Are Democrats the New Conservatives?

“Republicans in danger of losing US ‘God vote’,” claimed Britain’s Daily Telegraph the other day, over a piece by Washington correspondent Toby Harnden. The piece was brief and its argument less than convincing, but I think its conclusion might be true anyway. If so, we could be seeing the start of a major realignment in American politics, and with it a useful clarification of what “conservative” and “liberal” ought to mean.

Let’s start with Harnden’s piece: His premise is that neither Fred Thompson (divorced) nor Rudy Giuliani (twice divorced) shows any interest in attending church or otherwise humoring the party’s Christian base – whereas Hillary Clinton (never divorced) is a regular churchgoer and says God helped her through the rough patches with Bill.

Yes, this argument looks weak, and Harnden weakened it further with quotes from Christian-right activist Gary Bauer, who countered obviously that Ronald Reagan was a divorced non-regular-churchgoer, while Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were both non-divorced regular-churchgoers (and self-described “born again Christians,” I might add). Bauer also stated that “[Christian v]oters are looking for somebody that they can agree with on the definition of marriage and on life and religious liberty and the larger war on Islamo-fascism and who can defeat Hillary Clinton.” In other words, Christians still prefer the Republican brand no matter who the new CEO might be.

Strictly speaking, that appears to be true. Although Harnden didn’t mention it, Gallup did a poll in July showing that churchgoers preferred Rudy over Hillary 53% to 42%, while non-churchgoers preferred Hillary by roughly the same margin. These two populations are about the same size, which helps to explain why Rudy and Hillary polled evenly, back in July, in a hypothetical head-to-head race.

However, although I don’t know of similar polls of churchgoers before July that would help in mapping out the trend here, it’s clear that in the broader head-to-head polls Hillary has gained about ten points over the past six months and now seems to have a slight lead. It’s hard to imagine that at least some of that shift hasn’t occurred among churchgoing Christians.

The July poll also indicated that Giuliani, among all the Republican candidates, was the only one to poll markedly lower among weekly churchgoers (24%) than among less-frequent churchgoers (33%), suggesting that if he is the candidate the family-values Christians will be looking for excuses to vote for someone else – and you can bet Clinton (or Gore if he throws his hat in) will try to be there for them.

 

 

The apparent strategy of candidates like Giuliani is more or less to let go of the social-conservative right, and to reach out to the more populous center. Evidently this was the message many Republicans took home from the disastrous 2006 mid-term elections, of which CNN’s Bill Schneider said:

Look what happened in two states on Election Day. In Pennsylvania, Senator Rick Santorum embraced a deeply conservative philosophy and never wavered. He went down. Santorum lost the center. Independents voted overwhelmingly for the Democrat. In California, Schwarzenegger carried independent voters handily. He reclaimed the center.

“What do Republicans do now?” concluded Schneider. “[F]ollow the example of one Republican who had a very good year.” In other words, be more libertarian and pragmatic.

Easier said than done. Christian social conservatives don’t like being ignored or marginalized. Here’s a report on the California state Republican convention from the San Francisco Chronicle:

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has championed “post-partisan” cooperation, issued a bold call for a return to Reagan’s “big tent” and moderation during the opening night of the GOP gathering of 1,400 Friday [7 September]. He warned conservative party activists who dominate the GOP to take the conciliatory middle of the road – court independents and address issues such as global warming and health care – or watch their party “dying at the box office.”

Minutes later, conservative Texas Gov. Rick Perry shattered that mood with an incendiary address deriding Schwarzenegger-style moderation and decrying California’s “bankrupt, liberal political philosophy” – exhorting Republicans to stand their ground on social issues such as abortion and gay marriage. And without ever mentioning the California governor’s name, Perry launched a blistering attack clearly aimed at his direction.

“It’s a sad, sad state of affairs when liberals campaign like Republicans to get elected, and Republicans govern like liberals to be loved,” he said, getting whoops and repeated standing ovations from the 400 delegates at the opening dinner that put Schwarzenegger’s polite reception to shame.

