Tag Archives: Republicans

Should Leaders Who Can’t Govern Their Party Govern the Country?

11 Jun 2012 By in The Republicans Tags: , , , , , , , , 14 Comments

This is the question that the turmoil within the Republican Party prompts these days, as the moderate wing of the party battles to maintain control over a grass-roots extremism it has legitimated.

Is this what a dying political party looks like?  This is what flashes through my mind when I read or hear about the Republican Party.  The party isn’t dying, at least not yet: but the very forces of intolerance and intransigence it encouraged are assailing it from within.  Unless the moderate wing of the GOP can reassert itself and prevail, the party will continue its disastrous turn to the right.  Not only will its prospects for power dim, but the entire country will suffer, too.

Extreme conservatism is a minority view
Despite the media hype—fanned by talk radio and cable TV—extreme conservatism is not the dominant American viewpoint.  We are not a nation of extremists.  The desire of the country’s majority for sophisticated, moderate leadership was expressed in its 2008 rejection of Sarah Palin and, more recently, in Republican voters’ resounding rejection of conservative presidential hopefuls Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann, and Rick Perry.  Each of these candidates received lavish publicity, arousing fears that they represented the new face of America; in each case, support for these candidates proved meager indeed.

Weakening the fiber of nation and party
Yet the fate of the Republican Party is being directed by this assertive minority.  It’s the faction that Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich chose to pander to.  It’s the faction that hates the separation of church and state, that would attack the independence of our judiciary.  It’s the faction that’s against modern medicine.  That’s against female contraception.  That’s uncomfortable with racial equality.  In their quest for power, these conservatives have begun chipping away at principles and institutions that formerly sacred to all Americans and protective of us all.

Moderate Republicans are captive
In the face of this, the only Republicans to speak out against extremism have been members of the Bush family.  During the primary season, Jeb Bush distanced himself from the new conservatism while signalling disappointment at the Party’s loss of vision.  Barbara Bush has repeatedly expressed dismay at Republicans’ uncivil conduct and their disavowal of compromise.

These, though, are just two voices in a party that, by and large, has chosen to amplify and accommodate spurious right-wing demands.  Prior to 2010, there were reasons to hope that the social conservative wing of the party, for want of a victory, was moving into a more quiescent, marginal phase.  Unfortunately, the emergence of the Tea Party, with its new crop of faces, its fiscal focus, and its idealistic hatred of our federal tradition, has given new energy to the disparate elements that make up social conservatism.

Citizens United has further exaggerated the significance of rabble-rousing candidates like Newt Gingrich, whose funding was all out of proportion to the support he enjoyed. 

A terrible tactical decision
All along, moderate Republicans could have tamped down and disavowed right-wing extremism as it began taking hold, like crabgrass, on their impeccably manicured property.  Republicans could have chosen not to assimilate the Tea Party.  They could have refused funding to candidates whose intolerance is extreme enough to qualify as unpatriotic. They could have silenced the racist “dog whistle” that goes by the name of the birther movement.  Instead, moderates have chosen to go along and get along with a dangerous minority.  Why?  Because they need the support and approval of these voters too badly.  Without this virulent sub-population, moderate Republicans cannot hope to attain the majority needed to elect a president or control Congress.

Consumed by a wasting disease from inside
Now this emboldened faction is paralyzing and destroying moderate Republican leaders.  In recent primaries, Tea Partiers have targeted old-line Republicans like Richard Lugar for defeat.  They have reduced House Speaker John Boehner to impotence by stalemating last year’s negotiations over the debt ceiling by refusing to compromise.  Boehner bristled at David Axelrod’s recent allusion to a “Republican reign of terror” but, in truth, moderate Republicans are beginning to bear the brunt of  a “reign of terror” that their conservative wing is waging from inside.

Is Mitt Romney the man to speak truth to power?
It’s hard to imagine Mitt Romney, who wants so badly to be liked, disciplining and harmonizing the unwieldy elements that now constitute “the Grand Old Party.”  In his eagerness to gain office, Romney has promised to be the conservatives’ standard-bearer, while hoping the rest of us won’t consider what that means.  Unlike Jeb and Barbara Bush, Romney lacks the gumption to speak out against a strain of political intolerance that could spell the ruin of Republicanism—and that’s begun to harm the republic, too.

