Posted on 11/30/2006 11:24:55 AM PST by Aetius
My Kind of GOP Why do the Republicans seem to be on autopilot?
By Chester E. Finn Jr.
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.
Three other domestic problems — and then a word about foreign policy.
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.
One example, he says that in foreign policy the US can't go it alone, then he gives the example of North Korea and Iran. In both those cases, the US is not going it alone. It is working with the a group of 6 nations in one case and the UN in the other, and achieving absolutely nothing.
If the GOP embraces gay marriage, global warming hysteria (a convenient "truth" for the statist Left), or open borders, I'm out.
By the way, Reagan commissioned the Meese commission that attempted to restrict pornography, was strongly pro-life, and never advocated the queer agenda as when he was in the White House. Reagan and his interior secretary James Watt bravely stood up to environmental hysteria.
Much like John Dean's nonsense, Finn is making up a conservatism/Republicanism that never was and then disingenously saying that the GOP left them.
I love NR but I'm not sure why they decided to publish this bilge.
Good post. Thanks for taking the time to write it.
As I see it, the problem with Finn and those in the party who are of the same mind on illegal immigration is that they don't really live with the problem. It's purely an intellectual discussion to them.
Do you think John McCain has illegals next door? Do you think Chester Finn and Bill Kristol, soon after pulling out of their driveways, pass by swarms of illegal immigrants hanging on the corner seeking work, where they can be seen doing things that to put it nicely, make people say "there goes the neighborhood?"
It's so easy to favor an open borders policy when you never come face to face with what it really means.
Well, that is what the campaing IS ABOUT... to give that impression... san "The new more progressive Republican Party?" A "more sensitive conservative?" - And don't forget we already have the new "Coservativa-Democrat!" or something like that.. :)... and next one will be "Liberal-Republican!" LOL
And here I thought it was about the battle of ideas.
Of course you are right. It is easy to embrace something, especially something given the PC-seal of approval, if your own life is never negatively affected by that something.
What continues to puzzle me is how otherwise intelligent people like Bill Kristol, Fred Barnes, Michael Barone, and WSJ editorial writers, fail to see the political/demographic consequences of unending mass immigration. The GOP -- a conservative GOP that is -- only has a chance with immigrants that are thorougly assimilated, and assimilation is easier with lower levels of immigration. How these guys actually think the GOP can even break even with the current wave of immigration is a mystery to me. It makes me wonder if they really believe the things they say.
I simply can't take seriously any of these 'the GOP has left me' people if they don't at least admit that the Culture War was started by the Left, and made so bitter by the use of Courts to impose what can't be won through the proper and legitimate democratic channels. If you want to say conservatives have made mistakes, then fine, but if you can't even bring yourself to correctly place the blame on those who truly started the fight, then you might as well be a member of Moveon or the ACLU.
As to National Review, I will defend them by saying that they will usually allow some other writer to come in and respond when ever someone is spouting such nonsense. Immigration is an example, as they've had several running debates between those holding conservative views on immigration and those who hold liberal views, but who like to pretend those views are somehow conservative. So I wouldn't be surprised if someone posts a response to it. It is surely needed.
So, whatever its faults, at least NR is better than The Weekly Standard, which as far as I can tell gives no voice to conservatives on immigration.
Abstract:
We need TWO Democratic parties, and he will belong to the one with better country clubs.
But they can run a pro-gay, pro-open borders, anti-religious (after all, Repub Christians just want to supervise Finn's bedroom proclivities), leftcoast know-it-all. Probably some relative of the editor's bishop... .
KATHRYN!! If you ever listen. The danger the GOP faces is that they are about to lose a significant number of evangelical votes. There's some very smart triangulation going on, and check out the recent Newsweek covers. The left is making nice to the religious right, after years of being treated like Not Our Kind Deah from Kind Like You, Deah.
We already have all the limplivered otherwise-unemployables like Finn we could ever need. What we're about to lose is Joe Sixpack.
It is an elitist disconnect.
I can also give you an explanation that you might not understand--but a lot of women will. Housework is a highly-charged cultural/political issue--at least it is for those who have to take care of families.
These guys are all married to women who don't have to clean up after a family, or after themselves. And those women like it that way.
Up until the past ten-twenty years, servants were hard to come by, expensive and not at all servile. Now nobody like Tony Snow mows their own lawn , and Mrs. Snow sure doesn't wipe down her own bathroom. They have someone who is Just Like One of the Family doing that sort of thing now. And the Snows like it like that, and anyone who doesn't like it is just a Know Nothing Neo-Nativist (and a nattering nabob, too!)
The Bush twins had a Mexican nanny in their teens--Laura Bush doesn't clean up after Scottie.
The elites are different from you and me.
Mr. Finn, I order you to leave the tent.
(Of course a flight of fancy, but it sure would be nice if the Chairman would start ordering Leftists to leave the party)
"The only thing holding this homosexual "conservative" from voting conservative or GOP (less conservative) is his own crotch." -- ouch! now that's going to leave a mark...
... but nothing a little foundation and rouge won't hide.
teeman
Yeah, I meant to comment on the 'job-wary blacks' line. I'm one who can't stand it when people automatically cry racist when something the slightest bit non-pc is said about race/ethnicity, so I won't do that to Finn for this. But what makes it interesting is how he revealed himself to be a reflexive, pc, guilt-ridden, diversity-worshipping dolt with the line about 'smacking of nativism'. So it was a bit odd for him to say something that could be taken as showing hostility towards black Americans.
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