Posted on 06/06/2002 4:30:23 PM PDT by Korth
What is the Republican constituency? This fall's election, with control of Congress important to Bush's presidency, makes this question central.
There are different ways to answer the question. Partisan Democrats, policy wonks and campaign advisers have different perspectives. Democrats say the Republican constituency consists of interest groups, such as the rich and environmental polluters. Policy wonks emphasize policy goals, such as tax cuts, less government, economic growth and national security. Campaign advisers focus on the swing vote.
But interest groups, policies and swing votes don't define a political constituency. Neither does a war on terrorists. A lasting constituency is built on principles that offer a political vision of a good society. When these principles are sacrificed to pandering to interest groups and swing voters, constituencies are lost, not gained.
Intimidated by interest group politics, Republicans are deserting their principles. Ever since federal bureaucrats and judges illegally and unconstitutionally created race and gender privileges in the name of civil rights, many Americans have been patiently waiting for Republicans to reaffirm equality in law.
Equality in law means that government cannot favor groups by granting status-based privileges. Its opposite is equality of result, which is achieved by treating people differently.
Policies designed to achieve quality of result, such as race and gender quotas, contravene the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution and are illegal under the statutory language of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The purpose of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was to bring an end to legal discrimination against individual black Americans. When bureaucrats made discrimination a group issue and defined discrimination as the absence of proportional representation, the judiciary winked at this creation of race-based preferences in college admissions, employment and government contracts.
The imposition of proportional outcomes requires legal discrimination. Universities admit minorities on the basis of preferment and require whites to meet higher entrance standards. Minority preferment trumps the low bid in government contracts.
Legal preferment has been extended to women. One result is that men's participation in college sports is limited by the participation rate of women. It is discrimination and grounds for a federal lawsuit if a higher percentage of the male student body participates in sports.
This extraordinary development is the result of one ruling by one female assistant secretary of education in the Clinton administration. Her ruling has terminated 350 men's college sport teams. Proportional representation for women is achieved by shrinking opportunities for men.
After 38 years of civil rights policy, legally imposed race and gender discrimination are far more prevalent in the United States today than during the 1950s. In those days, discrimination was private or imposed by state or local law, and customary male and female roles. Today, discrimination against white males is required by federal agencies.
The Bush Justice Department has twice intervened against those seeking redress from reverse discrimination, thus sacrificing a core constituency principle to interest groups that do not vote Republican.
Citizenship is another principle that is under attack. Aliens, both legal and illegal, and their advocates have succeeded in forcing citizens to open their purses to them and to provide them with the full range of medical, educational and income-support programs. Some states now grant aliens more rights than they grant to U.S. citizens from other states. For example, some state universities supported by taxpayers grant in-state tuition to illegal ("undocumented") aliens.
Bush is doing nothing about the assault on citizenship except furthering it. He wants to amnesty illegal Mexicans. Campaign advisers tell him it will help with the Hispanic vote. Another constituency-defining principle bites the dust.
If Republicans desert a principle-based constituency, how will the party fare in political competition? Can Republicans outbid Democrats in promising privileges to preferred minorities and benefits to the poor? Are Republicans acquiescing to the liberals' morality that the only just policy is to redistribute income and power to the oppressed?
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It's easy and amusing to seize upon a single statement that he made, but basically some of the hour-long talks he gave on TV were sound and were more serious attempts to communicate with the people than what Bush or Clinton were doing.
"There are two political parties, the incumbents and everyone else."
The theme of Communists, Nazis, dictators and Republicrats.
(/sarcasm .... for the mentally challenged)
There is a theory that says that the candidate that grabs these voters, in addition to their hardcore party base, can win any national election. I have read a theory that this massive chunk of voters went with Wallace in '68, Nixon in '72 (who was the first Republican to draw in Union ethnics in the North and Southern evangelicals in the South), Carter in '76 (Ford was pathetic and elitist), Reagan in '80, '84, and '88 (let's face it - most folks were voting for Reagan a third term), Perot in '92 (the populist), Clinton in '96 (Clinton actually ran to the right of Bob Dole in some ways.)
Probably these voters split in between Gore and Bush in 2000, though I am not sure. Oddly enough, the deciding factors in politics now is less economics and more cultural. The old New Deal coalitions are fading away, which is part of the reason that Gore couldn't get elected despite a strong economy. The new dividing lines are among those who hold to a strong standard of morality, often based in religious faith or culture, and those who hold to a malcontent 60's philosophy of "no controlling moral authority."
A fascinating analysis can be found here:
National Journal - Michael Barone
This may be more than you cared to hear, but I think that America is about to decide, collectively and unconsciously, whether it will go the way of Western Europe (i.e. secularist, retaining only a veneer of Christianity), or re-embrace the values that made us great.
Yes.
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I don't believe the author of that statement is old enough to know anything about that period.
Stay at home in November.
Or better yet, vote for the democRats.
Instead of getting some of what you want you will get none of what you want.
But you will be "pure".
And you can console yourself when the (hillary!) Clinton gun confiscation squad kicks down your door and machineguns you and your family, with the fact that you did not vote for one of those wimpy Republicans.
I wish you the joy of your purity.
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Even diring 1961 men were being quietltly drafted for Viet Nam as well as the Berlin crisis. By 1964 Viet Nam was a serious ongoing operation that was a campaign issue. Goldwater was accused of saying he would go nuts bombing the North. There were commercials on TV presenting Goldwater as nuclear bombing American schoolyards. Johnson, the cinsummate actor was giving speeches with tears in his eyes talking about "Our poor dead president up in the sky" referring to the Kennedy assassination. The period was nothing similar to what the author of the article presented.
As someone who lived through most of the Cold war (so I have learned from your articles), did you think we would actually win? Or did you think that the Soviets had the advantage? Had I been alive in the 50's and 60's and conscious in the 70's I would prbably have looked at the relentless expansionism of the Soviet Empire, or own incompetence in Carter, LBJ, and Ford, and perhaps despaired. Thanks for your perspective.
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During the early portion of the cold war I was politically disinterested and naive. When Kennedy ran I realized I was seeing an empty-headed psychopath and became interested in politics. Consequently, I had no opinion on the cold war during the Truman and Eisenhower years.
Kennedy was catastrophic. LBJ was the same. By the end of the Carter years we were dead.
Reagan and Company reversed the situation. One of the things he did was bog the Soviets down in Afghanistan and support the lunatic opposition against the Soviets. The soviets were being chewed to pieces. It came to the point where Soviet troops were mutinying rather than be sent to Afghanistan. Reagan did the same thing in Latin America with the Contras. The Soviets found themselves vulnerable and losing in multiple areas for the first time. Gorbachev was smart enough to call it quits.
If it had not been for the Reagan period we'd still be looking at an aggressive Iron Curtain. We also need to give Gorbachev credit for having the courage to ask, "Why the hell are we doing this?"
In my opinion the period after the collapse of the Soviet Union was bungled. There was no provision for transition from a communist to a free enterptise economy. What should have been done is make a continual transition from communism to free enterptise over a 30 year period within the Soviet Union within a degree of economic isolation of the Soviets in the sense of encouraging the people there to develop their own businesses and industries.
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