My friend Patrick over at Sane Political Discourse had some thoughtful posts on what happened to the Republican Party. Unfortunately, every conservative blog I've read, post election, refuses to acknowledge one of the primary reasons the Republican Party lost the 2006 and 2008 elections. The Economist, hardly a liberal publication, takes a good hard look at what conservatives choose to ignore. Here are the main points and a link to the entire article.
Conservatives/Republicans: Ignore this at the risk of becoming a smaller and smaller based political party of backward thinkers.
Ship of fools
Nov 13th 2008
From The Economist
Political parties die from the head down
JOHN STUART MILL once dismissed the British Conservative Party as the stupid party. Today the Conservative Party is run by Oxford-educated high-fliers who have been busy reinventing conservatism for a new era. As Lexington sees it, the title of the “stupid party” now belongs to the Tories’ transatlantic cousins, the Republicans.
There are any number of reasons for the Republican Party’s defeat on November 4th. But high on the list is the fact that the party lost the battle for brains. Barack Obama won college graduates by two points, a group that George Bush won by six points four years ago. He won voters with postgraduate degrees by 18 points. And he won voters with a household income of more than $200,000—many of whom will get thumped by his tax increases—by six points. John McCain did best among uneducated voters in Appalachia and the South.
The Republicans lost the battle of ideas even more comprehensively than they lost the battle for educated votes, marching into the election armed with nothing more than slogans. Energy? Just drill, baby, drill. Global warming? Crack a joke about Ozone Al. Immigration? Send the bums home. Torture and Guantánamo? Wear a T-shirt saying you would rather be water-boarding. Ha ha. During the primary debates, three out of ten Republican candidates admitted that they did not believe in evolution.
The Republican Party’s divorce from the intelligentsia has been a while in the making. The born-again Mr Bush preferred listening to his “heart” rather than his “head”. He also filled the government with incompetent toadies like Michael “heck-of-a-job” Brown, who bungled the response to Hurricane Katrina. Mr McCain, once the chattering classes’ favourite Republican, refused to grapple with the intricacies of the financial meltdown, preferring instead to look for cartoonish villains. And in a desperate attempt to serve boob bait to Bubba, he appointed Sarah Palin to his ticket, a woman who took five years to get a degree in journalism, and who was apparently unaware of some of the most rudimentary facts about international politics.
Republicanism’s anti-intellectual turn is devastating for its future. The party’s electoral success from 1980 onwards was driven by its ability to link brains with brawn. The conservative intelligentsia not only helped to craft a message that resonated with working-class Democrats, a message that emphasised entrepreneurialism, law and order, and American pride. It also provided the party with a sweeping policy agenda. The party’s loss of brains leaves it rudderless, without a compelling agenda.
This is happening at a time when the American population is becoming more educated. More than a quarter of Americans now have university degrees. Twenty per cent of households earn more than $100,000 a year, up from 16% in 1996. Mark Penn, a Democratic pollster, notes that 69% call themselves “professionals”. McKinsey, a management consultancy, argues that the number of jobs requiring “tacit” intellectual skills has increased three times as fast as employment in general. The Republican Party’s current “redneck strategy” will leave it appealing to a shrinking and backward-looking portion of the electorate.
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Link
Interesting letter in the comments section of The Economist regarding this article:
Sinistar wrote:
November 17, 2008 18:26
Hi all, First time post. This article was dead on and I applaud the Economist for publishing it. I am a long time Republican (Cast my first vote for Reagan in 1984) that has lost patience and tolerance for the Republican party and voted for Mr. Obama this time.
I am one of those Post Graduate degreed individuals that will probably see his taxes go up but still voted Democratic. To be honest I'm willing to give up some of my income in exchange for a return of the Constitution and to defeat the Evil of Willful ignorance.
It seems to me the party of Reagan has been hijacked by the Mitt Romneys and the Dr. Dobbson's that say you can't be a Republican unless you turn your back on Scientific research and exploration ala Stem Cell Research, Evolution, etc.
The Evangelicals wouldn't vote for McCain until he was willing to hold up his right hand and swear alegiance to Life starts at Conception and Marriage is only between a man and a woman.
When the Republican party is ready to accept ideas that don't come straight from the Bible they may get some of us back. But for now I am happy to put as much distance between me and the Evangelical Republicans as possible. Good Riddance!!!
4 comments:
Believe it or not, I'm going to agree with you (more or less, of course).
The war of perception certainly cast the GOP in the idiot chair this year. This is partially because the party became more reactionary as it lost power (and that was due primarily to a failure to live up to the principles that elected them). In turn, the party chose to move toward the Democrats to win more votes (McCain), then plucked someone out to get their base in at the last moment (Sarah Palin) who wasn't quite ready for prime time (or the McCain people were messing with her).
I'm not going to go with the assertion that President Bush and Sarah Palin are dumb (because they're not). But when you fail to articulate a clear conservative message and fall back on the cliche-ridden reaction-speak to win votes, you're setting the stage to be the intellectual lightweights.
