Editors' Note: This is the final installment in our series of conservative responses to Mark Schmitt's article "Can Identity Politics Save the Right." Jon Henke is a founding editor of The Next Right, and Strategic Manager at New Media Strategies.
I think there's a great deal of merit in much of what Schmitt writes … but also a bit of convenient rationalization, too.
We agree that the Republican Party is pretty close to hitting bottom. He's correct that the Republican Party has been at its best as an opposition party, and his summary of how the Democratic Party regained its footing is quite right as well. Still, I disagree with him on three main points.
First, Schmitt's claim that Republicans rely more on identity politics than Democrats is … somewhat strained. What else, after all, are the Democrats' populist “people first” and “two Americas” arguments, except attempts to create identity groups they can claim are under siege — an us that is being oppressed by a them? Republicans and Democrats have long played the identity politics game and both will continue doing so, their targets shifting with the politics winds of the day, as long as people are prone to group-serving bias. The Democrats have not brought their identity politics “to a peaceful close”, and Republican allusions to in-groups and out-groups are neither new, unique to Republicans, nor necessarily disconnected from policy themes.
Second, Schmitt says McCain’s potential success would have to depend on him “divorcing himself” from the “post-Bush Republican Party and conservatism’s decadent phase”. There’s certainly some decadence that the Right needs to excise -- I would argue that the problem is more systemic than a condition of one Party or another -- but McCain has two routes to potential success. He can triangulate by moving to the middle and reaching compromises with Democrats that are generally tolerable to the middle and portions of the Right that are willing to make the best of a difficult political landscape, or he can try to resurrect the relevance of the Right bringing to the table new, imaginative ideas to address current problems while also moving forward on the traditional goals of the Right (e.g., limited government, strong defense). For instance:
