Puttin’ Yer Dukes Up
The decision by Arlen Specter to “cross the aisle” and become a Democrat has drawn a pretty broad array of reactions from a variety of interested parties. Some folks like Rush Limbaugh and Ross Douthat have deemed the defection good riddance to bad rubbish. While others like Olympia Snowe have tended to see the move as an unmitigated disaster for the Republican Party.
Specter himself seemed to assess the situation as equal parts realpolitik and principles. In part he acknowledged that he had taken a good hard look at the polling data and the hospitality he’d been receiving from the Party and saw the writing on the wall. On the flip side, he has spent a good deal of time pointing the finger folks like the Club for Growth, whose hard line stances he says have been steadily and surely pushing Republican moderates out of the Party for some time now.
In turning the various factors over in my own mind, I found that I encountered a surprising amount of contradiction in my own thinking.
I’ve made no bones about my own distaste for the direction in which the Republican Party seems to be headed; as much as I might be interested in the potential applications of conservative ideology as a piece to our every expanding political puzzle, I, along with pretty much everyone on this site, find the current formulation of movement conservatism to be simply unpalatable. In that regard, I suppose it is true that we don’t cover ever single inch of the political spectrum.
And so, on some level I can’t fault Specter for jumping from that sinking ship, from a particular angle it would appear the only sane thing to do. And, of course, I have spent no small amount of time on this site bemoaning the trappings of an overtly ideological perspective. I have also refused to articulate my own placement in a particular political camp for fear of short circuiting a process of political discourse that I see as not only important, but in many regards as vital to the functioning of any democracy. So one might expect that upon hearing news of Arlen Specter’s decision to jump ranks I could hardly contain the urge to jump to my feet and shout, “Yeah! You go boy!”
One would be wrong in that assumption. [Read more →]
May 9, 2009 17 Comments
Twenty-First Century Conservatism
Go populist without going populist: I’ve spent some time warning against the dangers of populism in regards to the AIG scandal and generally, but the fact of the matter is that there is smoldering populist sentiment out there that is not completely off-base in terms of its raison d’etre. People rightly believe that their government has gotten away from them and increasingly has little to do with their everyday lives and addressing the issues present in those lives in a positive fashion and a movement/party that can present a believable narrative about how they care about the challenges facing Americans and are interested in focusing on those issues in a collaborative fashion stands a decent chance of capturing a sizable proportion of the national imagination.
Look, John McCain and Sarah Palin were on to something with their decision to go hyper-local in how they addressed supporters and finished in what was a respectable place given that this election was the Democrats’ to lose and they did very little to actually lose it. The problem is that Palin and McCain practiced actual, base-line populism that appealed to people’s lowest common denominator inclinations. Such traditional populism generally winds up looking pretty ugly as a result and will get you a certain segment of support, but doesn’t offer the means for developing a broad base of support. But if conservatives can find a way of walking the walk of populism without necessarily talking the talk of populism, they might have a recipe for success sooner than we all tend to think. Walking the walk but not talking the talk to me means eschewing notions of appealing to peoples’ lowest common denominators and meeting people where they are but challenging them to bring the angels of their better nature to the game. Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam’s arguments around Sam’s Club Republicans come to mind in this regard, as does the kind of localism/regionalism/integrity of living articulated by the likes of Daniel Larison, John Schwenkler, and particularly Rod Dreher (though Rod runs in to his troubles in other areas). [Read more →]
March 27, 2009 20 Comments
