My Kind of GOP (call for Republicans to become liberals, published by National Review)

To be a heartfelt Republican has gotten hard in recent years, but while we were in charge in Washington and most state capitols it was easy, though perhaps unwise, to keep still about this.

Will the GOP use its recent losses to change itself into something that more people again feel positive about? Or will everyone assume that the 2006 election was just an anti-Bush, anti-Iraq glitch and therefore the party should stay on its present course until those two unpopular interruptions are behind us?

I feel about the Republican party today much as I felt about the Democrats after their post-1968 “reforms,” the party’s capture by McGovernites in 1972, and its further conquest by the teacher unions and their pals in 1976. It was no longer a place I belonged — which is why I joined the Reagan administration and have been a reasonably steadfast Republican ever since.

No, there’s little chance that Howard Dean’s and Ned Lamont’s party is going to lure me back (though Joe Lieberman’s might). But I may stay home, ignore the primaries, keep my (none-too-important) checkbook closed, and vote for quirky third-party candidates.

What’s gone wrong with the GOP? Let me start by quoting a friend who is both gay and conservative (yes, I know several such): “I’m for low taxes, strong defense and limited government. Why doesn’t the Republican party want me?”

There’s a two-part answer to that question and neither half is good news. The first is that today’s GOP doesn’t really want gays — and it yearns to supervise everybody else’s bedroom and reproductive behavior as well as (implicitly, at least) their relationship to God. The second is that Republicans are no longer really in favor of limited government. Besides having their own version of a nanny state, they want to spend and spend, start program after program, ladle out the pork, make deals with influence peddlers, and spin the revolving door between Capitol Hill and K Street. Yes, they still pretend to favor low taxes but that’s an illusion; they pay for limitless government via huge deficits that will mean high taxes for my granddaughter.

First, while claiming to favor state and local control of social programs, the Republicans have accepted if not advocated astonishing amounts of micro-management from Washington, even when they were in charge. Consider the No Child Left Behind Act, where the White House and congressional leaders wound up getting it exactly backward: instead of national education standards, tests, and sunlight combined with state/local/school/parent autonomy regarding how (and when and even whether) to attain those standards, they decreed that states would set their own standards (and pick their own tests) while Washington dictates timelines, interventions, remedies, and procedures, even the selection of reading programs. And all of this offset by very little school choice. Perhaps this was the price of bipartisan legislation in 2001, but it’s not where the GOP should be five years later.

Second, the immigration-policy schism is catastrophic. Besides smacking of nativism, it repels legal immigrants who might vote Republican — a swelling population. It’s also bad for the economy, bad for law enforcement and bad for millions of kids who live here — and will grow up here — but through absolutely no fault of their own aren’t (or their parents aren’t) legal. Let the Democrats be split by anti-immigrant trade unions and job-wary blacks. Let the GOP say “Welcome. Play by the rules — before and after you come — and we’ll find a way to make you legal.”

Third, some of the party’s environmental positions are embarrassing, above all its denial of the global-warming problem and all that it portends. How can the U.S. deal energetically with such enormous warmers as China and India if it doesn’t first acknowledge that the icecaps are melting and human activity is at least partly responsible?

Foreign policy isn’t my forte, but I don’t think the U.S., strong and rich as it is, can go it alone internationally. We’re obviously having no luck with Iran and North Korea. China is kicking our butt. Darfur is a crime against humanity. NATO is probably obsolete. The U.N. is basically useless. Somebody smarter than I am needs to rethink all this for a globalizing, post-Cold War planet that buzzes with terrorists.

And that’s the key point. When it comes to thinking and rethinking, the GOP seems to be on autopilot, like England’s Tories, once known (Pat Moynihan taught me) as “the stupid party.” For most of the past 30 years, Republicans were America’s smart party, the party of ideas. Conservatism was intellectually respectable, abounding in imaginative people offering fresh approaches. But where will tomorrow’s ideas come from? When the Democrats ran out of ideas and tilted toward their own extremists, some wise folks started the Democratic Leadership Council, a charter member of which was Bill Clinton, the most successful (despite his character flaws) Democratic politician of my adult life. Where is its Republican equivalent? Who will lead it? Shouldn’t we be addressing those questions before the 2008 primaries begin?

— Chester Finn is a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. He was assistant secretary of education from 1985 to 1988.

The one or two good ideas contained here are buried by suggestions that the GOP basically become more liberal, even on issues where the public generally holds conservative views. I'll comment on two; the issue of homosexuals and the GOP, and immigration.

