David Brooks today, in a Times blog, drew a distinction that makes the basic econ/social conservative split in the GOP even more tortured:
In Michigan, the full corporate Mitt was on display.
His campaign was a reminder of how far corporate Republicans are from free market Republicans. He proposed $20 billion in new federal spending on research. He insisted that Washington had to get fully engaged in restoring the United States automotive industry. “Detroit can only thrive if Washington is an engaged partner,” he said, “not a disinterested observer.” He vowed, “If I’m president of this country, I will roll up my sleeves in the first 100 days I’m in office, and I will personally bring together industry, labor, Congressional and state leaders and together we will develop a plan to rebuild America’s automotive leadership.”
This is how the British Tory party used to speak in the 1970s.
I get it -- and the corollary, of course, is that Margaret Thatcher brought in real free-market conservatism and blew down not just Labor's welfare state but the corporatism of the center-right as well. But does anyone in the Republican Party really understand this distinction? Who is a real "free market Republican" among the candidates? And do they sound any different from the corporate Republicans? Not to my ears, although the language Brooks quotes from Romney here would have sounded out of place in any of the Republican debates I've watched.
I think the Republican Party has two dilemmas: The obvious one is that the marriage of social conservatives and economic royalists is not a natural partnership. And the less obvious dilemma is that, within the economic conservatives, they are basically various kinds corporate conservatives (mostly just corrupt ones) but addicted to the language of raw free market conservatives like Thatcher and Reagan.
And yet, one could begin to see the glimmers of a solution, if they could escape the Club for Growth, always-cut-taxes ideology that passes for "free market." One could imagine a robust social-contract Republicanism that marries Romney's Michigan language with some version of Huckabee's "Sam's Club Republicanism," that recognizes that families need more from government than gay-marriage bans.
If that's the Republican Party that emerges after losing the next presidential election, that might be a party that one could actually find a way to cooperate with on health care and some other things.
--Mark Schmitt
