on Bush’s watch, which is bad enough for the GOP, but the current iteration of the Republican Party is doing everything in it’s power to weaken today’s economy. And business leaders know this.
If mismanaging our foreign policy and our economy were unforced errors, the problem with the third leg, social conservatism, is largely a demographic problem over which the Republicans have little control. There are at least three problems that conservatives have on the social front. The first is related to sexual morality, and it includes attitudes about homosexuality, abortion, contraception, marriage, and women’s role in the workplace. The Republicans have adopted a minority position on all these issues, and among the younger generations, the GOP’s positions are starkly out of the mainstream.
The second problem is really a racial issue that traces back to the adoption of the Southern Strategy by Richard Nixon and the realignment of the Republican Party as a Southern party that appeals to the white working class’s sense of grievance and resentment. With the election of a black president, a lot of this grievance and resentment that had been subterranean or dormant suddenly came to the surface and did severe damage to the Republicans’ image with not only blacks but Latinos, Asian-Americans, and even Native-Americans. All the talk about the president’s birth certificate really polarized the country, and not to the advantage of the Republicans.
The third problem is basically religious, but only as it pertains to a fundamentalist view that discounts science and higher education. This attitude was best expressed by Rick Santorum in the primaries when he said, “We will never have the media on our side, ever, in this country. We will never have the elite, smart people on our side.” Santorum also called the president a “snob” for wanting people to get a college education. This attitude has thoroughly alienated the academic and scientific communities, but also a huge segment of the professional class. And it’s severe enough that it manifests itself in things like climate change-denialism becoming an orthodox position in the Republican Party.
So, it’s not just that the three traditional legs of the Republican Party are now insufficient. It’s not just that the three legs are no longer working in harmony. The legs themselves are rotted out.
If the Republican Party is going to give up on gay-bashing, embrace immigration reform, and accept pro-choice candidates, then their army of bigots and fundamentalists will stay home. That’s the prospect that McCain faced when he chose Palin over Lieberman, and the choice Romney faced when he decided to recommend an immigration policy focused on self-deportation.
The GOP establishment is trying to figure out a way forward but all signs point to more of the same. Almost all Republican lawmakers are currently more concerned about a primary from the right than a defeat in a general election against a Democrat. Nothing in recent Republican primaries would indicate that a candidate can win by tacking to the center.
Probably the best way for the Republicans to proceed is to open up all their primaries to independents so that their mouth-breathing base doesn’t continue to terrify anyone considering moderation on any issue.
The Republicans are very unified in their opposition to the president, but it’s a surface unity that will not hold. The party of Reagan is spinning apart.
