Short Term Future of Republican Thought
The Republican Party has become synonymous with the Religious Right over the past few years. Bush and Rove have targeted and appeased the Religious Right on numerous issues. This has led many, especially politicos from my generation, to conflate all Republicans with those whose intellectual foundation is the Bible.
A Professor that I trust very much once described the Republican Party as 1/3 Religious Right, 1/3 Libertarian, and 1/3 Secular Conservative (that’s me). It is true to claim that currently the Republican Party is controlled to a large degree by the Religious Right, but it is false to claim that the Republican Party over the long run is controlled to a large degree by the Religious Right.
The New York Times had a story today entitled, “Rove’s Word Is No Longer G.O.P. Gospel.” It describes Rove’s fall from grace with Republicans who are not intimately beholden to the White House:
Some are disregarding Mr. Rove’s advice, despite his reputation as the nation’s premier strategist. They are criticizing Mr. Bush or his policies. They are avoiding public events with the president and Mr. Rove.Influential conservative commentators have openly broken with the White House, calling into question the continued enthusiasm of evangelicals, economic conservatives and other groups that Mr. Rove has counted on to win elections. . Some Republicans are ignoring Mr. Rove’s efforts to hold the party together on issues like immigration and Iraq.
To me this is not new, but continued evidence that moderate conservatives, or essentially classical liberals, are beginning to reclaim the Republican Party. The best evidence for this comes from early polling data. All of the polls among likely Republican primary voters show that only three candidates have a significant chance for the nomination: John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, and Condi Rice.
None of them are monotonously colored threads in the Bush blanket. None of them are beholden to the Religious Right or to the far right in general. This is why I am hoping for a resurgence of moderate, secular, classical liberal thought from within the Republican Party. This dramatic shift would ease the bitter partisanship in D.C. and make innovative Republican ideas more palatable to the Democrats, and therefore, more likely to be enacted.
Comment by Chris on 2 September 2006 at 7:40 pm:
Yah, but there’s something you are missing.
9/11 and the war against Islamic Fascism was awfully traumatic to Liberals. They do not truly believe we are at war against an enemy that even deserves to be called fascist. Yet McCain, Condi, and Rudy wouldn’t have a problem calling the Islamists “fascists” (Condi might in her mode as S.O.S., but on the campaign trail, I could see her doing so.).
A lot of today’s bitter partisanship stems from a deep trauma within today’s liberals that stems from the unrelenting nature of the Islamist threat. Liberals cannot conceive of an enemy with whom you cannot negotiate and who aims to either convert you to his faith or kill you. Much easier to believe that Bush is Hitler.
Comment by Jon Ozaksut on 2 September 2006 at 7:40 pm:
Man, that would be a relief.
However, it’s also been said that the winner of the primary will be the candidate who most captures the hearts of the Religious Right, since they’re the most motivated voters in the country. We can already see some evidence of this in McCain’s softening position towards Bob Jones University. I’m just hoping he doesn’t concede any further.
Comment by Jon Ozaksut on 2 September 2006 at 7:52 pm:
I also apparently missed Chris’s comment.
Chris: given that your comment ostensibly addressed bitter partisanship, it was pretty comical to see nothing but broad-brush attacks on liberals on your part.
For what it’s worth: I’ve got friends in Iraq. You don’t need to convince me that we’re at war. And anybody with a basic grasp of history can conceive on the enemy you describe. However, I don’t call the terrorists Islamic Fascists simply because they aren’t fascists. They’re religious fundamentalists, and that is bad, yes, but simply because two things are bad doesn’t mean you can exchange the terms.
I sincerely hope that McCain, Condi and Rudy have the common sense necessary to not refer to the enemy in erroneous terms. As we discuss our enemy in incorrect terms, we facilitate crucial misunderstandings of that same enemy. I want to know what we’re fighting, so we may fight it better. That’s why I don’t use the term “Islamofascism” – it indicates a dangerously unserious approach to this war.
Comment by Billy Joe Mills on 2 September 2006 at 9:23 pm:
Chris and Jon,
While my politics align more with Chris than with Jon, my antipathy for partisanship of any kind aligns more with Jon. So I have to agree with him on all of the points that he made.
It would also trouble me if McCain runs further toward Bob Jones and Liberty University, but I also respect the pragmatism that his idealism is willing to use in order to get elected so that he can enact his idealist measures.
I also agree, quite strongly, that “Islamic Fascism” doesn’t make sense when applied to non-state terrorist actors. It might apply to Islamist leaders of countries who are fascists; however, the conflation of Islamist terrorist and Islamist fascist by the term “Islamofascist” is inevitable. The term is imprecise, politically convenient, and simply unnecessary. It’s also important to maintain the distinction between people who are Islamic and those who are Islamists, which is another important distinction the new buzz term will inevitably conflate.
