The Specter of One Party Rule
It would be easy to put the National Republican leadership down as brain-dead ideologues, and you would not be that far from an accurate description. But to be honest, they are faced with a very serious dilemma, that is neither simple for them to address effectively, nor would any solution be politically painless were they to find a leader with the courage to enact one.The basis of their problem is rooted in the nature of the American political system itself. The largest constituency that the vast majority of politicians are required to appeal to is at the state level. Many more run at the district and local level. At this level of granularity, you will find a tendency for people to hold a more consistent set of beliefs and opinions than at the broader, national level. A candidate for US Representative in a district in rural Alabama will have to have a vastly different set of social and political ideologies than a candidate for US Representative in urban Massachusetts would have. In and of itself, this is as it has always been, and is typically not a problem for a national political party or movement. At the National level, a party builds a coalition, employing a significant amount of ideological flexibility across geographic regions in order to represent the largest share of the electorate possible. An excellent example of this is the pro-life and pro-gun "Blue Dog" Democrats in the House and the so-called "centrist" Democrats in the Senate.
The problem for the Republicans has arisen directly out of the Bush/Cheney Presidency. So many of their core issues have been demonstrated to be unworkable, disastrous policies that the people soundly rejected them in both 2006 and 2008. From economic policy to foreign policy, from taxes to immigration, from free-market deregulation to unabashed union-busting, the entirety of the Republican platform has become anathema to a very large majority of Americans who want to see their government work to improve their lives and the lives of their families and neighbors.
But most Republicans in office today were put there by people in the south, the rural Midwest and parts of the Rocky Mountain west who continue to hold ever more narrow and parochial views of what is "American" and what is "socialism", never mind what the word actually means. Overall, in spite of their dominance in certain states and districts, this portion of the population represents only a third of the electorate, and is shrinking at a measurable rate. For any of these elected Republicans to try to take a national leadership role would require them to expose themselves to primary challenges from the far right in their home districts, and probable defeat , either to the Democratic candidate in the general election or the far-right challenger in the primary. The challenge can be summed up like this: The Republican party needs to moderate it's platform and move towards the center in order to be a viable national party, but any individual who does so will be removed from office. When an individual's political survival is pitted against the party's political survival, it takes a rare kind of politician, with a rare kind of courage, to step up to the plate. And not surprisingly, the Republicans haven't found that brilliant, charismatic messiah to lead them out of the wilderness.
Which brings us to Arlen Specter. Now it's arguable that Sen. Specter made the choice he did out of pure political expediency. The remaining Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate is very far right, and likely to nominate the radical Toomey over the moderate Specter. He certainly saw no clear path to another Senatorial term, which is the kind of survival challenge that tends to focus the mind. But even with that, he is an important example of where the Republican party is deficient, and he clearly demonstrates the things they will have to do to regain national political viability. By any measure, Specter has been an effective and powerful Conservative politician. His views and votes, while not as far right as the party might have liked, have been consistently supportive of the worst of the Republican agenda. The fact that he is not sufficiently radical for the right-wing is telling, but one wonders how much he might actually contribute to the progressive agenda. Certainly he was encouraged to make a commitment on health care reform, but overall one wonders if he might make the Blue Dog Democrats look positively socialist by comparison.
Fortunately, the very cravenness of Specter's abandonment of the Republican party might very well serve to moderate his actions, to the benefit of the Obama agenda. He will now have to run as a Democrat in 2010, so he will have to be sufficiently supportive of a progressive agenda to first avoid a Democratic primary challenge, and then to win the Senate seat itself.
The disintegration of the Republican party is not, in general, good news for our political system. A rational and viable opposition party can prevent the party in power from indulging in excesses that might otherwise be inevitable. But that opposition party needs to have a reasonable and viable platform, one that has some appeal and one that might result in better outcomes. To spew madness and discredited policies is neither valuable nor is it supportive of a viable political opposition. If the Republican party cannot find a way to moderate its ideology, indeed, if it continues it's headlong embrace of the most radical rightwing agenda, then another party will have to arise to challenge the Democrats for political leadership. It has become clear that bile, hatred and ignorance will not sustain a national political party in the twenty first century.
posted by mikey @ 12:32 PM
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