Note; I wrote most of this yesterday afternoon/evening; I’m rushing this out while hung over because the inevitable has happened.
Back in April, the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute asked some of Wisconsin’s best and brightest right-of-center minds to answer the question, “Is Conservatism Out Of Gas?” (easier-to-follow archives than what they provide here for week 1 and here for weeks 2-4). I threw in my two cents on both Wisconsin and the national scene, and given the events of the Republican Presidential primary/caucus season, it’s high time to revisit this.
As the title says, this revisit will focus on the national scene, but I would be remiss if I didn’t briefly mention the Wisconsin one. While the situation hasn’t changed since I last visited the question, there is some progress on the judicial front. We did find a judicially-conservative judge, Mike Gabelman, to take on Doyle appointee Justice Louis Butler for the Supreme Court. Depending on what happens in that race, I may revisit that portion.
There are four basic legs of the conservative coalition, three of which are essentially unique to American conservatism and two of which are shared by libertarians. The first one I’ll deal with is governmental conservatism, shared with libertarians. At the federal level, it is a basic respect for the Constitution, and for federalism, which precludes using the federal government as an “overlord” to either push a particular philosophy or to buy votes. The three candidates who espoused this, Duncan Hunter, Fred Thompson, and Ron Paul, all were summarily rejected. In no state did the three of them even amount to a quarter of the vote. Mitt Romney attempted some outreach in this regard after a governorship spent growing the public-private partnership in Massachusetts; however, his only success in a state where he faced competition was after once again dipping into the bigger government well.
Why did this die? Simple; decades upon decades of government cultivating a dependence of the populace on it has, as surely as nicotine, marijuana, cocaine, or caffeine, created a dependence on government that is exceptionally hard to break, even as the country plunges into an economic mess caused by the creation and expansion of that dependence. One could say that it died when the 104th Congress lost the government shutdown battle in 1995, and he or she would have a valid point. One could also say it died when George W. Bush ran as a “compassionate ‘conservative'”, and again he or she would have a valid point. It just hasn’t been recognized until now.
The second portion that is at best on life support, almost as a direct result of the death of the first, is economic conservatism, also shared by libertarians. The few tax cuts that aren’t specifically targeted at a small subset of the few taxpayers left are sold not as actually reducing the amount of money the federal government receives. Indeed, it is hard, if not impossible, to use government as a way to buy votes without a complete lack of fiscal restraint.
There is a little bit of hope in this regard; John McCain does recognize the need to not have earmarks; however, the fight against earmarks is but a small part of economic conservatism, and that’s the only part that McCain recognizes. Morever, the fallout from the method of his primary win, including the likelyhood of humiliation in November, makes even that moot.
The third leg, a victim of suicide, is social conservatism. Rather than embrace candidates that also espouse the remainder of the conservative coalition, the voters listened to the RNC’s thinly-veiled call to push out those that believe in small government and fiscal restraint and pushed a candidate who, franky, is a big-government socialist, Mike Huckabee. The remainder of the conservative coalition pushed back, and after a surprise win in Iowa, Huckabee didn’t have a single win until today with a “stop-Romney” parliamentary move in West Virginia, with follow-on wins in his home state of Arkansas and heavily-Southern Baptist Arkansas.
That leaves the last leg, foreign policy. It is the one that is not, at least historically, uniquely-American. I will note that Paul is the outlier here; as a libertarian, he espouses weakness in the face of attacks, and that has been roundly rejected by the Republicans. The remainder of the candidates, both surviving and withdrawn, do recognize that to retreat in the face of attacks is only a recipe for the ultimate defeat of America. However, that is not, on its own, enough to carry the day. By focusing solely on this to the mutual exclusion of the other three legs, the RNC has planted the seeds of its humiliation in November. There are many conservatives, both influential and bloggers, who have vowed not to vote for John McCain.
I briefly considered tossing this, or at least postponing it again, after a rather lengthy discussion with Brian Fraley over beers. However, I’ve put it off too long. I hope the RNC is happy with the separation of the Republican Party from the conservatives and the resulting death spiral last experienced by the Whig Party. I also hope the rank-and-file is happy with being a national minority party for the remainder of its marked time as it is poised to nominate a candidate who would rather be a member of the other party. Lastly, I hope the “conservatives” who participated in the systematic destruction of every candidate who came forth to carry the broad-based conservative banner by voting for or supporting somebody else because of some perceived slight are happy about being shoved into the dustbin of history, because neither McCain nor the Democrats will let conservatives back into the political game if they can help it.
Revisions/extensions (1:06 am 2/6/2008) – There is a lot of good discussion over at Michelle’s place, as she notes there is an actual CPAC topic called, “Is the GOP lost?”.
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