Posted on 05/11/2015 7:08:03 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Jim Geraghty asked a good question (a frequent occurrence!) the other day on The Corner. “If you want to change American culture,” he wrote, in the light of the presidential-announcement themes of Ben Carson and Mike Huckabee, “should you be running for president?”
Geraghty isn’t sure of the answer, and neither am I. It’s not immediately clear whether a political office, even the presidency, is as good a place from which to change the culture as is a movie studio or a sound stage or a college classroom.
But there’s a parallel question that should concern conservatives at least as much: Can a conservative win the presidency if his cultural markings seem alien to too many American voters?
Mitt Romney’s experience indicates that the answer is no. More voters agreed on more key issues with Romney than with Barack Obama. Yet — as has been well publicized — Romney was crushed, 81–18, on the question of which candidate “cares about people like me.” Despite first appearances, this isn’t merely a touchy-feely “empathy” question. It’s at least as much a question about cultural cues. The key part of the question isn’t cares, but cares about people like me.
We’ve all heard about the widely reported turnout deficit in 2012 among what Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics accurately described as “largely downscale, Northern, rural whites. In other words, H. Ross Perot voters.” It takes no great powers of observation or analysis to understand that they stayed home, rather than stand in voting lines at the end of a long workday, because although they were disillusioned with Obama they just felt no affinity for the high-finance, starched-shirt, stiff-mannered Romney.
Rick Santorum would have appealed to them. Mike Huckabee, for all his considerable flaws, might well have appealed to them. Scott Walker and maybe John Kasich will have some success appealing to them in 2016. But not Romney. Nor did the elder Bush in 1992, once he was on his own rather than running effectively as Ronald Reagan’s surrogate.
Culturally, this is no longer Ronald Reagan’s America, which is why Reagan-like landslides are unlikely for Republican presidential nominees any time soon.
The Left can run anybody reasonably qualified and count on, say, 46 to 48 percent of the vote. That’s the size of the combination of coastal elites, single professional women, young voters, environmentalists, minorities, and union activists that is in tune with the popular-media culture. Culturally, this is no longer Ronald Reagan’s America, which is why Reagan-like landslides are unlikely for Republican presidential nominees any time soon.
The question then becomes how to cobble together a majority by “running the table,” as it were, among the 52 to 54 percent of the country that remains at least open to conservative principles of limited government, strong defense, and traditional values. The numbers fully on board with these principles are considerably lower than a majority; the majority is available only to a candidate who can both inspire those fully on board and make the principles attractive to a floating 10 to 14 percent who just want to feel they are heard, understood, and appreciated.
Jeb Bush isn’t likely to be able to do it. His voice drips with disdain for those who disagree with him on any number of issues, and he has none of the common touch of his more gregarious brother. And, of course, he’s another Bush, in a country increasingly turning against dynasties (see: losses by Landrieu, Udall, Nunn, Pryor, Carter, Begich) and other trappings of the ruling class. He’s well positioned to win the string of pluralities necessary to secure the Republican nomination, but he’s likely to repeat Romney’s regrettable results in a general election.
Carly Fiorina, a former business tycoon who was evicted from her post in what amounted to a shareholder revolt, can’t do it. Rand Paul opens up new avenues, perhaps, to the young, but his intermittent bouts of weirdness and nastiness would make him seem more than a little too, well, esoteric for uncertain times. He can’t win the whole thing either.
What’s needed is somebody who won’t back down on questions of liberty, civic virtues, and national defense, but who can take his stands while sounding like neither a moral scold nor an accountant. It need not be somebody whom a majority of voters see as being exactly like them, but it must be someone whose life experiences and outlook seem to voters to be similar enough, or parallel enough, to their own. It’s not so much a matter of economics or ethnicity as it is of aspirations and attitudes. In those respects, for example, the Polish-American factory worker in Michigan may believe he has more in common with the Miami-Cuban Marco Rubio than with, oh, maybe his own governor, Rick Snyder.
(No, this is far from an endorsement of Rubio; it’s just as example.)
It’s not a matter of wealth, but of outlook. The same sort of voters left cold (or at best lukewarm) by Romney were enthusiastic about the even wealthier Perot in 1992. Perot’s cultural cues were different and (until he started babbling about his daughter’s wedding) far more effective.
