The Lion and Gun

Ideological change is a gradual, halting, imperfect process. It is less the product of stunning events and influential personalities as it is the slow accumulation of received wisdom over long periods of time. Driving it are deep demographic and generational shifts -- the coming of age of baby boomers; the influx of Hispanics over the past fifty years.

Political parties have a role to play in this process. No party ever perfectly captures the zeitgeist; that is not, after all, the role of parties. They aim to squeeze very different policies out of the same electorate and, in the longer term, to reshape that electorate in their own image. Successful political parties will find a balance between these sometimes contradictory goals: to appeal to the nation as it is and nudge it in the direction that it ought to be.

Parties don't always strike the proper balance. Sometimes a party ensconced in power will overreach, provoking a backlash and prodding voters in precisely the opposite direction. Other times a party will be too cautious, taking up a humble stewardship of the nation -- maybe even finding a great deal of electoral success doing so -- without real leadership or staying true to its goals.

And sometimes a party out of power will cleave so strongly to its grand vision in defiance of all political reality that it is rendered an ideologically pure irrelevance.

The good news is that American big-tent political parties, unlike the kaleidoscope of ideological parties littering European parliaments, exhibit a considerable degree of intellectual flexibility. They constantly reinvent themselves as different factions jockey for power and political leaders play with different strategies. Ideological shifts within a party can occur much more rapidly than within the nation at large.

This, however, can be a double-edged sword.


McCain v. Palin

An ideological shift looms for the Republican Party. The choice of path is perhaps nowhere more obviously displayed than in the increasingly public cleavage between the two halves of the national ticket: John McCain, until recently the darling of the party's moderate wing, and Sarah Palin, evangelical firebrand.

Palin may not know much about national and international affairs -- may even be a 'whack job', as one McCain aide recently described her -- but it is becoming clear to me that early appraisals of her political skill might not have been unfounded. She has a history of using powerful allies for political gain and then screwing them over. A week from now John McCain's political corpse might one more victim of a political black widow. Throwing handler-in-chief Nicole Wallace under the bus is simply the most recent in a long line of attacks against her own campaign. By now it's as clear to the public as it is to the pundits and campaign insiders: Sarah Palin is no longer running for Vice-President in 2008. She's running for President in 2012.

But this is not just a tale of personal ambition; it's a battle for the heart of the Republican Party. The lines might have been drawn before 2006, but it's only now that the faithful are lining up on either side. And if Rush Limbaugh and former Bush aide Jim Nuzzo are to be believed, it will be attitudes toward Palin that will determine which side an activist is on.

Before I continue I should make this clear: I don't mean to imply that Palin will definitely be the nominee in 2012, nor even that she'll be the leader of the Republican right's forces -- although she's better positioned for both than anybody else. It's impossible to say what will happen in the next four years. Obama could tank; there could be a serious foreign policy crisis or natural disaster; there could be a rising star in the GOP that eclipses the governor of Alaska; there could be a battle between Palin, Huckabee, and Jindal (maybe others) for leadership of the right; or the conservative base could split allowing another moderate to claim leadership. There are simply too many imponderables. Hell, even the great cleavage between moderates and conservatives might not come to be, or it might be reshaped in the aftermath of this election.

Nevertheless, it seems clear that in the coming weeks recriminations between Palin and McCain camps, and the conservative and moderate wings of the party, will grow more acute.


The Small Tent

The question defining this debate should be, 'What went wrong?' The fractured state of the ticket, however, lends itself to a kind of fruitless simplification that changes the question to, 'Who's to blame?' That debate precludes, in the short run, the kind of compromise that has held the two wings of the party together since at least the days of Goldwater. True, the moderate wing has issued a great deal of thoughtful reflection in recent days -- and the ideological diversity of these 'moderates' (I'm use the term loosely and for lack of anything better) shows how many factions the self-defined conservative base wants to kick out of the big tent.

There's the rub. Rush Limbaugh can say that the McCain campaign failed because '[g]oing after moderates, independents, and all these yokels is not the blueprint;' he can say the loss proves the 'Republican Party "big tent" philosophy didn't work' and call for Sarah Palin to be made the head of the party. He and base conservatives can simply say, 'It's McCain's fault.'

