Crack-Ups, Past and Future

In the comments to my post on the looming conservative civil war, Jay Reding writes:

For all the talk of a conservative crackup, the GOP is exactly in the same position that the Democrats were in at this time in 2003. There was no clear winner, there were major differences of opinion over what the face of the party should be, and there was even talk of brokered conventions and splits in the party.

I agree! But in 2003, the Democrats were facing a crack-up - hawks versus doves, Clintonites versus Deaniacs, Peter Beinart versus Michael Moore, the DLC versus Daily Kos. The bloodletting was halted only because the Iraq occupation turned out to be a disaster rather than a triumph, which simultaneously discredited the party’s hawkish faction and incentivized the party to unite against a weakened GOP. But it didn’t have to be that way: The Lamont-Lieberman race in '06 was a fading echo of a civil war that might have continued unabated, if George W. Bush’s approval ratings had kept hovering around sixty percent and foreign policy had continued to be an electoral trump card for the Republicans.

Instead, the Bush Administration drove the GOP brand into a ditch, creating an enormous opening for the Democrats – and parties with a clear path back to the White House don’t tend to engage in bloody internecine strife. Which is why a scenario like the one Matt sketches out here, in which Romney goes down to defeat and the GOP just keeps on keeping on, seems unlikely to me: Parties and movements only keep on keeping on when they can tell themselves that they’re within hailing distance of real power, and if the Republican Party wakes up in ’08 with a Democrat in the White House and solid Dem majorities in the House and Senate, it’ll take some serious self-deception for conservatives to convince themselves that they still have a winning formula for ’10 and ’12 and beyond. (Particularly since they can’t count on Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton starting an enormously unpopular foreign war, which is what pulled the Democratic Party back from the abyss in ’03 and ’04.)

This doesn’t mean that there will be blood in the hallways of the Heritage Foundation; but a party doesn't need to experience a bloodbath to come out altered in significant ways. The Democratic infighting of the Bush years may not have been all that severe, but it had a real effect on the political landscape: All of the party’s ’08 candidates, you may have noticed, are running to the left of any Democrat since Dukakis, a turn of events that would have been hard to imagine just five years ago. I don’t know how or how much the Republican Party will change if it goes into the political wilderness this fall, but we don’t live in an environment where politicians and parties have a chance to settle in and get comfortable in the minority. Everything happens too fast, and too much attention is paid to politics for the out-of-power party to do anything except cast about for ways to change.

Comments

I just wonder when the crack-up will take place between those who believe in evolution and those who don't.

I think the split is bigger in the Republican Party than the Democratic Party. After all, a lot of Republicans look like Democrats on fiscal issues but vote on gay marriage and abortion. A lot of others have gay friends and friends who needed an abortion but hate high taxes and the welfare state.

I always thought the Republican coalition would survive until they overturned Roe. It looks like it won't even survive that long

Posted by neil wilson | January 2, 2008 10:39 AM

First off, thanks for reading and responding to comments.

I agree with most of the substance of your post. One minor disagreement: The GOP could come back through obstruction.

They've already set a record for filibusters only halfway through the session-- and the media narrative has been more "hapless, do-nothing Dems" than "obstructionist Republicans." If the GOP can keep that up, then maybe they'll have some big victory akin to stopping health care in 1993.

So the GOP may be able to stage a comeback even if they lose big in 2008.

The GOP has to work to shift the focus away from solving problems, because they are trailing Democrats on just about every issue. Of course, if the Democratic Party takes charge, these numbers could easily shift, due to Democratic incompetence and Republican intransigence.

Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | January 2, 2008 11:25 AM

Back in 2004 many pundits assured us that the divided conservative coalition had run its course and that Bush with a terribly had war and tax policy had run the Republicans into the proverbial ditch.

I'll grant that none of the present Republican candidates have stirred the conservative base, to say nothing of independents, though with the Iraq War looking far better, the economy in decent shape, and the fiasco of Reid and Pelosi's leadership, it's hardly time for conservatives to throw in the towel.