Thanks for the posts guys,
Billy
Comment by Chris on 2 September 2006 at 11:14 pm:
Jon,
I have no problem identifying the enemy as “Islamic Fascists”. To be much more precise, the modern Islamic Fascist Movement shares several characteristics of its Teutonic cousin:
1. Rule from the center, or a central authority. Despite the franchise nature of Qaeda, there is a general acknowledgement that bin Laden and AZ are the top dogs in the outfit. But what’s more, the successors to UBL for influence in the Islamic Fascist Movement, Ahmadhi-Nejad in Iran, has definitely moved to concentrate power in his hands.
2. The appeal to Millenialism. Just as Hitler longed to establish the Thousand Year Reich, so UBL longs to recover lost Andalusia, vanquish the corrupt puppet Oil Princelings, and restore the Islamic Ummah to greater Glory to the vast Caliphate that stretches from Gibraltar to the Straits of Mallaca.
3. It’s Not You, It’s Not Me, It’s That Jew Behind the Tree. You can’t have a bangup fascist movement without the Jooos to have as the source of all things Evil. Bin Laden throws in the Crusaders for good measure. Ahmadhi-Nejad makes sure he uses grievance against past wrongs to stoke nationalist feelings against the Jooo and the American so he can build the Bomb in the basement. A lot of this is wrapped up in grievance against perceived wrong done to the volk by the Foreigner or The Other (usually, the Jew). Hitler had Versailles, Bin Laden had the American Occupation of the KSA, the Iranians had the Shah and his rule. It’s always something. Grievance is as central to fascism as snappy uniforms, Wagner, and suicide bombing. And you haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen a photograph of massed Hezbolloah giving the Fuhrer salute!
4. There’s this mistaken notion that fascism requires some sort of overriding economic theory, like the Labor Theory of Value. That’s complete tommyrot. Socialists usually make this mistake when analyzing their rivals to the Utopian throne. Neither strain of fascism has an economic program, other than the ban on interest under Shar’ia. Adolf had a four-year plan and Winter Relief, but those were huge scams.
Bottom line: If it walks like a fascist, and it talks like a fascist, it probably is one. I’m not planning on splitting hairs in some Academic Exercise like George W. just because I’m a skeered of ticking off elements of the Islamic leadership in this country.
Liberals and the war: you were right-my attack used too much of the broad stroke. I should have been much more specifict. There are plenty of patriotic, serious, Democrats.
However, having read Richard Holbrooke’s latest offering, suggesting that the U.S. Army hightail it to Kurdistan with our tail between our legs, I’m still on the lookout for the serious Dems. And I don’t speak of Peter Beinart trying to exhume the blessed Harry S. Truman, either.
A political party that has no room for Joe Lieberman is a political party that has no serioius program for national defense. The fact is this, and is one you do not address: your party’s activist base has way too many people in it who think that George Bush is the Enemy. Period. That is a fact. These people are influential, they have money, they vote, and they keep your party in George Soros/MoveOn/Dr. Evil territory.
They also make the election of Rudy, Condi. or McCain highly likely in 2008.
There are a significant number of people in your party who believe that if we just Left those people alone, the problem of terrorism would begin to subside, as if there were no terrorist activities prior to Iraq or 9/11. I know I’m beginning to sound like an ideologue, but I’m sorry, I’ve read too much Kos, too much Steve Clemons, too much of the TPM page for me to believe that the Democrats have anything more than “Not Bushhitler” as their positive national security agenda (btw, in Steve’s defense, I speak of his comments section-he’s a rather reasonable fellow as liberals go…).
There’s a sense, that, well, what’s their answer? Oh, well, let’s “strategically redeploy” from Iraq to, uh, where? And what does that mean? No one is really prepared to explain that beyond the Buzz Word stage from the DLC wing of your party. Have the Democrats finally wised up on Missile Defense, after having been taught a lesson by the Chia Pet in Pyongyang? Probably not. The last thing they want to admit was that Ronald Reagan may have been right all along. And are they going to the Middle East to beat the Israeli/Palestian dead-horse again? Will they completely dump Condi’s transformational diplomacy just because she did it? Howzabout India? China? What if there’s a civil war in Mexico, of all places?
Too many folks in Democratland haven’t got past “BushLiedTheyDied” to think of the serious, “Lord Palmerston” business of the rutlhless application of national interest. What I look forward to is, and this may surprise you, a reconstruction of the National Interest as Truman, Marshall, and Vandenberg understood it. It will take a more moderate Republican than Bush to pull it off, and in that sense, I agree with the original poster. But it will also take the Democrats to show leadership and grow up. When they do, they will deserve the Presidency again. Not before.
