The Grand Old Party No More?

There is nothing moderate about support for abortion or for the overthrow of the traditional definition of marriage. But there is for recognising that unbridled capitalism in unconservative (and historically un-American and un-Republican), that social responsibility is integral to patriotism and to family values, that there can only be a large and thriving middle class if the several tiers of government are harnessed in order to deliver and protect it, and that the patriotic, morally and socially conservative attitude to wars is to avoid them whenever and wherever possible.

Will we never see the like again? The practically certain GOP nominee next year gave socialised medicine to Massachusetts, having previously run for the Senate from Ted Kennedy’s left. That pro-abortion supporter of same-sex “marriage”, Rudy Giuliani, addressed the last Republican Convention to rapturous applause and will no doubt address the next one to the same warm reception; no such courtesy was extended to Ron Paul, who had far more delegates. That Convention nominated John McCain, in the tradition of Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, much of Reagan’s actual record (the people who lionise him now compared him to Neville Chamberlain when he was in office), George Bush the Elder, Dole, and George Bush the Younger as he had presented himself, perhaps even sincerely, in 2000.

Apparently, the Tea Party is off on a RINO hunt against Scott Brown, Orrin Hatch, Dick Lugar, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe. Would that be the same Tea Party that installed Scott Brown in the first place? It did not do very well in 2010, ending up claiming as its own several successful candidates whom it had previously disowned. Marco Rubio took fewer votes than his two opponents combined, and Bob Bennett would have been re-elected against the Tea Partier if he had run as an Independent. By contrast, the GOP’s old Moderate school staged a significant comeback, even returning Lincoln Chafee, who had openly endorsed Obama in 2008 and who was effectively endorsed by him in 2010, as Governor of Rhode Island as an Independent against the GOP’s official Tea Party nominee.

As the RNC is busy imposing open primaries in order to prevent any further Tea Party advances even on that pitiful showing, the Tea Party can look forward to campaigning this year for the Presidency to go to, I say again, the man who gave Massachusetts socialised medicine and who ran for the Senate from the left of Ted Kennedy. But even he is not going to win. So, in 2016, the Tea Party will be out on the stump for a man who is currently a serving member of the Obama Administration.

Watergate would not be a story at all now, and I flatly refuse to believe that anyone was really shocked by it at the time, although one does have to mourn the passing of a culture in which they at least felt obliged to pretend that they were. So another complete non-story, which everyone has always known and which makes no difference to anything, recently had to be dredged up in order to discredit the Civil Rights sympathiser, in marked contrast to Kennedy, who suspended the draft, who pursued détente with China, and who ended the Vietnam War along with Ford, an old stalwart of the America First Committee (as, to be fair, was JFK).

No one must ever know that that was once the Republican Party. No one must ever know about the Republican calls for Europe to revert to pre-1914 borders and thus end the First World War. No one must ever know about those Republicans who resisted entry into the Second World War until America was actually attacked by either side. No one must ever know about Eisenhower’s ending of the Korean War, his even-handed approach to Israel and the Palestinians, his non-intervention in Indo-China, and his denunciation of the military-industrial complex.

No one must ever know about Reagan’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 1983, and his initiation of nuclear arms reduction in Europe. No one must ever know about James Baker’s call to “lay aside, once and for all, the unrealistic vision of a Greater Israel” and to “foreswear annexation, stop settlement activity”. No one must ever know about Republican opposition to the global trigger-happiness of the Clinton Administration. No one must ever know about Bush the Younger’s removal of American troops from Saudi Arabia after 11th September 2001, thus ensuring that there has been no further attack on American soil.

And no one must ever know that there was once a President, a Republican President, who believed in wage and price control as surely as in the Clean Air Act and in the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, as surely as in the War on Cancer and in the War on Drugs, as surely as in Title IX and in the desegregation of schools in the Deep South, and as surely that the United States should launch no war over the Soviet Union's treatment of its Zionist dissidents. Those last have turned out to have been just as unpleasant, in their own way, as were many other categories of those who happened to dissent from the Soviet regime. And they now constitute a significant obstacle to peace in the Middle East, where they are busily engaged in denaturalising both the indigenous Christians and the Haredi Jews.

That said, from the party partly founded by Marxist veterans of 1848 who had gone on to fight for the Union, comes a startling outbreak of economic populism among those seeking to stop Mitt Romney. The Democrats absorbed most of the old Northeastern Republicans, making themselves financially dependent on holding to a combination of liberal social policies and the economic policies favoured by, because favouring, big business. Whereas the Republicans absorbed most of the old Southern Democrats, making themselves electorally dependent on holding to social conservatism. That ought also to have made them electorally dependent on holding to economic populism. Somehow, though, it never did.

Until now.

In November 2011, Democratic Governor Steve Beshear was re-elected by a margin of 20 points. In Kentucky. In Mississippi, the constitutional recognition of personhood from conception, while opposed by the outgoing Republican Governor, was supported not only by the Republican nominee to succeed him, but also by the Democrat, who is black. The Southern Democrats are on the way back. Only this time, they come in both colours. The impending Romney nomination makes it look as if the GOP has reverted to being the party of big business social liberalism, with what used to be called liberal interventionism thrown in, but of nothing else.

That is nowhere near a large enough constituency to carry the Electoral College, or to win or keep control of either House of Congress. But, especially if accompanied by at least lip service to conservative social principles and to international nonintervention, economic populism is. That is the rising Republican challenge to the Democrats. Their answer should be that their economic populism is integrated with, not lip service to, but the reality of conservative social policies and international nonintervention.

There is no conceivable policy reason for the supporters of any other Republican candidate to vote for Mitt Romney. Let them be given at least some policy reason to vote for Barack Obama. And even more to vote for the Democratic nominee in 2016. But if, in 2016 or 2020, the present trends had caused the Republicans to nominate and economically populist, socially conservative international noninterventionist, against a Democratic of whom those things could not be said, then the Republican would be our candidate, whom we should therefore do everything in our power to elect.

One way for the Democrats to avoid that position would be to restructure the party so that one would register as a Democrat through up to two, possibly three, of eight tendencies: Progressive (as the heirs of the New Left style themselves), Liberal, Farm-Labor, Environmentalist, Fiscal Conservative, Social Conservative, Moderate, and Paleoconservative. In each state or territory, the members of each Section would elect one member to the Democratic National Committee and 45 delegates to the Democratic National Convention, in the latter case with everyone having three votes, one for their preferred candidate on economic policy, one for their preferred candidate on social policy, and one for their preferred candidate on foreign policy.

Each state or territory would have 15 delegates in each category from each tendency, with the highest scoring candidate in that category being awarded five, then four, three, two, and one. In the event of fewer than five candidates, it would simply go back to the top of the list, so that, if there were three, the first placed scorer would get five, the second placed four, the third placed three, the first placed another two, and the second placed another one. That would mean the return of a proper Convention, choosing the nominee by exhaustive ballot while thrashing out a platform genuinely representative of a broad range of opinion.

If not, or even if so, then the Republican Party might restructure itself in similar manner, in order to guarantee representation to Fiscal Conservative, Social Conservative, Moderate, Paleoconservative, Neoconservative and Libertarian tendencies.