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July 7, 2009
Exclusive: A Republican Opportunity – If They Take Advantage Of It
There is one thing Americans will always endorse and two they will not forgive. Therein rests the peril and promise of Republican opportunity.
Americans will always endorse freedom; as an ideal, a political principle, a lifestyle, a defining characteristic of their nation. Appeals to freedom resonate deeply with something primal in the American soul. Freedom is the essence of American life and politics and its protection animates American will. Americans will fiercely defend individual prerogative and will reject any institution they believe threatens their liberty. A political party that stands for freedom stands with that which most fundamentally resonates with Americans.
On the other hand, Americans do not forgive hypocrisy or those who threaten their freedom. If they conclude that a party has taken a position simply for political advantage, the party will lose their trust and they will turn decidedly against it. They will reject any party whose program represents an encroachment on individual prerogative. Americans are a generous people. But they do not forgive those who lie to them or attempt to impinge on their freedom. If Republicans are to regain electoral primacy, they must appeal to Americans’ fundamental commitment to freedom, their underlying sense of fairness and their demand for honesty.
Republican leaders have never so distinguished themselves as they have since the start of the Obama Era. Never in the history of the republic has a party in opposition acted so completely on principle as the Republican Party has over the last six months. At the dawning of the Age of Obama, I argued in these pages that the President would furnish Republicans with sufficient cause to oppose him on principle. I urged Republicans to avoid the sort of ugly personal attacks to which Democrats subjected George Bush and Republicans, Bill Clinton, and confine themselves to the area in which they are most comfortable: the world of ideas. I suggested that if they were to go down the road of conspiracy mongering and invective, they would lose even more ground with voters.
Republicans have collectively risen to the occasion. They have rejected jockeying for political position. They have played no legislative games. They have engaged in no personal attacks. They have shown themselves to be men and women of ideas; fired by principle and animated by a philosophy as old as the Republic. They have started the hard work of defining what their party is to stand for in ways Democrats never have. They have dealt with their internal contradictions by providing space for disagreement at the same time as reaffirming the fundamental conservative ideal that defines the party.
Most of all, they have taken principled positions in opposition to the grave excesses of the Obama Administration. They have defined their opposition to its dangerous initiatives not by suggesting that they are advanced in bad faith but by conceding the good faith of their advocates even as they have pointed out that they are dead wrong. In so doing, they have taken the ugliness out of the debate and put in stark relief several important differences between the left and the right in this nation. Rather than muddying the waters of civic discourse with, well, mud, Republicans have shown that their opponents’ policies are completely out of step with public desire, out of touch with public fear and completely opposed to American ideals. They have shown their policies to be illogical; their initiatives to be ill-considered and their project to be grounded in ideology rather than in experience. They have shown them to be an assault on fundamental Americanism and exposed the destructive impact of these unsound and irresponsible proposals.
At the same time, Republicans have contrasted their civility with the continued bilious fuming of those on the left who cannot bring themselves to give up their continued, mouth frothing attacks on President Bush and all things conservative. The result of Republican resort to principle and civility has resulted in the quickest turnaround in modern political history.
The contrast is stark and it is noticed. To this day, President Obama cannot help lobbing shots at George Bush, red meat for his base but old news and petty to a public that demands that he take responsibility for the problems it has entrusted him to solve. The more members of his Administration rail on about “the last eight years” and Joe Biden continues his odd hyper-political approach to statecraft (if one can, without smiling, characterize anything he is doing as rising to the level of statecraft), the more the public turns them off as just more of the same; the more they are dismissed as merely political.
One can see this in the broad public reaction to late night twit David Letterman’s ugly attack on Sarah Palin. He thought she was easy game; that the public would support any base and revolting assault on a conservative. He was wrong and he paid a price for it. It is not likely the public, with all its current concerns, is going to again tolerate the sort of demonization the left so consistently employs and which so defines its contribution to discourse. That is why the recent attempt to demonize Rush Limbaugh fell so miserably short. No one cares. The public has had enough. It has served notice that attacks will not do it. Now is the time for the Left to test its ideas in the court of public opinion and to tell the voters what they want to do, not how bad the other guys are.
Americans have been saying for years that they want political games to cease when elections are over. They want to see their leaders engage in honest debate, not in “gotcha” politics and reflexive opposition based on nothing but political advantage. Republican opposition has transcended that late trend and in responding to the extreme leftism of the Obama zeitgeist, has begun to back into that which will define them. Republicans seem almost inadvertently to be identifying themselves as politically conservative and are increasingly looking to conservative thinkers to help mark out a coherent philosophy to guide the party and against which to measure candidates.