Comment by Jon Ozaksut on 3 September 2006 at 10:33 am:
Chris,
Your very first point belies your claim of similarity between Islamic terrorists and German fascism. Lay claims if you like regarding a central authority, but the big problem here is that we are currently not at war against a state entity. We aren’t fighting Iran, we aren’t fighting Iraq, we aren’t fighting Syria. This is unfortunate, because those are battles we can win relatively easily (remember how easily Saddam Hussein was trounced.) The trouble is, we’re fighting terrorist organizations, who cannot quite so easily be wiped out – this is equivalent to trying to kill a hill full of ants without destroying the hill. In many ways, this is one of the main difficulties of 4th Generation Warfare – as good as the US is with precision bombing, the standards for acceptable collateral damage are much higher, especially when one of our enemies is depending on it as a recruiting tool.
Continuing to wage this war as if we are fighting a monolithic, easily defined and easily attacked enemy won’t bring us any closer to success. Discussing the enemy in terms of fascism perpetuates that fallacy, and that’s why I’m against it – not, as you say, to avoid offending nebulous Islamic leaders.
Regarding seriousness in security policy – our biggest danger is not nearly Kim Jong-il. The biggest danger to us is smuggling dangerous material into the US for detonation through ports, etc. North Korea’s leader is dangerously unstable, but he’s not so stupid as to believe he could launch something at the US without being wiped out in response. Terrorists, on the other hand, aren’t liable to attack us with an ICBM or the like – their plots are without exception predicated on causing the largest amount of damage possible stealthily. Plainly: missile defense is not going to be what defends us in the War on Terror. It’s also a little ridiculous to tout its success and importance given how far it is from being effective, and with a cost that could easily secure our ports and borders.
The thing about the War on Terror is that it isn’t like any war we’ve fought before, and so we can’t fight it the same way we’ve fought past wars. Arguing that we’re not fighting this war properly is not a ridiculous proposition, but it is pretty ridiculous to mischaracterize any change in tactic as “cut and run” considering that our current strategy is simply digging us into a hole.
Comment by Manny on 3 September 2006 at 10:10 pm:
I apologize up front for not being a political brain, but I have my own opinions. The president I liked best was George the First. He was pragmatic. He did not adhere to “Stay the course” if the course was wrong. Sometimes you have to do what’s best for the country, instead of what’s best for your re-election.
Whoever the next candidate is, you know they will shift over to appease the Religious Right the closer it is to election day.
Comment by Chuck Prochaska on 3 September 2006 at 10:22 pm:
This is an excellent conversation and I don’t wanna steer it in any one direction, rather just add pieces of some thoughts:
- Simply because al Qaida or any terrorist network doesn’t use a state as a launching pad doesn’t mean it escapes the facist brand. As the new American Taliban told us this week, they seek for us all to convert to Islam – the whole world – so that there need not be any states. Just the rule of their god.
- But also, simply because they don’t use states as a launching pad doesn’t mean that the states that are supporting them (Iran, etc.) would not play key roles in governing their envisioned Islamic world, or key roles in achieving victory had they ever seriously taken the fight out of Iraq.
Which leads me to a subpoint. Because the fighting is happening in Iraq – because we chose to fight terrorism there and that’s where al Qaida sends their bombers to blow themselves up, it means they don’t have the resources to send them here. If we achieved anything in Iraq it was 1) to prevent Saddam from acting like present day Iran and 2) to keep Qaida busy overseas and our people safe at home. Not wanting to fight the war in Iraq would be like a football team saying they’d rather play defense to stop the opponent from scoring then go on offense and take the lead.
And for all of Chris’ reasons I like the term Islamofacist. Every day I have a tougher time believing there’s anything peaceful about that religion – and that’s not bigotry – it’s evaluating a real threat out of facts. Liberals (most Democrats) refuse to believe this.
‘Islamofacist’ is tough – it describes their goal and dehumanizes them to the point that an enemy should be dehumanized to (which is necessary and easier to do when you fight a state). In WWII, the ‘Krauts’ and the ‘Japs’ were not liked, trusted, or given any mercy – here or in their native countries. Why can’t be the same with Muslims today? Political correctness is what will lead to a draw in the War on Terror and many more deaths at home. Can we elect a President that will rid our national conscience of this rotting relic of the Vietnam era once and for all and develop a moral and gutsy fortitude that will lead us to victory? We can (should) only hope.
Comment by S&D on 17 September 2006 at 9:17 am:
I’m not sure I’d agree with you on the breakdown of the Republican party. I’m probably not terribly accurate on the numbers, but I’d say it’s probably less secular conservative and libertarian and more of two other groups, (thereby become a five-way unholy alliance) namely militarists-those who believe that the United States is strong through its military and should have the best in the world so it can use “overwhelming force” against all opposition-and big business interests which, while probably the smallest group, is arguably the most influential policy-wise.