So what does the GOP do now?
Let's see. First of all, I have concluded, reluctantly, that John McCain would not have been a good president. He'd have thrown we conservatives under the bus faster than Dubya did.
We need to get the correct set of values and policies together. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening. The GOP has become a party of economic conservatives, libertarians, social conservatives, a few old-style bluebloods (increasingly rare and more likely to be found in the Democratic Party), belligerent imperialists, and exiles from the Democratic Party.
The problem is ... the social conservatives aren't necessarily economically conservative. The economic conservatives aren't necessarily socially conservative. The libertarians are 80% sane and 20% nuts. The belligerent imperialists are often not socially conservative or economically conservative. And there's a certain amount of don't-tax-but-spend philosophy proponents, too.
Some baleful tendencies in the Republican Party:
1. A tendency, just as bad as the Democrats, for sloganeering and demogoguery, for feeling over thinking.
2. A tendency to hate their political opponents. (I fight this tendency a lot.)
3. A tendency to apologize for torture.
4. A tendency toward instrumentalism — to see government as an end toward cultural change. Even though this started out as a defensive move.
5. A tendency to make some really bad choices on the national level. Dubya, Palin and Quayle are three of them. Now, I admit I backed Palin. My initial reaction was WTF? Then it was, Oh, I get it, it's brilliant. But lately I've seen a Cult of Palin that, while nowhere near as bad as the one surrounding Obama, is still worrisome.
Straightening all this out won't be easy and probably won't happen. We had our chance from 2000 to 2006 and didn't take it. In doing so, the GOP unraveled the winning narrative we'd had for 20 years — the Democrats are tax-and-spend, engage in nation-building exercises abroad, and irresponsible. In doing so, we allowed the Democrats back in the game, and now we're out of the game. I wouldn't be surprised if we were out of power for two or three terms.
That said, remember we are opposed by the Democrats, who are notorious for circular firing squads. They'll self-destruct, because, well, they always do.
Now, the Democrats and their leftist allies have a twofold political strategy. Everything they do that's truly evil falls into these categories:
1. Undermine all the values that help people be self-governing. These include what we normally call family values. Indeed, they attempt to demonize these values as bigotry.
2. Create constituencies, whether from the business community, non profits, racial/ethnic groups or academia/science, that are as dependent as possible on the government's coffers for funding. Once the Democratic Party can create a 51% majority of people who can live off the other 49%, they're in power until they bankrupt the state. See New York, California, New Jersey ...
Republicans have for the past 28 years attempted to fight these two battles. The Republican Party stood for:
1. A preservation of those cultural values that allow people to be masters of their own affairs, or at least in a way that allows them to remain independent of the state, and use and preserve human freedom. These include your standard civic, Christian, and family values.
2. An attempt to keep the state from encroaching continually on our lives, and to wean people off dependence on the state, so they can be productive citizens living out freedom for their own purposes.
The problem is this: Both of these strategies are defensive. The Democrats open up new fronts all the time ... they attack the family, they attack the idea of marriage, they attack the concept of personhood, they attack the very idea of America, the idea of equality under the law, the person of God and His Church. It's one front after another, it's always on defense, and it's exhausting.
And now they're in charge.
What we need to do is be ready. It's not too late, but someday, it will be. It's too late, for example, many of our city's public school systems — politically, they're unreformable, because there's a combination of political interests, stupid legal decisions, and community-value failures that have destroyed it.
So what to do?
First, we need to realize we'll be on defense for a while now. But at some point, we're going to get the ball back, and we need to be ready. It might be sooner than we think, or not. But we need to be ready. Too often the Republicans have settled for the status quo after getting a mandate to roll back Democratic excessives. In 1991 in New Jersey, an unpopular tax increase caused Republicans to gain a veto-proof majority in both houses of the legislature. Did they roll back the tax increases? No.
In 2000, we won nationally. A close victory. Did we roll back? Some. But not the growth of government. We got involved in nation building. And we had elected an inarticulate president who couldn't successfully defend our values in the public square, like Reagan did.
This articulation is required for the job of any future Republican president. The person can't be like Nixon or Dubya — but more like Reagan. Must be unflappable in public. Democrats can whine — they are whiners by definition. But Republicans can't.
We need to be adult. Buckley like. We need to handle this period with grace and humor and not mimic the Bush Derangement Syndrome of the past eight years. It'll be difficult. It'll force maturity upon us. But the GOP needs to go back to being the grown-up party. That means being grownups. It's the more difficult road.
We cannot return evil for evil. We can't seek vengeance. We must look for the good in others. We must remember that Democrats are the mission field, not enemies to be destroyed. We conservatives can accomplish more by converting Democrats to adopting our values.