Conservatism is a relentless intellectual pursuit. I know because I've been struggling with defining it more and more (and I'm getting gooooood at it). This means being able to define anything within the framework of conservative thought logically rather than emotionally or with dogma. And the GOP failed miserably. And I was reduced to simply attacking Obama's socialism because I couldn't boost McCain "conservatism" (and the presence of quotes indicates my opinion there).
Compare that with the Obama message, which was "hope" and "change" for a year before he got the nomination. By then, he was able to flesh out enough that he sailed by based primarily on anger at the GOP/Bush failures. Oh, and there was the economic mess that erupted this year, after stewing for a couple of decades.
Considering that the GOP forgot that its the party of thought and not emotion, it's no wonder it crashed and burned.
I found this extremely interesting.
From the NY times article Monday November 17 discussing changes at the National Review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/business/media/17review.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=david+frum&st=nyt&oref=slogin
'Mr. Frum said deciding to leave was amicable, but distancing himself from the magazine founded by his idol, Mr. Buckley, was not a hard decision. He said the controversy over Governor Palin’s nomination for vice president was “symbolic of a lot of differences” between his views and those of National Review’s.
“I am really and truly frightened by the collapse of support for the Republican Party by the young and the educated,” he said.'
Bingo.
And I agree with Patrick regarding Bush and Palin. they aren't dumb.
But they are lazy and incurious and confident and self-assured to a level no way commensurate with their abilities. Glib and (when properly coached) completely presentable.
But we're talking about the leader of the free world. Not America's Idol.
And there is still a difference.
Republican political analyst, David Frum writing in The New York Times Magazine of Sept. 5, 2008:
http://tinyurl.com/62qpbr
What the middle class needs most is not lower income taxes but a slowdown in the soaring inflation of health-care costs. If health-insurance costs had risen 50 percent rather than 100 percent over the Bush years, middle-income voters would have enjoyed a pay raise instead of enduring wage stagnation. John McCain’s health plan, which emphasizes tax changes to encourage employees to buy their own insurance rather than rely on employers, is a start — but only the very beginning of a start. Some Republicans have brought great energy to this problem. In the Senate, Robert Bennett of Utah has written a bill with the Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden that would require employers to “cash out” employer-provided health care — and then midwife a national insurance marketplace in which employees would join plans that offered more price control and price transparency. Mitt Romney in Massachusetts put an end to the tax disadvantage that hammers consumers who buy health care directly rather than through their employers. Rudy Giuliani proposed a federal law to enable low-cost insurers in states like Kentucky to sell their products across state lines in high-cost states like New Jersey. But it remains unfortunately true that the Republican Party as a whole regards health care as “not our issue” — and certainly less exciting than another round of tax reductions.
Unlike liberals, conservatives are not bothered by the accumulation of wealth as such. We should be more troubled that the poor remain so poor. With all due respect to the needs of employers, Republicans need to recognize that the large-scale import of unskilled labor is part of the problem.
Meanwhile, the argument over same-sex marriage has become worse than a distraction from the challenge of developing policies to ensure that as many children as possible grow up with both a father and a mother in the home. Over the past 30 years, governments have effectively worked to change attitudes about smoking, seat-belt use and teenage pregnancy. Changing attitudes about unmarried childbirth may prove more difficult. Yet it is a fact that the only way to escape poverty is to work consistently — and that even after welfare reform, low-skilled single parents work less consistently than the main breadwinner in a low-skilled dual-parent household.
At the same time, conservatives need to ask ourselves some hard questions about the trend toward the Democrats among America’s affluent and well educated. Leaving aside the District of Columbia, 7 of America’s 10 best-educated states are strongly “blue” in national politics, and the others (Colorado, New Hampshire and Virginia) have been trending blue. Of the 10 least-educated, only one (Nevada) is not reliably Republican. And so we arrive at a weird situation in which the party that identifies itself with markets, with business and with technology cannot win the votes of those who have prospered most from markets, from business and from technology. Republicans have been badly hurt in upper America by the collapse of their onetime reputation for integrity and competence. Upper Americans live in a world in which things work. The packages arrive overnight. The car doors clink seamlessly shut. The prevailing Republican view — “of course government always fails, what do you expect it to do?” — is not what this slice of America expects to hear from the people asking to be entrusted with the government.
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Equality in itself never can be or should be a conservative goal. But inequality taken to extremes can overwhelm conservative ideals of self-reliance, limited government and national unity. It can delegitimize commerce and business and invite destructive protectionism and overregulation. Inequality, in short, is a conservative issue too. We must develop a positive agenda that integrates the right kind of egalitarianism with our conservative principles of liberty. If we neglect this task and this opportunity, we won’t lose just the northern Virginia suburbs. We will lose America.
David Frum, is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Well, I am glad to see that I am not the only one out battling against the insanity of conservatism. First off, what now passes as conservatism, which would include GWB and Sarah Palin, is not logical and is more fascism than actually democratic conservatism. When all you do to gain support is strike fear in the heart of your followers and wave the flag of patriotism and national security you are NOT being a conservsative.
Ranting and raving about lower taxes all the while not saying a word about budget deficits is not conservatism.
Ranting and raving about MSM is just an excuse to hide the fact that you have no fundamental ideas to base an argument on.
This is not an attack of conservatism...its just reality.
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