Halfway through The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians and the Battle to Control the Republican Party, the new book by New York Post columnist and self-described libertarian Ryan Sager, readers may find themselves torn over whether to empathize with Republican Congressman Mike Pence of Indiana.
The former talk show host won a House seat in 2000, the same year George W. Bush punched his Supreme Court-issued ticket for Washington. Regretful of the fact that he missed out on the 1994 revolution that swept the GOP into power in both chambers, Pence arrived on Capitol Hill in January 2001 excited -- “suited up” -- to join that ambitious pack of conservatives who had taken control six years earlier and, presumably, were still rocking the people's House.
Soon after his arrival, however, Pence learned that H.R. 1 -- the bill assigned symbolic import by virtue of its position at the front of the legislative queue -- would constitute nothing less than the largest expansion in the Department of Education since the days of Jimmy Carter: Bush's No Child Left Behind proposal. “They tell me don't worry about it, it's an anomaly,” Pence recalls to Sager. But two years and his first re-election later, the Republican leadership inaugurated Pence's sophomore term by assigning H.R. 1 status to the president's massive prescription drug entitlement bill. “Wrong answer,” he bristled. “Not what I came here to do.”What Pence failed to understand is that a lot had changed during the intervening six years between the revolution and his arrival, and only part of that change had to do with the simultaneous arrival of the self-styled “compassionate conservative” from Crawford, Texas.
The blessing of being in the majority is that political power and policy reach expand with the size of the governing coalition. The curse is that disagreements break out quicker, fester longer, and wreak more havoc as that governing majority expands.
Long comfortable with shouting from the sidelines about a variety of slights, real or perceived, Republicans realized soon after the Revolution that gaining control of the entire national government was easier than governing it. Like kids held down on the playground by bullies, the visceral roars that brought Republicans to power quickly morphed into whimpering pleas from the halls of Congress and the West Wing. “This is hard,” they boo-hooed.
So Republicans took the easy route: They abdicated, expanding rather than shrinking government, compensating for their fiscal perfidies by emphasizing a “values” agenda. (Far better, Senate majority leader Bill Frist clearly concluded, to diagnose Terry Schiavo's condition by watching her on videotape than put his caucus members through a 12-step program to rid them of their addiction to wasteful earmarks.) Conservatives who had waited 40 years for a choice rather than an echo instead got a “big-government conservatism” echo to what liberals had been chanting all along.
Into this political and intellectual chasm leaps Sager, with his spikes up. After a brief digression on the history of pan-conservative “fusionism” that will be familiar to readers of many other books -- from Michael Lind's Up From Conservatism to John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge's The Right Nation -- Sager spells out the main question paralyzing today's Republicans: Can they keep their party's libertarian and “values” wings together? “Today, no longer bound together by the Cold War or opposition to Bill Clinton and having tasted power at the small price of bending their beliefs,” writes Sager, “the two sides are fighting over nothing less than whether the Republican Party will complete its abandonment of the very principle upon which their fusionist marriage has been based these many years: a commitment to limited government.”
New York Times columnist David Brooks has taken a more sanguine view of conservative diversity, believing that the movement is strong precisely because “conservative” is a flexible yet inclusive enough label to attract a range of sub-movements. This book means to cast doubt on that comforting notion. A heretic to Republicans' "always project optimism" code of public engagement, Sager grumbles that fusionism has collapsed, replaced by the inchoate politics of strange bedfellows (heterosexual bedfellows, to be sure). “[C]an social conservatives and libertarians return to the common ground they once shared, or will their differences grow irreconcilable?” wonders Sager, concluding dimly that “early signs are less than encouraging.”
To make his point Sager turns to the oft-forgotten stepchild of the GOP's southern-dominated geographic coalition: the West. Trends in the eight states of the interior West ought to make Republicans shudder. Clinton carried five of them at least once, including Montana in 1992. Though there were no Democratic governors in any of these eight in January 2001, presently there are four: Arizona's Janet Napolitano, Montana's Brian Schweitzer, New Mexico's Bill Richardson, and Dave Fruedenthal in unlikely Wyoming. If Colorado's Bill Ritter, who leads Republican congressman Bob Beauprez by double digits in recent polls, can hang on this year, Americans will be able to drive along the Rockies from the Canadian border to Mexico without entering a Republican-governed state.
The GOP's western deterioration stems from the party's inability to balance budgets back in Washington coupled with palpable unease caused by evangelical Christians and other culture vultures that have dominated the Republican leadership during the Bush era. With millions of easterners and bounced-back Californians filling the West's burgeoning suburbs while new Latino residents reach voting age and Native Americans reach for the ballots they've long ignored, a perfect storm may be gathering for Democrats on the great plains and high peaks beyond the Mississippi River.
Sager's description of the Republicans' mounting problems is marred only by his lack of prescriptive solutions. Other than calling for a “renewal of (conservative) vows” and suggesting a few policy tweaks, Sager provides no path out. It is fashionable to dismiss Democrats for having lost the center. But when 53 percent of Bush's 286 electoral votes from the culturally conservative South and just 15 percent come from the eight states of the interior West, the GOP faces ideological problems in its own center-right marriage -- problems no new vows can solve.
Neither Pence's complaints nor Sager's warnings can substitute for a massive campaign to liberalize southern attitudes on social issues and wean southern electorates off the federal dependency that brings them more dollars from Washington than they pay in taxes. The decline of fusionism may be the Republicans' “elephant in the room,” but the real problem is that the elephant's southern girth leaves little space for others to squeeze inside the door.
Thomas F. Schaller is associate professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and author of Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South.
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