As much as many of my friends in the GOP may wish that they can stop time, or even reverse time by 30 years, the likelihood of this occurring is slight. In my personal day to day interaction with time I’ve found it to be a one way street. Further, I’ve found that, as much as I would not like this to be the case in many instances, human culture, which includes our own society, changes and evolves as we move along in time.
I make this observation as a preface to a statement which will draw some degree of anger but which I’ve wanted to write for some time: Ronald Reagan and the politics of the 1980’s are not the answers to the doldrums in which we Republicans now find ourselves. Political parties, like society, either evolve, innovate, and change according to the needs of voters, or they stagnate, look backwards, wither and die.
There is an argument to be made that the Republican Party has collapsed for two essential reasons:
First, when given the opportunity on a national level to implement the good government reforms that brought us to power, we failed to do so in a spectacular manner. Voters might think or have thought the GOP insensitive, or intolerant, but I would think that up until the last few years they also thought that we were competent managers and reasonably wise stewards of the public money. For many swing voters that was the essential allure of the Republican Party… we balanced our books, won wars, and could be called on to make painful fiscal decisions that hurt the middle class least.
The impact of the self-immolation of the best part of our own brand is that many otherwise winnable voters now see an intolerant Party (for good or ill – there are many things that one, I hope, should be intolerant of) that is also spendthrift and incompetent. It is somewhat like running a hamburger stand that is known for serving 100% Kobe beef, and then the local paper running a story that in fact the help has been grinding up the community strays instead: it is going to be very difficult to get many of those customers back without a change of management.
Pledging that we are going to return to the days of the strict balanced budgets we had under President Reagan is probably not going to be the answer to this problem. Instead we are going to have to accept that some customers who may have eaten Fido are going to have a very bad taste in their mouths about our hamburger stand for a while. A big “Change of Management” sign might help, we damn sure better serve 100% Kobe beef burgers bigger than anyone else in the community, and we can only hope over time customer dis-satisfaction doesn’t mean we have to gut the stand and open a fish and chips shop in it’s place.
Luckily for us, in this case, there is only one other food stand in town and it’s had it’s share of similar scandals… but over time if both stands don’t clean up their acts one could envision investors pooling funds and opening new food stands. It’s happened before.
Second, our Party has grown intellectually stale, focused increasingly on issues which motivate fewer voters, particularly swing voters, and failing to address the issues which increasing numbers of voters, particularly swing voters, find important. Our saving grace for the last couple of elections is only that there are enough voters who are terrified of how the Democrats would conduct the war – not a good long term issue.
I don’t think going “back to the future” is the answer to this problem. What I suggest instead is perhaps more unpleasant: political parties go through transformations every few decades. These transformations bring in new blood, while losing some old blood, and mix the parties up again a bit (witness the Reagan Democrats who are now largely Republican, or the ‘coastal Republicans’ who are now largely Democrat). In the process of transformation old ideas that no longer reflect the times or the will of at least a majority of a given political party are often discarded, and new ideas that bring in new coalitions of voters are given life.
The conservative movement has had a pretty good thirty year run – but every successful movement accomplishes some of its goals, gets tired, and needs to be redefined by living and breathing people in the particular circumstances of their day. The 1980’s under President Reagan were an exciting time for the conservative movement… but those times are not these times, and those people are not these people. Walking around in a cemetery whispering ‘remember when’ or ‘this is how we won before’ isn’t going to bring them or the victories we enjoyed back.
To be clear I’m not arguing for some sort of moderate revolution in the GOP… nor for that matter for the complete consolidation of the conservative movement’s hold over the Party. I’m not arguing we abandon our core principles and simply poll our way forward. I am arguing that we, a Party of free markets, individual freedoms, and tradition reapply those core beliefs to today’s issues, from today’s perspective, in a rigorous manner.
I suggest that it is time for the Republican Party, nationally and here in California, to re-examine itself in the way we typically do – a "no holds barred" war of ideas fought out at conventions, in small groups, on the internet and in newspapers, and, of course, in elections. Instead of limiting ourselves to the agenda we set some 30 years ago let’s open it up and talk about the day to day issues which Americans and Californians are concerned about today (some of which, but not all of which, of course, would overlap the concerns of 30 years ago). Let’s encourage dialogue and new ideas and open discussion rather than set in stone ideas that, for their own time, were new and revolutionary. At the end of the day I suspect we’ll have a stronger, larger party, even if we lose some blood in the process.
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