There was a time when I would have greeted the sectionalizati
on taking place within the GOP with unbridled glee. Now, all I can express is sadness.
If anything, it underscores the irony of politics. As a recent Economist article observes, former Georgia Governor and Sen. Zell Miller wrote a book only a few years ago bemoaning the sectionalization of his own Democratic party. Now, the tables seem to be turned. The GOP, historically the party of national unity, faces the bleak prospect not only of sectionalization but also of provincialism — a party confined only to one section, increasingly parochial, even obscurantist in its outlook.
As the Democrats reinvent themselves to look less like Harvard Yard and more like real America, the GOP looks less like real America, more like the campuses of Baylor or Bob Jones universities. And as the economist observes, there is a real danger here:
The danger for the Republicans is that they will respond to these Democratic advances by retreating to their heartland. The incoming Republican delegation will be more southern and more conservative than ever. It is hardly encouraging that the Senate Republicans have just reinstalled Mississippi’s Trent Lott as one of their leaders—a man who had to give up the top job in 2002 for making a racist remark. There are plenty of Republican activists who think that the future lies in becoming ever more conservative, and not worrying too much about the slow-growing north-east. That sort of thinking led the Democrats to become the Party of Taxachusetts and Michael Dukakis. The Republicans need a Zell Miller of their own.
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Most of us in the course of our lives are struck with moments of stunning insight and clarity.
Sometime at around age 15 or 16, I remember watching some low-budget Cold War-era flick about a communist takeover of the United States. Reflecting on it a few days later, I was struck by the rather stark realization that if the United States suffered some major calamity — an invasion or internal collapse of some sort resulting in the utter destruction of our ideals — there would be little left that was definably American.
Of course, way back then I had no idea that far less prosaic minds than mine had been ruminating on and debating this idea for years. We are, after all, a credal nation defined far more by our ideals than by the ancient ethnic or religious bonds that distinguish other nations from one another.
More recently, though, and at the risk of sounding like a neocon, it’s occurred to me that national greatness figures into this too. From the beginning, we’ve either been a great nation in the making or a great nation in fact. And that raises an equally intriguing, if not unsettling, question: What would an America be like that ceased to be great or, at the very least, that lost much of its luster, one that was viewed less as a model and beacon to other nations and more as a spent historical force? For that matter how would we Americans deal with it? Would we follow our post-war British cousins, tying our fortunes to an ascending nation and striving to become its mentor? Or would we nurse our frustrations in comparative isolation, much like post-Soviet Russia?
If New York Times columnist Paul Samuelson is right, we may be asking these sorts of questions sooner than many of us realize. What Samuelson foresees is an America more akin to a post-World War I Britain — perhaps not so much a spent force like the Britain that emerged after Second World War but one that is aware of its limitations and less willing to impose its will across the planet. As Samuelson writes,
America won’t retire from the world stage, but how active it will be is unclear. Iraq has reduced national confidence and credibility. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid spending are already twice defense spending. Generational attitudes are shifting. A poll of 18- to 24-year-olds finds that 72 percent don’t think the United States should take the lead in solving global crises, reports Paul Starobin in National Journal.
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Presidential hopeful and Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney lately has been backing away from earlier, moderate-sounding views on abortion and gay rights, but he can’t deny his impeccable moderate Republican pedigree.
Writing in the Decline and Fall of Liberal Republicans, published in 1989, Nicol E. Rae, a scholar of Republicanism, described Romney’s late father George as a serious 1968 presidential contender and a popular “pragmatic reformer in the progressive tradition.”
Elected 1962 as the first Republican governor of Michigan in more than 14 years, George Romney advocated a “citizens party” vision for the GOP — one that sounded too much like Eisenhower Republicanism to suit many conservative party stalwarts.
At the highly contentious 1964 GOP Convention, Romney also further alienated himself from the Goldwater wing by joining other liberal Republicans — Jacob Javitts, William Scranton and Nelson Rockefeller — in calling for platform amendments on civil rights, nuclear weaponry and party extremism, Rae states in his book.
Romney’s star eventually waned as his public statements sounded less and less like those of a serious presidential contender. The death knell was sounded after his notorious brainwashing statements following a Vietnam tour.
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