RELATED:
Is the Republican Party Dying?

Bringing Political Innovation to Market

24 May 2012 By in Political Innovation Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Photograph of a Polaroid Land Camera 1000 by Chris Lüders (shared via Wikimedia Commons)

Can corporate models teach us anything about political change?  One of the problems politically active Americans face today is that the Republican and Democratic parties are organized around outmoded ideas (a topic I’ve written a lot about already).  Yet what do we know about how to bring new political ideas to market?  How do we introduce better ways and ideas to a political marketplace that, for over a century, has been dominated by just two parties?

The Instagram/Polaroid analogy

I’ve been thinking about this ever since reading a smart article by Nick Bilton about Instagram, the digital photo-sharing start-up that Facebook paid $1 billion to acquire.  The hallmark of an Instagram is its resemblance to an old-fashioned Polaroid.

What interested Bilton was why a start-up had brought this idea to market, rather than an old-line camera company like Kodak or Polaroid.  These were, after all, the towering pioneers of innovative film processing.  Polaroid, in particular, had made its name developing a camera and film process that allowed people to make and share their photographs instantly.  For decades, Kodak and Polaroid were cash cows, dominating the markets that sprang up around their own innovative technologies.

Yet, amid the onslaught of digital technology, neither proved able to change enough.  Though the market for their products had been dwindling for decades, neither company managed to make the transition to digital.  Today, both companies are teetering on the brink of death, while Instagram has grown rich and famous on the strength of images with a “Polaroid feel.”

“Disruptive technologies”

Bilton concluded that the success breeds constraints that make established companies hesitant to embrace the next new idea.  Companies become wedded to the ideas that brought them to the top.  They develop cultures aimed at perpetuating the gains that have already been made.  Having once brought a new idea to market, the resulting business rightly views the next new idea or technology as disruptive.

A company dependent on profits from an existing technology will have trouble compromising that in order to capitalize on the next new thing.  As one of Bilton’s sources observes, “It’s tough to change the fan belt when the engine is running.”  (And didn’t Bill Gates once admit to being terrified of the next unknown, tinkering with a new idea in his garage?)

The analogy applies to the political scene

This is exactly how I think about the political scene, whose very landscape the Democratic and Republican parties have shaped.  These two parties became dominant because, at crucial points in our history, they supplied ideas and platforms that were right for the time.  The visions and forms of action they proposed were ones around which millions of citizens could organize.

Support for the major parties is dwindling because they rely on outmoded ideas.  They sell products many of us have no interest in buying.  An estimated 30 percent of voters are not aligned with either party, making each “major” party a minority.

Yet, structurally, the parties deter competition.  Though ideologically moribund, the Republican and Democratic parties are vigorous institutions.  They are known entities.  They have millions of adherents, and familiar brand names.  They’re well capitalized.  And they sit atop vast hierarchies of state and local organizations that penetrate into every ward and district of the country.  Every political event in the US is understood and described in terms of these two entities, a sure sign of their authority.

These behemoths are more interested in maintaining market share than in changing their offerings.  Too much newness carries risk, just as it did for Kodak and Polaroid.  There may be a broad constituency out there, clamoring for new political leadership, but the major parties will view as a disruption any force hoping to reinvigorate politics by espousing a new ideology.

The calcified rhetoric of our politicians and their parties is strangely at odds with the political ferment of the time.  All around lies evidence of amazing levels of political activism and concern, whether on the left or the right, whether in populist movements like Occupy or the Tea Party, or in the billions of comments, tweets, and posts that Americans generate in political conversation every day.

Unlike in business, how ideas move from the bottom to the top of the political hierarchy is incredibly murky.  Yet anyone who wants to get this country into better political shape needs to take an interest in the how of political change.

Image: A Polaroid Land Camera 1000,
courtesy of the photographer, Chris Lüders, from this source.

