I have a confession to make: I've always wanted to be a Republican. I can't imagine that wonderful feeling: watching policies you approve of seduce Congress into approval and eventually reach the soft, warm bosom of a president who shares your ideology. Finally, they're thrust deep into the American legal code, where they gestate into common practice. 'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.
In all seriousness, though, there are times when I envy the Republicans. The experience of watching politics with joy instead of dread must be great, of course; not only that, but every conservative has at the ready a well-developed world-view, based on the goals of a very disparate coalition. This world-view contains a number of basic assumptions; it's impossible to attack the policies conservatives advocate without understanding the basic ideas that underline it.
The first of these ideas is borrowed from the small-government conservatives who founded right-wing and libertarian think tanks in the dismal-for-conservatives years after Goldwater. This idea is that government can do no right. A central tenet of the modern conservative movement is that government, when it gets involved in the economy, is necessarily inefficient and ineffectual. For example, in "The Minority Report" in Monday's Eagle, Seth Johnson writes that "government never really creates a job. Jobs are created when the government gets out of the way." This is inaccurate at best (there are about 120,000 jobs in Iraq now, for instance, which I assume Mr. Johnson supports), but the point is to illuminate a worldview. Conservatives see government as a force for waste.
The second main underpinning of the conservative outlook comes from the religious right: the idea that government (despite being ineffectual and hidebound) should intervene in cultural matters, to protect a particular vision of "decency." Attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts, gay marriage and flag burning all rest on the common assumption that government has the right and the duty to determine the tastes of a nation and to act as the conscience for a society that has none.
These two elements, deeply distrustful of each other, could not hold together on their own. The third leg of the stool is business interests, and they contribute to the conservative world-view as well. Most specifically, modern conservative rhetoric shreds the notion of any social obligations.
This is not the same as merely attacking the competence of government. Certainly, many in the business community share the sympathies of the small-government conservatives; but just as many have no aversion to taking what they can grab from tax revenues. It's tough to gel President Bush's Medicare plan with the idea of a shrinking government; but it's easy to figure out how it benefits the president's donors. But if business is not averse to reaping the benefits of big government, it vehemently opposes any attempts to harness that government to improve the lives of citizens. Export subsidies in the tax code are acceptable, but the idea that government has the duty to make sure citizens are protected from injury in the workplace? Socialism! According to these members of the conservative movement, government is not the problem - the problem is the very notion of any obligation beyond social Darwinism.
The fact that these three elements came together produced the current conservative dominance (and conservatives are dominant - get over the "liberal media," guys, you control all three branches of government). Three groups, with different goals, ideologies and memberships, came together to promote a shared vision of government that defined American politics for a generation.
And yes, I used the past tense. In the 1950s and '60s, tensions between Southern Democrats and liberal Northeasterners over the question of race broke up the New Deal coalition created by Franklin Roosevelt. If you watch closely, you can see the same thing happening to the modern-day coalition between business, small-government conservatives and the religious right. Just today, a group of conservative Christian leaders sent an open letter to the president attacking him for timidity on the gay marriage amendment. Ideologues across the right came out against Bush's Medicare expansion, attacking him for expanding government, and have criticized him for the rapid growth in federal spending and the budget deficit. Business, meanwhile, appears to be the only faction getting most of what it wants from the Bush administration, and have kept its mouth shut.
What's happening is not merely grumbling. Republicans are famous for keeping these kind of internal disagreements under the rug; if they're showing this much, it means something significant. What we're witnessing is the opening stages in a slow-motion divorce, as a 40-year marriage goes down the tubes. Breaking up is often painful and never easy to do. But in some cases, everybody feels better afterward.
I know I will.