1. Its too bad that this Finn repeats the standard, bogus leftist line about Republicans (i.e. the Christian conservative base) wanting to supervise bedroom behavior. This is such nonsense. And what does it even mean? If one didn't know better, one would think these words speak of people who want to regulate who has sex with who, and how they do it. Are there people who would like to institute such intrusive, unenforceable laws? Yeah, I'm sure there are, and I'm also sure they make up a tiny percentage of even evangelicals and conservative Catholics. Most Christian conservatives, like most other Americans, do not want the govt meddling in such matters.

What they do want, however, is to prevent the institution of marriage from being redefined by a handful of renegade judges. And guess what? So do Americans as a whole, as shown by poll after poll, and more importantly, by every direct vote that has been held on the matter. And the margins by which they pass show that it is a mainstream view held by many outside of the conservative Christian community.

But whatever one thinks about gay marriage or its euphemistic substitutes, one thing that should unite all conservatives and all Republicans is support for a restrained, Constitution-respecting judiciary, and opposition to judicial activism. Only those on the Left, with their contempt for the people, can support the ludicrous 'living Constitution' doctrine. If the people embraced gay marriage/civil unions, then so be it, but their refusal to does not justify the imposition of it from the Courts.

So its sad to see Finn engaging in classic liberal obfuscation on matters dealing with homosexuals by confusing opposition to a judical assault on traditional values with hostility and hatred for gay people. What Finn should tell his gay friend is that the Courts are to blame for the Culture War, and if he wants such concerns to fade from national elections, then he should support any and all atttempts to fight judicial activism. If not for the ever-present and looming threat of a federal court imposition of gay marriage, then we really could let the states handle it. We'll take all supporters of 'low taxes, strong defense and limited government', so long as it doesn't mean we must also surrender to the Courts and their attack on mainstream values.

2. Its funny how on the immigration schism, he is only concerned about one end of it, that being the loss of potential voters, while he ignores completely the danger of losing existing base supporters, who don't need to be pandered to, but who dare oppose unending mass immigration and amnesty. But who cares about them? Afterall, they're just a bunch of ignorant, hate-filled rednecks, right? How nice it would be for the Finn's of the party if they could free the party of reliance on such backwards, racist, rubes. I know they long for such a day, but if they think the deliverance will come from the current wave of immigrants, then they are delusional.

Most immigrants, and at least the first few generations of the native-born, favor the Democrats, and they do so for reasons other than immigration. Of course immigration plays a part, but so too does the big govt policies of the Democrats, as well as their ethnic pandering and racial demagoguery. Even if the GOP officially embraced liberal immigration policies supported by Finn and purged it membership of all Tancredoites, then most Hispanics and Asians would continue supporting the Democrats. As such, continuing with our current mass legal immigration will continue to mint many more Democrats than Republicans. If we increase legal immigration then it will only get worse. I've yet to encounter a persuasive argument from a pro-mass immigration conservative that says the GOP can even break even with the immigrant community. Its most certainly a pipe dream.

He then says something about 'anti-immigrant trade unions.' Aside from the unfortunate use of the bogus leftist 'anti-immigrant' charge, he gets the stand of many trade unions wrong. The AFL-CIO, for example, embraces 'comprehensive' reform. They have completely folded on this and have surrendered to calls for amnesty and increases in legal immigration. Politically correct, diversity-worshipping trade unions, which are mostly a subsidiary of the Democratic party anyway, are more in line with Finn on immigration than the Republican 'nativists' he abhors.

Finn's last line on the subject is simply bizarre. He says “Welcome. Play by the rules — before and after you come — and we’ll find a way to make you legal.” If one plays by the rules BEFORE they come here, then they would already be legal, and would not be in need of adjustment, better known as amnesty. If he's talking about those who overstay visas, then they are no longer playing be the rules after they came here.

Finally, and in general, it would be nice if Finn and others like him would simply state their true immigration agenda in no uncertain terms. Why can't they just avoid platitudes, euphemisms, and needless attacks on fellow conservatives? Why not just say you support amnesty, and enormous increases in permanent legal immigration?

I've gone on too long now, but in sum, it would be nice if those providing advice to Republicans on how to right the ship could avoid parroting leftist distortions about religious conservatives, and stop engaging in fantasies about how immigrants would jump ship from the Democrats to the GOP if only Republicans weren't so mean.

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