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In Sunday’s New York Times there was an interesting story about a bunch of white, working-class Pennsylvanians who voted against Barack Obama in the Democratic primary last spring but supported him last week.
One of them explained why as follows: “We’re like a trillion dollars in debt and spending, what, like $10 billion a month on the war.”
In other words, he was voting Democratic because he thinks the Republicans had screwed up both at home and overseas.
So do most people. That’s why the Republican Party’s troubles began rather than ended Tuesday night. Two of the three legs on which Republican power stood for three decades have been discredited.
Ironically, the third leg, still upright, is the one that’s given Republicans the most political trouble over the years. That leg is social issue conservatism—opposition to abortion, gay rights and the like. But these policies can not be dismissed as incorrect or inaccurate. They are value judgments; there is no such thing as an incorrect value judgment.
But there is such a thing as a botched foreign policy and bad economics, and the Republicans seem guilty of both. Foreign policy neo-conservatism in the abstract—that the United States should assert its values as well as its interests, and that it should not totally rule out military force in pursuit of both—remains plausible. Neo-conservatism as actually practiced—that by invading and occupying a country halfway around the world we can transform it and its region into a Western-style democracy—has been exposed as a delusion.
And if former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan—that free-market purist who was once a devotee of Ayn Rand—has acknowledged that deregulation went too far, who can still defend it?
Well, a few Republican congressmen, who insist that the party cling to its pure Ronald Reagan roots, cutting taxes and regulation even more. Reagan was a real conservative. He was also a real pragmatist. A year after he engineered what was then the biggest tax cut in U.S. history, he agreed to the biggest tax increase in U.S. history. He scorned the Soviet Union, but reached an arms control treaty with it. Like all good leaders, he knew when to compromise.
That’s how he led the Republicans to dominance. In their present state, it’s hard to see how they can get back there.
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