All of which is enough to let us understand one thing: Without giving evidence of the right cultural attitudes, Republicans can’t win. Yet this shouldn’t be the end of the diagnosis, much less the prescription. The sad reality is that even a candidate who can send the cultural cues to win in 2016 will be fighting cultural trend lines that are pushing the Left’s “automatic” share of the vote up from 46–48 percent, ever closer to 50–plus.
Here’s where Geraghty’s original question re-enters. It isn’t enough merely to be culturally in tune with a narrow majority of today’s voters. If the principles of ordered liberty are going to thrive beyond another presidential term or two, the narrow majority must grow. The cultural trend lines must be reversed. The margin of error must be increased.
And to do that, against the determined efforts of the academic and media elites, will indeed require the single biggest stage (and pulpit) in public life today. That stage and pulpit is the Oval Office. Changing the culture may be a tall order, while also dealing with a world of nukes and terrorists and complicated economics, but to be successful a conservative president must indeed find a way — maybe through gentle persuasion and example rather than direct and fervent preaching — to use the presidency to change the culture.
If he doesn’t, there won’t be much chance for his successors to be conservative.
— Quin Hillyer is a contributing editor of National Review Online.
On the contrary, the president we get is more than likely only a reflection of a change that has already happened in culture.
It is past time to kill the Royal Presidency and return the status of the president to that of America’s CEO.
We don’t need or want another King Obama and Queen Moochie.
The constitutional function of the president is to serve Americans and to execute the law.
It is not the constitutional role of American citizens to serve the president and First Lady.
This is why we are doomed as a nation.
I believe only Cruz and Walker meet the author’s criteria.
Conspicuous in its absence is any mention of Ted Cruz in this article. Since National Review is the GOPe mouthpiece, it makes sense. This article is drenched in the kind of conventional thinking that killed the GOP.
Obama has certainly changed the culture. The way he did this is complex, but it is certainly true. There’s a form of cognitive dissonance that Obama created. Steyn quotes Theodore Dalrymple:
“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.”
When Obama says “he evolved” on Sodomite marriage, what do people do? They fall in line behind him, because he’s the president and therefore 50+% of your fellow Americans agree with him. Since you don’t really have any strong convictions, and the other side does, you don’t bother defending the position you previously held.
It represents A change. That’s true. People weren’t all that excited about Sodomite marriage before 2008, but they also didn’t have any convictions on it or anything else. So the change was not that people hated Christianity, but they didn’t really have any convictions about it, . It was easy to elect a freak who hates Christianity. The election of Obama reflects the loss of moral convictions, but Obama/Jarret did exploit that to change the culture.
Who is this Cruz person? He’s not mentioned in the article...
Daniel Patrick Moynihan was correct when he wrote that “the central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.” The former implies that conservatives accept (and lament) culture as it is, the latter implies the use of an aggressive political agenda to achieve (usually harmful) cultural objectives. I think it is obvious why the liberal element in America has been more successful to this point.
Here’s the best way to change the culture for the better -
get the gov’t out of the business of alleviating the consequences for bad choices.
The “culture” would then, after a short bit of turmoil,
“right” itself.
Liberals believe that choices, especially those with a moral aspect, should NOT have consequences,
but since they always do,
those consequences have to be alleviated “by the government”,
which means taxpayers, people who don’t make bad choices, have to pay for the bad choices of those who do.
No. A PRESIDENT can’t change the culture. It takes a fascist tyrant, a dictator, from some sleazy little African country.
The ideal of Americans being proud, independent and self reliant is gradually being replaced by the moocher and whiner sucking on the government teat.
LBJ kept his word when he said he would have “negroes” voting democrat for the next 200 years.
Now Obama is continuing the culture change with more blacks and other minority groups.
The federal government is seeding America's small towns and cities with hundreds of thousands black muslims from Africa and Arab muslims from the mid-east
Obama is bringing in more millions of illegal aliens across the Rio Grande,
It won't be long before democrats will have an insurmountable majority in national elections.
like....Obie from Nairobi....../?
The criteria are presented in the article.
I’m asserting that Cruz and Walker are the only 2 candidates who meet that criteria.
I don’t much care that the author didn’t mention them.
Walker was mentioned.
No but the MSM can and have by dumbing down the public who take their bait it’s how PC got started and all the other problems.
Hollywood and the mass media is much better at it, but having the president in on the gig closes the deal.
Reason: There are only 6-7 million LDS believers. Christians don't believe what they believe.
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