Who’s Afraid of the Big Tent?
John Avalon has a great piece up at David Frum’s New Majority website about how the GOP can win in New England again. He notes that before the Bush-era there were still an favorable number of Republicans holding office in New England and now there are none (two if you include New York State.)
One of his tips that the party has to become a Big Tent party:
Somehow Republicans have lost common ground – Reagan invoked the Big Tent constantly as a way of collecting libertarian conservatives, national security conservatives, economic conservatives and social conservatives under one banner. But the spirit of outreach and inclusiveness has been drummed out of the GOP – disagreement is seen as disloyalty, and the search for heretics has become a hobby. Libertarians are losing any logical reason to affiliate with the GOP, while centrist Republicans are seen as suspect almost by definition. When Senators like Olympia Snowe or John McCain win re-election with over 70% of the vote, they are considered sell-outs rather than successes. I’ve debated conservatives on TV who were rooting for Norm Coleman to lose, because they considered him insufficiently conservative. This road leads not just to political disaster, but party suicide. Republicans who have won statewide in the Northeast tend to be centrist on social issues, especially on a woman’s right to chose and gay civil rights. Republicans must welcome social moderates into the big tent of the GOP, focus on finding common ground and not treat them as second class citizens. Remember: In a place where everyone thinks alike, nobody is thinking very much.
This is something that I have long advocated. There are many flavors of Republicans, but for some reason many conservatives think there is only one way to be conservative. Social conservatives look down on those of us who happen to be pro-choice even though we tend to do so on completely conservative grounds.
So, what is it about some in the GOP to be so afraid of the Big Tent? What is so scary about facing a person that might not exactly have the same conservatism that you do? Why has the party so drifted from Ronald Reagan’s message of forging alliances with those who agree with you 80 percent of the time?
I don’t have an easy answer, only a guess. As religion played more and more a role in the GOP, the party itself has become more rigid. If the lines between religion and politics blur, the party becomes less open to ideas that are seemed as sinful in religious circles.
Take gay rights. There are many African Americans that have issues with gay marriage. African Americans also tend to be an important aspect of the liberal coalition. However, Democratic politicians who do support gay marriage don’t fear being treated as not “Democratic enough” because religion doesn’t play as big a role in the Democatic Party as it does the GOP. In the modern Republican party, there are many who see gay marriage and homosexuality itself as a sin and want that expressed in national policy. They also believe that it should be expressed in the party platform and made a tenet of conservatism. So, if you are a conservative who happens to believe gays should be tolerated in society and should have the right to marry, you are not only going against religious teaching, but because church and state are blurred in the GOP, you are then deemed not a true conservative.
Which is why, I believe, that many social conservatives are afraid of the Big Tent. If you admit people who support gay rights, or abortion rights into the party, you are admitting those who support sinful practices and there taint the party. This is why the Kathleen Parkers of the world have called for the GOP to not be so identified with religion. Someone like a Joe Carter have interpreted that to mean that social conservatives should be kicked out of the GOP. That’s nonsense. Nor do we want to silence those who have a faith. But the fact is that social conservatives have kept power in the party to the exclusion of anyone else that tends to believe in small government or low taxes but have a more socially moderate views. But in their eyes adhering to those bedrock coservative ideas don’t not matter; God doesn’t get upset with wanting big government, but would- in their eyes- if you treat gays like human beings and not as someone that committed a sin.
Which is why in the end, I believe that if we want to have a viable GOP that follows a Big Tent Conservatism, it will have to come from the margins and not from the powerbrokers. The social conservatives are too strong, and the powerbrokers are too beholden to the social conservatives to make room for other flavors of conservativism. If we want to see more Republicans running and winning seats in areas like New England, it has to come from insurgents who are willing to buck the established order and bring about a more tolerant and open Republican party.
Will it happen? It all depends on the outsiders being able to raise hell.
Crossposted at NeoMugwump.
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9 Responses to “Who’s Afraid of the Big Tent?”
I like this post a lot. It describes a situation which has been happening in the Republican party for a long, long time. I grew up in a Republican house, and considered myself a strong Republican for years. The fight over the amendment to ban gay marriage and civil unions in Wisconsin is what began to push me away from the party. I was highly uncomfortable with the idea of giving the Government powers to ban two people from forming a legal union. Hard line stances on contraception and abortion were also hard for me to stomach. I'm no fan of abortion, but some stances seemed extreme to me. Laws with no exception for rape or a mother's threatened life just seemed to go against the idea of a compassionate society.
But anyway, personal views aside, I think there are a lot of good points here. I hope the Republican party chooses to open up- and maybe some day I'll return to a new, stronger party.
As a New Englander and a former Republican, let me state what I want from the GOP: intelligence and competence.