An incisive recent analysis of this by John O'Sullivan resonates:

Conservative parties in the Anglosphere win when they retain the support of three large electoral blocs: economic conservatives, moral traditionalists, and nationalists. The Reagan coalition consists of these groups. It is not dead, but groups within it are increasingly irritated because they don’t feel cemented by a grand unifying idea (like anti-Communism in the Reagan days) that justifies the concessions each makes to the others. I think that there is such a grand unifying idea standing in the middle of the room trumpeting loudly: it’s the omnipresence of an unaccountable bureaucracy at home and abroad that increasingly rules us while exempting itself from our democratic control. This bureaucracy annoys economic conservatives by overregulating the economy, moral traditionalists by using state power to spread moral “innovation,” and nationalists by deconstructing the nation and transferring power to international bodies.

Posted by Peter Leavitt | January 2, 2008 12:34 PM

One additional factor to consider is that the last twenty years have trained the Republicans to expect the Democrats to self-destruct. So the Republicans could easily spend 4 lethargic years in the minority expecting the Democrats to do something like pass a huge tax increase specifically targeted for the support of gay marriage while simultaneously trying to ban alcohol, make sex education mandatory in pre-school, and nominate Osama Bin Laden to the Supreme Court. It would only be when they lost a second election to a Democratic Party that turned out to be unexpectedly competent and popular that the Republicans would start the internal struggle to redefine themselves.

Posted by JimB | January 2, 2008 12:52 PM

"This doesn’t mean that there will be blood in the hallways of the Heritage Foundation"

But we can dream, can't we?

Meanwhile one can only guffaw over Peter Leavitt's comedy act. The "Iraq war looking far better"? The "economy in decent shape"? I suppose if you think closing n on 4000 American dead for a war which never should have happened in a cause for doing fucking handstands, and if you think the subprime mortgage fallout is over. But neither is true. And when you consider that Dumbya and the Bushpigs didn't do a single thing in their 6 years of complete control to better the long-term picture for the country - not one single thing - it is impossible for any rational person to conclude that the Bush years have been anything but a morass of malignant incompetence.

Then again, torture makes Peter Leavitt happy.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | January 2, 2008 1:28 PM

Short version of Ross: GeoBush43 = HerbertHoover.
What a great thought!!! It'll keep me smiling all day long. Forty years of conservatives hiding under their rock, PRICELESS.

Posted by JohnMcC | January 2, 2008 1:53 PM

re: "Parties and movements only keep on keeping on when they can tell themselves that they’re within hailing distance of real power"

I remember during the Clinton years ("the Clinton I years"?)... many of my Republican friends were convinced that Clinton's election was somehow illegitimate. He hadn't gotten a majority, and "Wouldn't have gotten in at all if it weren't for Ross Perot".

Of course, we saw the same thing with Bush II ("He wouldn't have gotten in at all if it weren't for Ralph Nader - and the Supreme Court").

I'm guessing there will be somebody running a third-party race this year - Bloomberg, Ron Paul, Stephen Colbert - and we'll see the supporters of whichever party loses trotting out the same argument.

And if your guy only lost because the other guy cheated, you don't throw in the towel. You throw out the rulebook...

Posted by Jeremy | January 2, 2008 3:54 PM

MLJ, Then again, torture makes Peter Leavitt happy.

Actually, I accept John McCain's view that normally torture doesn't work, though I would consider it for idiotic leftist bloggers in the perhaps forlorn hope that they might mend their ways.

Posted by Peter Leavitt | January 2, 2008 9:00 PM

Peter Leavitt quotes and writes: "MLJ, Then again, torture makes Peter Leavitt happy.

Actually, I accept John McCain's view that normally torture doesn't work, though I would consider it for idiotic leftist bloggers in the perhaps forlorn hope that they might mend their ways."

Of course you don't care if it works, and I didn't say that you did. I just said it makes you happy.

You're not actually stupid enough to think Dumbya or Cheney care if it works, either - are you? It's not about efficacy. It's about fear and power and a government gone horribly wrong. If the needle hadn't fallen off your moral compass decades ago perhaps you'd even realize that.

It's not just McCain's view that torture doesn't work - he thinks it's wrong. That you couldn't bring yourself to say so points out that he's a better man than you are. But then again, most are.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | January 2, 2008 10:23 PM