E.J. Dionne proves that he’s a great journalist, again, with his latest piece in The Atlantic. One of the things that kept running through my mind as I read his article was that the Reformicons seem unlikely to play a central role in the 2016 Republican primaries. Despite the fact that they’re among the only ones doing any original thinking (and, frankly, it ain’t all that original) on the conservative side, I just don’t see Ramesh Pannuru and Yuval Levin getting hired by Rand Paul or Ted Cruz to help them craft a set of policies. I could see Jeb Bush or Chris Christie doing that. But I just get a feeling that Jeb and Christie are not going to be able to shift the right’s attention onto the Earned Income Tax-Credit. The fight for the nomination won’t be won by the person offering the freshest set of policies, but by the person who best stirs the rumblings of hate towards liberals while still being able to present surface-level plausibility as a winning candidate.
Think about David Frum’s admonition that the GOP stop fighting for the prohibition of abortion and start focusing on reducing its occurrence “by two-thirds over the next ten years.” If a Republican president proposed something like that and had an actual sensible plan to make it happen, progressives would be completely on board. That’s because the things that will reduce unwanted pregnancies are things that progressives have long supported: protection of women against violence, access to affordable and effective contraception, sexual education, more economic security for the lower classes, and better upward mobility due to better access to higher education. What won’t work is lecturing people about abstinence and insisting the people get married before they have sex. We’re not going back to the days when people got married so that they could have sex. If they’re going to get married, it’s going to be because they can afford to do so, and because they want to make a commitment. If you want to encourage marriage and two-parent households, you should focus on economics, not preaching. In any case, the idea that a Republican can win his party’s nomination for president by calling a cease fire on the abolition of abortion is not one that is rooted in reality.
What we’re going to see instead is a brawl between neoconservatives and libertarians over foreign policy and a brawl between social conservatives and libertarians over things like the War on Drugs. The GOP cannot even discuss health care coherently, so I doubt we’ll see anything grounded in this world discussed on that topic. Do you think the GOP’s primary voters are going to give a crap about what David Brooks or Ross Douthat think about Common Core, Race to the Top, and No Child Left Behind?
Personally, I expect every candidate, excepting possibly Jeb Bush, to just call for block granting everything under the Sun and leaving actual policy and priority setting to the states. Of course, that’s a popular idea in the Reformicon Movement as well.
For Dionne, there’s something lamentable about the pathetic efforts of the wannabe reformers, but I actually see it as a positive. As a country, we’re not ready to reconcile. If the reformers were more sincere and effective and influential, it would be a sign that we might be able to have a functional divided government again sometime soon. But that’s not reality. What we need is a massive victory in 2016, and the reformers’ lack of seriousness, focus, and actual consequence is a great sign that we’ll get that giant victory.