Surely plenty of moderates will be happy to blame the loss at least in part on Palin. But this false dichotomy, McCain or Palin, ignores a lot of the real reasons for Republican failure (some of which, admittedly, were beyond their control): an unpopular President, a tanking economy, an exciting challenger. McCain's campaign really was poorly run. And Palin was a liability -- but then so was the man at the top of the ticket.

Those demographic trends I mentioned at the top of this post mean that Republicans are going to have to refine and sharpen their message. That's the business that ought to be at hand. Instead, if the right gets its way, there will be an argument over blame. All of the failures and challenges and the lessons they impart will be forgotten. And there's no reason to think that won't happen.

After all, blaming the loss on McCain -- and, by extension, moderates -- is easy. It doesn't force self-examination or a confrontation with error. It confirms the biases and proclivities of conservative Republicans. It provides the satisfaction of saying, 'I told you so.' And, perhaps most importantly, it provides the leverage Sarah Palin and party leaders who (perhaps foolishly) wish to make her their tool need to take over the party from more politically pragmatic but less ideologically pure types.

The big tent will be no more. The party four years from now will be as ideologically straight-jacketed as it was in 1964, but instead of representing a rising new force in American politics it will be propping up the corpse of a long-withered idea. In some ways, then, Palin is the anti-Goldwater: the perverted monstrosity of a conservatism let go to rot; the last voice in a fifty-year game of Chinese whispers.

Some see the party reforming itself as a shrill populist scream against modernity: anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-Wall Street, anti-trade. In Palin Republicans will have 'a populist, far-right politician with intense celebrity appeal.'

Barring unforeseen Democrat disaster, they won't have a chance in hell.

The strategy is to play for culturally conservative anti-government independents and neocons while ginning up the social conservative and evangelical base -- a coalition of Kaganites, Dobbsicrats, and Limbaughblicans. But in order to win the party will still need its small-government conservatives, its libertarians, its foreign policy realists. It will increasingly need to reach out to pro-choice moderates, to minorities, to today's youth. It will have to persuade moderates that failed to support it this time to change their minds.

The Palin plan explicitly does none of that. It is more likely to drive those voters away. And if Rush Limbaugh is to be believed, that's the point.


Democrats Rising

There is an opening here for a smart, flexible, and pragmatic Democratic administration. If a President Obama proves himself an appealing leader and the party can present a coherent ideology that allows room for defecting small-government, low-tax, and realist Republicans, Democrats can build the kind of broad electoral consensus that's existed on the right since at least 1980 --and that Democrats shepherded in the generation beginning with Roosevelt. They can positively reshape an America that is demographically trending in their direction anyway. They can really shit American ideology. The center-right nation can become center-left.

It won't be easy. A President Obama will face the greatest financial crisis, and probably the longest and deepest recession, since the Great Depression. He'll have to manage two wars and the threat of Islamic terrorism. He will rule a nation that remains, even with a Democratic landslide, more partisan than it's ever been. Yet Franklin Roosevelt faced equally great challenges and triumphed. And Barack Obama's centrist consensus-building, though bound to disappoint many progressives, is probably the stuff we need right now to make it through this mess.

I have no illusions about a permanent Democratic majority. Even if the party makes it through the next four years unscathed -- and the GOP spends that time eating its own head -- Soren Dayton is right when he says that the Republican party will eventually heal its wounds. Conservatism will reemerge, undoubtedly in a new form, and will eventually be ascendant once again. In the meantime a successful Democratic party could force Republicans to move to the middle as they did with Eisenhower and as Dems did with Clinton.

This is no vast shift in American consciousness. Ideological change will remain a gradual, halting, imperfect process. The rosiest future for Democrats has a marginally-left-of-center populace supporting a marginally more left-of-center government. America will still be America. It certainly won't be Sweden. And even that small degree of change is not foreordained. Much will depend on how a President Obama handles the challenges placed before him.

Much more may depend on who wins the heart of the Republican Party.
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