The question is whether the Republican Party, riven as it clearly is, can still move to the center without fracturing. Remember the Whigs? Irreconcilably split over the slavery question in the early 1850s, they lost most of their northern members to the new Republican Party, leaving their southern remnant too weak to compete. By 1856 the Whig Party was effectively extinct.

These days there is no viable third party on hand to draw in the social conservatives alienated by Republican libertarianism. So some might assume that these disgruntled conservatives will stay Republican because they have “nowhere else to go.”

I don’t believe that’s true – and I suspect the Democrats don’t believe it either. The alignment of Protestant, mostly Southern Whites with the Republican Party is a relatively recent phenomenon, and the history of Republican ideology – and political “conservatism” itself – suggests that this alignment is both non-essential and temporary.

 

 

Broadly speaking, Anglo-American conservatism began with Edmund Burke’s preference for a slower, more natural and sustainable pace of social change – a pace better suited to what he saw as our slow-changing human nature. To hold social change to this more humane pace, Burke generally advocated a more limited form of government – as opposed to radical utopian projects like the French Revolution. In this sense, social conservatism and limited government went hand in hand. One was the end, the other was the means.

The Industrial Revolution severed this connection. In fact, in the environment it established, the principle of limited government began to work against social conservatism. The drivers of rapid social change were no longer radical governments; they were inventors, industrialists and media tycoons. Limited government became the enabler of the social upheaval these market-based actors tended to cause.

Needless to say, the Republican Party never portrayed conservatism in these terms. Its inner conflict was basically concealed, so that the party (lest it shrink too much) could hold onto both small-government economic liberals and social conservatives. But the former represented the party’s pro-business core. Social conservatives – true “conservatives” – were usually needed in some form or another but were never treated as essential.

In Teddy Roosevelt’s day, for example, the social conservative role was filled by the Progressive wing of the party, whose concern for the social ecology extended even to environmentalism. But this alliance did not last long. By the 1920s the Republican Party had reverted to the control of its core economic liberals, who discredited themselves by enabling the stock-market and debt bubble that burst in the Great Depression. With the New Deal and the let’s-all-pull-together spirit of World War II, policies to conserve social and environmental ecology became associated primarily with the Democrats. “Progressive” is a label now enthusiastically used by Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and a great many Democratic voters, and it encompasses the increasingly popular Green movement.

In other words, Republicans at their core are not even conservatives in the logical sense of the term. And they have already lost one large strain of conservatism to the Democrats. Logically they should abandon their pretense to any kind of conservatism.

That might seem crazy, because Republicans are so often portrayed as the party of the uncompromising Christian right. But again, that is the case only recently and incidentally. Since the 1950s, Republican ideologues have tended to define their “conservatism” not as social or religious conservatism nor even as a 1920s-style economic liberalism, but as the secular promotion of freedom in virtually all spheres. Barry Goldwater, the purest libertarian the Republicans ever nominated for president, despised religious conservatives. Even Ronald Reagan was at heart a Goldwater Republican, as he revealed in a famous Reason magazine interview thirty two years ago:

I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals – if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.

Goldwater showed, when he was trounced by Lyndon Johnson in 1964, that Republicans cannot live on libertarianism alone. Nixon and Reagan learned this lesson well enough to reach far beyond the Republican core when they ran for office, but none of the electoral coalitions they built was really built to last.

Reagan’s “big tent,” as Schwarzenegger enviously calls it, was made up of angry Southern Whites, evangelical Christians, and Americans of all stripes who had been made anxious by the Cold War and economic malaise — and by Jimmy Carter’s general ineptitude of course.

The factors that brought these groups together have been fading ever since: The Cold War is over, and the Republicans have not fared as well, electorally, with the so-called War on Terror. Feelings of economic malaise are still with us, but they can no longer be pinned on the Democrats. The evangelicals have noticed that even with a born-again Christian at its head, the Republican Party has done almost nothing for them in terms of effective “family values” policymaking. Indeed, the Republican libertarian core is in the process of repelling Republican social conservatives.