After the last election, there was much hand wringing among Republicans over the seeming sound rejection of the party and its principles. Oddly, after running among the most moderate candidates for president in modern Republican history, they wondered if the party had hewn too closely to conservative principles. But voters did not reject Republicans because they stood for too much but because they stood for too little and Republicans at all levels are beginning to see that their way out of the wilderness is to reaffirm the principles that became so compromised during the Bush years.
Republicans are finding that political conservatism still resoundingly resonates with voters. It is that philosophy of freedom that still defines America and Americans and now that the left has come so roaringly out of the closet, there is increasing horror at what it has in store for the nation.
That is the great opportunity for Republicans.
If it identifies itself with that most cherished of American principles – freedom – it can recapture the imagination of American voters. If it points out to the American people that it is only government that can abridge their liberty, it can demonstrate that liberty’s greatest threat is from the expansion of government and the coercive power it represents. The party must position itself as freedom’s bulwark in opposition to vast expansions of governmental power that will inevitably circumscribe individual prerogative and stifle individual initiative.
Republicans must start with basic principles like the idea that the fruits of labor belong to those who earn them; that taxation is the confiscation of property by force which, when used for social programs, is simply the diversion of resources from those who create them to those who do not.
Republicans must articulate a “Freedom Agenda” that identifies coercive governmental abridgements of individual liberty – which nanny state initiatives are and which Americans resent – and call them out. Speak to the inherent yearning for freedom when addressing the left’s authoritarian project. Emphasize that in government healthcare, for example, citizens will lose the freedom to choose physicians and will not, for any price, get medical care that is not government approved.
Republicans should advocate a new Bill of Rights; one that preserves freedom and the right of Americans to make their own choices; to beat their own paths; to rise or fall on their own initiative; to succeed by their own power. One that exalts the individual and the power to create one’s own reality through imagination, effort and discipline. Conservatives can contrast their freedom to liberals’ authoritarianism. Conservatives’ appeal to liberty can be compared to the left’s consistent resort to coercion in service of its ideology. It can be contrasted with everything from speech restrictions on college campuses to the Left’s project for government control of the cars we buy, the food we eat, the vices we embrace, the energy we use, the doctors we see, the books we read, the news we get, the programs we watch and the way we raise our kids. All of these are things the left – and Democrats – seek to control. If Republicans rededicate themselves to the freedom of the conservative philosophy that defines them, they can be the “party of freedom,” appealing to the mystic unifying chord of the American soul.
At the same time, there are issues Republicans can address that demonstrate that conservatism offers the real solution to national crisis and is the only means to progress and prosperity. Americans are horrified by federal spending. Ask anyone except unhinged leftist ideologues, Paul Krugman and California state legislators (the latter two simply being subsets of the first). Conservatives, liberals, moderates, Democrats, Republicans and independents all agree that spending is completely out of control under the Obama Administration. A dedicated, lifelong, black Democrat friend of mine is aghast at the extent of spending initiatives. She now questions whether or not social programs designed to take money from her to fund healthcare for others is something she wants to support. She sees the handwriting on the wall. She worked herself up from nothing to tremendous success as a lawyer and sees the lifestyle for which she has worked for 20 years under assault by the very people she has politically supported her entire adult life.
She is not alone. She is, in fact, rule. Americans do not think they are undertaxed; they think they are underserved.
But Republicans do not have any credibility with the American people when it comes to spending. Republicans went happily along with an impecunious Republican president as he geometrically increased spending and the size and scope of government in ways unimagined until the current administration. And that is the hypocrisy Americans will not tolerate. They punished Republicans in the last two election cycles because they perceived the dishonor of appeals to principles they had no intention of following. Republicans cast themselves as the party of fiscal responsibility even as they engaged in the most irresponsible increases in spending in two generations.
How do Republicans overcome the perception that they argued for smaller government merely for political advantage? By apologizing. By saying to the American people that they understand the message that has been sent. By telling them that in the flush of enthusiasm at being in control of government for the first time in 40 years they allowed themselves to betray their own philosophy of small government and diminished spending and that they are sorry. By saying they are rededicating themselves to the principles that originally defined them and by promising that they will never again allow enthusiasm, self-interest or parochial concern to lead them to the error of increased government. By, indeed, making the promise that, given the chance, they will challenge the assumptions of every government program with an eye toward eliminating wasteful spending and unnecessary programs. By committing themselves not just to stopping the increase of government but to rolling back its scope and reach and to restoring its proper, limited function.
They should go to the American people with a question: “Are you getting your money’s worth?” and they should pledge to reduce the size of government that the people may retain as much of the wealth they earn as is not absolutely necessary to ensure their protection.