Dogma, including the current GOPs take on social issues, is practically worthless. Intelligence trumps dogma. If you want me to support your platform, even if your platform includes dogmatic statements such as “free markets are wonderful”, make sure you prove it and show me that you've thought it through, ALL the way through. This tells me you've properly vetted your proposal or your position. The GOP in it's current state is anything BUT intelligent. They smack down science and ignore experience and have effectively dumbed-down political discourse to a horribly low level.
As far as competence goes, the ruling party had better do things that produce results or I will abandon them. This GOP, at least at the federal level, has failed miserably. They deserved to be abandoned.
The conservative party will always be a smaller tent party than the liberal party. Throwing money around is always easier for the liberal party and allows the liberal party to pay off friends.
The problem with the Republicans is they decide to take the worst party of the liberals, (massive spending, nation building, expanding entitlements along with worse tendencies of the right such as the Schiavo case.
If President Bush was going to have a 25% approval rating, at least he could have balance the budget to gotten rid of the Department of Education. Bush tried to rule as a moderate and was hit from both sides. He passed a massive education bill and it resulted in the entire educaitonal establishment hating him. He passed a new entitlement and seniors hated him. He passed benefited for illegal aliens and added to the real estate bubble.
It is kind of hard to claim that Bush was a small tent Republicans when you look at how much he expanded the government.
Free markets are wonderful when it comes to letting individuals and companies have choice in products they buy. They're great when it comes to honest economic competition on a level (or close to it) playing field. As soon as you get past that it becomes problematic. The version that gets up to our current banking system and corporations like Enron and “health insurance” companies that don't care about their customer's health is something only a sociopath could love and far more destructive than beneficial for not only our country but the world. All of life is not a balance sheet and should not be subsumed to quarterly reports.
The current Republican Party is one of ideology and only ideology. Two strong faiths, fundamentalist Christianity and the Church of Free Market, are what have more than enough influence to run things. Combine that with one of the worst features of every fanatical religion, hatred of “the other”, and you have the modern “conservative” movement. I can practically hear the objections now but if I were really horribly wrong in this evaluation there would not have been the rabid hatred of the Clintons in the '90s and you would not still have enough of an audience to make Limbaugh, Hannity, Malkin, Coulter, Michael Reagan and all the others like them as successful as they remain. Look at Limbaugh's proud boast of wanting President Obama to fail. This kind of fanaticism does not readily change course. I think that it is entirely possible that the only way the more reasonable conservatives will ever mean something in this country is to start a new party and quit allying themselves with the current crop of Republican Radicals for the sake of keeping influence. You will be judged by the company you keep. The break must be sharp, it must be complete and it must come soon if respectable conservatives want to come in from the political wilderness. But of course YMMV.
Jim,
The Republicans are a minority party. Having some of them break off and create a new party just makes the Democratic Party more powerful.
If you look at what Limbaugh is really saying is that he does not want a massive expansion of entitlements that President Obama is propoisng. Limbaugh does not want open borders and unlimited immigration that President Obama is proposing. Limbuagh does not want the central economic planning that President Obama is proposing.
Also, it is hard to argue that the party that passed Sarbanes-Oxley is really the anti-regulation party. That the party that required banks to make loans to minorities is the anti-regulation party.
Jim, if you were honest instead of a cheerleader for the Democratic, you would admit that the Obama ADmnistration is foolish in saying that policy coming out of the White House has a direct, short term effect on the economy. The economy did well under the Clinton Administration because that adminstration did so little instead of going so much.
SD tells me what I would do if I were honest. This is rather pathetic. Sarbanes-Oxley is one law and only one law. It was passed only after multiple cases of massive fraud perpetuated by large corporations. It proves nothing about the larger attitudes and beliefs of the Republican Party.
Jim, if you were honest, you would admitted that a Repubican Congress passed and a Repubican President signed a bill that placed a tremendous regulatory burden on American business without any long term benefits to show for it. Also, what regulation were rescinded during the Bush Administration. I would love to know. I guess all of the regulations that made it almost impossible for research firms to possess a large number of biological samples or chemical weapon precursors also really did not happen. Or the regulation that required people at blood banks to submit fingerprints to the FBI was not a real regulation.
Maybe if you read something other than the dailykos, you would realize that a large number of regulations came out during the Bush Administration. but then you would have to admit that the rules against red-lining probably closed more harm that any possible benefit.
Time after time we hear that the Republicans should be more liberal and more like the Democrats. Those who say that have the Democratic Party they can have represent them, as should be the case. The rest of us, who aren't all partisan Republicans but at least want to see some difference so at least we can select the Republicans as the clearly lesser of two evils, don't want Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber.
DENNIS SANDERS COMMENTARY: Who’s Afraid Of The Big
The moderate-liberal Republican blogger opines about the Republican Party: “There are many flavors of Republicans, but for some reason many conservatives think there is only one way to be conservative. Social conservatives look down on those of us wh…