The Political Animal at Rest #2

19 Apr 2012 By in The Political Animal at Rest Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

The other day I watched Frost/Nixon, the 2008 film adapted from the 2006 play adapted from, well, the 1977 bit of history.  Michael Sheen and Frank Langella reprise their Broadway performances as David Frost and Richard Nixon, respectively, working out their divergent fates in the series of on-camera interviews that the British television personality set up with Nixon three years after he resigned from the presidency.

I wasn’t too blown away by the movie but think it’s worth seeing for several reasons.  First, I’m in favor of anything that gets a person thinking about an important historical event or personality.  This, the movie does.  It suggests the complex emotional currents swirling around in the aftermath of Watergate, as a chain of ridiculous and unnecessary crimes brought down the entire inner circle of the White House and prompted the most powerful man in the nation to flee ignominiously rather than face impeachment or say what had happened—what he had done—while he was in office.

Yes, the ignominy of Richard Nixon’s end was astonishing.  More to the point, his furtive escape from the machinery of justice left the American people full of frustration, disappointment, and hostility.  They were entitled to something more and better from their leader.  Nixon’s violation of their contract left them degraded and cheated.  They watched powerlessly as Nixon climbed into his presidential helicopter (which belonged to them, by the way) and flew away from blame.  The film doesn’t really do justice to these precipitating events and their effects on the public, but it channels enough of the flavor of this peculiar historical moment to give viewers the idea.

Second, Michael Sheen is brilliant as David Frost, depicted here as a benign, happy-go-lucky risk-taker.  Now something of a British national treasure (the Australian-born Frost was knighted and is still working at age 73), he was then at risk (we are to believe) of becoming a nobody.  Adrift professionally, Frost latches on to the desperate and expensive scheme of interviewing Nixon as a way to save himself from oblivion and irrelevance.  Bleak prospects and a yen for respectability drive both characters into a wary relationship and a mediated struggle for supremacy.  Will the seemingly careless Frost manage to wrest anything valuable from his cagey and formidable adversary?  Frost’s success in doubling down at a critical juncture and exacting admissions from Nixon that ostensibly relieve a troubled nation makes this the ultimate Brit feel-good movie.

Frank Langella’s Nixon is evocative enough to send you off on a quest for vestiges of the real man, and this is the final reason the film is worth viewing.  The question of Nixon’s role in history is essentially a question of personality, a topic this film treats inconclusively.  Yet even its cursory sketch of Nixon’s discordant makeup raises questions that Americans will be debating for years to come.  Curiosity sent me to YouTube, where, for a time, footage from the original interviews was on view.  The memory of Nixon assessing his own failings will stay with me a long time.  It’s compelling stuff.

RELATED:
The Political Animal at Rest #1 (on the 1942 Capra film Meet John Doe)

Is the Republican Party Dying?

22 Mar 2012 By in The Republicans Tags: , , , , 13 Comments

The question is in the air, so why not ask it?

I think the answer is no.  But the question is out there because the Republican party is badly divided, in a way that many of us have never seen.  As a historian, I think that maybe this is what a party looks like when it’s beginning to go.  Like long ago when the once all-powerful Federalists petered out and ceased to matter nationally (circa 1820); or when the high-minded Whig Party gave up the ghost, startlingly soon after getting Zachary Taylor into the White House (circa 1850).  Or when the Democratic Party split in two on the eve of the Civil War, its members suddenly riven over slavery.

Parties do die, of course; but no major party has died in a very long time.  Our 20th-century parties are much hardier and more redoubtable institutions than were their counterparts 150 years ago.  That, in itself, is an argument against the Republican Party disappearing.

The GOP has a big problem, though.  Its conservative wing is weakening the party, in the sense of compromising its appeal to moderates.  This is something I’ve written about several times.  Over the past five years, the GOP establishment made a couple of costly mistakes, as when John McCain chose his “game-changing” running-mate, or when the Republican leadership decided to embrace the uncompromising Tea Partiers rather than cut them loose.  Had the Tea Party been treated as a distinct third party, the limits of its appeal would have become evident, and by now it would have been dead.  Instead, in the aftermath of the mid-term elections, congressional Republicans like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner proclaimed that there was no difference between themselves and the Tea Party, with the consequence that the Republicans have become the party of ‘No.’