The Republicans’ loss could be the Democrats’ gain. In fact, the blue-state party might now have its greatest coalition-building opportunity since 1932. In recent years Americans with a wide variety of political inclinations have been venting a common set of complaints: These have to do with the upheaval in the job market because of offshore outsourcing; the widening “wealth gap” between the very rich and everyone else; the extinction of small businesses by big-box retailers and e-tailers; out-of-control immigration; the sexualization and consumerization of children by advertisers and the media; the ubiquity of pornography via the Internet; the media-driven decay of social ties including marriage, friendships and civic associations; and last but not least, global warming. Every one of these issues is an unintended side effect of a free market system that might have been checked with greater social conservatism. In other words these are all really conservative issues. And logically, with the libertarian ideology that lies at their core, the Republican Party is on the wrong side of all of them.

Hillary Clinton, or Al Gore if he enters the race and beats her in the primaries, might wish to play it safe by throwing the usual sops to the left-wing base, sounding tough notes on terrorism, and waiting for Giuliani to fall into the character-issue quicksand. That could be a colossal mistake. By redefining their policies as the true conservative ones the Democrats would, at a stroke, not only capture much of the huge virtual coalition that is out there waiting, they would also be clarifying, almost for the first time, the issues and the choices that Americans really face these days — issues whose origins have been obscured deliberately by parties who’ve tried to be everything to everyone.

Yes, the Democrats still have a loony, socialist left as well as an extreme civil libertarian one. Would they lose these groups if they were to redefine themselves as a moderate social-conservative party, intent upon protecting, from the corruption of the market, some of America’s traditional cultural values? I don’t think so, and I don’t think it would matter in any case. The UK’s Labour Party has had relatively little trouble transforming itself, over the past decade or so, from the rusty refuge of coal miners and dole scroungers into the ideological home of centrists — which by the way is a more profound transformation than America’s Democrats would have to undertake. (The Conservative party leader, scrambling to distinguish himself from the new Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown, recently described himself ludicrously as ‘the heir to Blair’.)

How would the Democrats sell this new, essentially conservative redefinition of themselves? How would they come up with something as descriptive and unifying as Reagan’s famous “Morning in America” motif? Maybe they need look no further than It’s a Wonderful Life. As schmaltzy as the film is (and as Republican as Frank Capra was) it nevertheless presents a usefully stark contrast between the civic virtues that hold a small town together and the selfish, destructive forces that a libertarian freedom would unleash. Which version of Bedford Falls would most Americans recognize in their communities these days – the pleasant, trusting place bound by George Bailey’s communitarian values, or the unruly, nightmarish one transformed by Henry Potter’s greed? I suspect that most Americans, offered their political choices in this way, would have little hesitation about how to respond, because deep down they are conservative in the only true sense of the word.

 

Postscript: As Clinton widens her lead over Giuliani (Oct 4), Christian social conservatives say (Oct 1) they have begun to explore running a third party candidate who shares their values. But according to the Wall Street Journal (Oct 2) the Republicans aren’t shrinking to a base of pro-business economic liberals — because they’re losing them too.

New evidence suggests a potentially historic shift in the Republican Party’s identity — what strategists call its “brand.” The votes of many disgruntled fiscal conservatives and other lapsed Republicans are now up for grabs…. Some business leaders are drifting away from the party because of the war in Iraq, the growing federal debt and a conservative social agenda they don’t share.

Part of this “conservative social agenda” has nothing to do with the Christian right. The WSJ also cited a poll (Oct 3) that indicates (the remaining) Republican voters are against “free trade,” i.e., trade which appears to cost Americans their jobs, by “a nearly two-to-one margin.” David Brooks — did he read my post above? — says (Oct 5) the Republicans are collapsing because they have abandoned old-fashioned Burkean conservatism for the “creedal” conservatism of libertarians, neocons, and Christians.

See also “The Evangelical Crackup” in the NYTM (Oct 28) and “Is a New Conservatism Possible?” in Salon (Oct 29).

 

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