Newtered

The Republican contest will now drone on for months before Mitt Romney is nominated anyway. Oh, what fun. But also a grave abrogation of responsibility. For all practical purposes, America at federal level is now a one-party state, since the other party has made itself unworthy of serious attention. Already the party of utopian global war without end, at astronomical expense and at whatever cost to the liberties of American citizens, it formally ceased to be the party of family values when a hall full of its activists cheered Newt Gingrich to the echo for his adultery and for his desire to institutionalise it with his second ex-wife.

Socially and culturally traditional Republicans ought to be proud inheritors of the economic and political legacy of Progressivism and of the Nonpartisan League. Socially and culturally conservative Democrats ought to be proud inheritors of the economic and political legacy of Populism and of the Farmer-Labor Parties. Independents ought to be proud inheritors of the Republican and Democratic, traditional and conservative, Progressive and Populist, Nonpartisan and Farmer-Labor legacy of international nonintervention. Liberal, environmentalist, fiscally conservative, and libertarian interests are not illegitimate. But neoconservatism and the New Left are beyond the bounds of acceptable debate. And priority belongs to progressive traditionalism and to conservative populism.

The Southern tradition is in reality the tradition of everything that now unites the two sides of America’s Scots-Irish family, black and white: blue-collar job protection, immigration control, English as the national language, abortion reduction, marriage as only ever the union of one man and one woman, a strong defence capability used strictly for its proper defensive purpose, and the very considerable use of government action, federal as well as state and local, to secure public goods as economically populist as they are socially and culturally conservative, and on both counts rooted in activist, anything but liberal, Christianity. That true Southern tradition also includes opposition to the waging of aggressive wars by the federal government, wars that harvest the black and the blue-collar white alike.

On every point, the Southern tradition corresponds closely, both to the Northern tradition of Catholic Encyclicism, and to the Western tradition exemplified by the (Democratic-rooted) Farmer-Labor Parties and by the (Republican-rooted) Nonpartisan League, as well as to the whole African-American tradition with which it is so intimately bound up. Each of those either closely resembles, or is related to, the activist political traditions both of Orthodox and of Classical Reform Judaism. And each of them closely resembles, or is related to, the witness of the Latter-day Saints on a number of contentious issues, from abortion and the definition of marriage to poverty and nuclear weapons.

At every level and from every state, such candidates urgently need to be nominated and elected, whether as Republicans, or as Democrats, or as members of other parties, or as Independents. Roll on 2016.