It’s a problem the party itself could solve, and perhaps it will.  It could enforce some kind of ideological discipline through the instrument of the party platform or disavow some of its members who, in their fervor, have assailed some of the country’s most sacred national principles, such as the separation of church and state or the independence of the judiciary.  These are not creations of a particular party; they are features of our Constitution that the Founding Fathers labored to establish and that we have a duty to take seriously, and even revere.

Meanwhile, it’s clear that spatial and social segregation is a factor perpetuating the moderate-conservative divide.  Remember those maps Richard Florida did a few years ago, showing that people of higher education and means were becoming geographically concentrated in particular areas of the US, along the coasts, and near cities?  This type of migration, along with increased social stratification, has produced a country where people of different types no longer live together or interact as they did formerly.  The social relationships so fostered were politically moderating.  Instead, we see the demographic divide being replicated in the results of recent Republican primaries, resulting in a protracted struggle between Mitt Romney and his conservative-backed rivals.

Going forward, this balkanization will assure the conservatives of continued strength in Congressional races, governorships, and state legislatures.  Whether this mix of conditions will serve the Republican Party as a whole well in the years ahead remains to be seen.

RELATED AND NEWER:
Susan Barsy, The Incredible Shrinking GOP, Our Polity, November 2012.
Ryan Lizza, “Can The GOP Save Itself?“, The New Yorker, March 2012.

New Democrats

7 Mar 2012 By in The Democrats Tags: , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

One of the strange things about the Democratic Party is that it’s only had two major ideological phases in its very long life.  In the first phase of its life—from 1828 to 1932—it was the party of less government, states’ rights, and laissez-faire.  In the second phase—dating from 1932 to the present—it’s been the party of big government, activist government, and more dedicated than the Republicans to the rights of the people.

Even though the Democratic Party is full of good people who believe they have right on their side, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the Republican Party is more vinegary, more organized and interesting.  Perhaps because long ago the Democratic Party believed in “letting everyone be,” its members (and I’m talking now about its ordinary members, not about leading Democrats) tend to let the Republicans hog the spotlight and get away with all kinds of outrageous things.  The Democratic Party plays defense, but as a whole its members are not organized and energized to PREVAIL in defining the character of our political life.  This is why we are always focused on the Republican Party, with its weird leaders, its mama grizzlys, its Bible thumpers, its dark strategists like Dick Cheney and Karl Rove.

This is a shame, because it’s obvious that there is a lot of work the Democratic party, root and branch, could be doing.  If Democrats thought like Republicans, they would be out there in the vast “red” districts of the South and West, working to strengthen their base by reminding voters of the true civic traditions of this country.  They would be active in school districts, where the Republicans are rewriting history with misleading textbooks and charter schools.  If Democrats thought like Republicans, they would be busy trying to capitalize on Obama’s considerable star-power by tossing out their old ideas and fashioning a new ideological message, around which a vast army of moderates and independents could rally.

Instead, despite the palpably weak condition of the Republican Party, most Democrats are sitting on the sidelines, just laying bets on whether or not Obama will manage to squeak through and resigned to the prospect of losing more seats in Congress.  Yet this is a time when the Democrats (given a more can-do mentality) could have been on the offense, mobilizing to make substantial gains in both Congress and state governments.

It’s funny, because you can see Obama trying to articulate some of the elements of a New Democratic ideology.  But, as I’ve written elsewhere, this is a task that “takes a village”: reshaping a party’s message is too big a job for any one person.  You can see big Bill off on the side, like the party’s guardian angel, doing his “smart government” thing.  It may be a little more retro than I’d like, but he, too, is trying to get the Dems to move to new ground.

The Democrats may be approaching a tipping point, where they flip a switch—choose to leap into the present—and articulate a crystal-clear “New Democrat” ideology.  If I had my way, that ideology would embrace not just the green, but the local.  It would emphasize smart, rather than big.  It would pioneer a decentralization of the federal government.  And it would tout an economy based not on continued global expansion, but on the shrewd husbandry of our own great national and human capital.  It would be far more protective, more civic, and more inward looking.

This is just one vision, and there’ve gotta be many.  So, to all you New Democrats out there, I say: Get talking.