If Republicans are to go to the people with a freedom agenda, though, they cannot be perceived as, themselves, seeking to abridge individual freedom. As I have argued in these pages, they must adopt a philosophy of political conservatism that celebrates individual freedom. But if they allow themselves to be sucked into arguing for the political imposition of conservative social values, they will squander their unique opportunity with the American people and make hollow any appeal for a freedom agenda. Government is inherently coercive and individual social choices the very definition of freedom. If we cannot define for ourselves what we see to be moral precepts, we retain no freedom at all. If Republicans argue for a conservative social agenda achieved by political means, they argue against freedom.
There is nothing wrong with hewing to conservative social values. Indeed, I would argue that most Americans do so. But they do not want to be told that government, let alone political figures, will be employed to enforce those values. Doing so invites accusations of hypocrisy – the cardinal sin of American politics – and saps the energy of appeals to individual liberty. Republican candidates should, then, acknowledge their social conservatism but suggest that it has no place in a political agenda that is, after all, only about government.
Democrats give lip service to conservative social values even as they pledge not to use the coercive power of government to enforce them. Not one Democrat has said he is in favor of abortion, for example, but all say they want to preserve the freedom to choose it. Democrats often claim to be religious but none seek to impose religiosity on other Americans. Republicans can neutralize the Democrats’ seeming claim to the support of freedom and individual prerogative by adopting the same position. Americans will understand that Republicans are more credibly conservative socially and will respond to the consistency of a philosophy of freedom that shies away from government imposition of social values even as it encourages those values as a necessary good for the moral society.
Republicans can credibly argue that social values are matters for the home, the family and the community and that government has no place in such matters if freedom is its agenda. Government’s role is to preserve that freedom so moral choices may flourish and individual citizens exercise that ability of self-definition that is freedom. They can argue that individual choice is the essence of freedom and that no elected official – right or left – should impose social values on citizens. This will contrast nicely to Left’s effort to police speech, social interaction and behavior all in the name of “tolerance.” The people are ready to reject the social excesses of the left but won’t endorse those of the right.
At the same time, Republicans should appeal to American disdain for hypocrisy. Democrats seized power, in part, by arguing that Bush betrayed American principles. The editorialists of the New York Times sanctimoniously arrogated to themselves the role of moral arbiter and definer of American values and found conservatives wanting. Obama promised he would abolish “torture” as an interrogation technique even as we have discovered that the techniques about which he was so critical hardly qualified as “torture” as that term has been understood for centuries and were completely legal under the Geneva Conventions. Regardless, of course, his own CIA chief has reserved the right to employ them again, should the need arise. Who, now, are the “torturers”?
The New York Times and ACLU accused Bush of “shredding the Constitution” by employing military tribunals rather than the rarified precincts of federal courts for the trial of vicious terrorists, blithely ignoring decades of precedent that holds that foreign terrorists are not entitled to trials in such courts with all the Constitutional protections such trials require. The Democrats joined in the chorus. Now it turns out the Obama Administration will continue to use military tribunals for the trial of some of those accused of terrorism. Who, now, are the “shredder?”
The Democrats feigned horror at the idea that some of the worst captured terrorists might not get trials at all and Obama ran for president on the criticism that Bush and Cheney were insufficiently sensitive to the mandates of due process. Now that he has won, though, he has decided that there are some who are just “too dangerous” to risk trying in an American court and they will be held, presumably for the remainder of their lives, in a prison somewhere. Where are Democrats’ calls for due process now?
For the last eight years Democrats have taken to the American people the story that Republicans had betrayed our deepest values by their conduct of the War on Terror and suggested that all of these acts were unjustifiable excesses of a dark and dictatorial predisposition by proto-fascists. That was, in part, the narrative that catapulted Democrats to their current state of electoral success. The Obama Administration has continued all of the programs that made up that “betrayal of American values,” including, even, extraordinary rendition, the subject of much Democratic hand wringing and inane Hollywood entertainment. Who are the proto-fascists now?
Republicans can expose this hypocrisy and show that the left’s criticism was nothing more than rhetoric – far from deeply held beliefs – and simply a means for seeking political advantage. The people will respond to Democratic hypocrisy as they have to that of Republicans, if Republicans will just point it out.
Republicans can regain their majorities if they do several things: embrace the philosophy of political conservatism; create a “Freedom Agenda” to contrast them from Democrats; regain the initiative and their traditional commitment to reduced spending, smaller government and fiscal conservatism; acknowledge and apologize for having failed to do so during the last administration; endorse conservative social values even as they consign them to their proper, non-political forum; hammer the Democrats’ irresponsible social initiatives and expose the left’s hypocritical critique of Bush terrorism policies.
Obama has given Republicans the tools with which to rebuild. Whether they do so is now up to them.
Family Security Matters Contributing Editor John W. Howard is a lawyer, specializing in corporate and business litigation who also founded a non-profit, public interest law firm specializing in First, Second and Tenth Amendment issues. Feedback: editorialdirector@familysecuritymatters.org.
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