While I knew a number of these would be coming along all through the winter, (after the GOP lost an election that wasn’t exactly a squeaker) I’ll confess I felt a bit of nostalgia and empathy upon reading Sophia Nelson’s Lost Republican Love Song in the Washington Post this weekend. Much of it is predictable for those of us who have suffered through the same recriminations and regrets in the past, but a few highlights are worthy of mention.
After such a devastating loss, Republicans will have to do some retooling. We’ll have to decide whether we want to be the party that believes in smaller government, lower taxes and less regulation, or whether we’re going to be a litmus-test party that responds only to the demands of social conservatives. But most important, we’ll have to confront our most disastrous modern legacy: our poor relationship with black Americans, the very people the party was formed to protect from the expansion of slavery into Kansas and Nebraska in 1854.
That relationship may be lost for generations, thanks to a campaign by Sen. John McCain that seemed to simply concede the black vote.
I should first point out that there are a number of things Ms. Nelson and I do not share in common. I’m not a woman. I’m not a minority. (Unless we’ve started giving out assistance for the morally or intellectually challenged.) And I’m no longer a member of the Republican Party. I did, however, go through a considerable period of soul searching similar to Sophia’s a few years back. At that time I was working with my old blogging partner Ron, (who can be found over here these days) and he made many spirited attempts to convince me that “my Republican party” really didn’t exist any more, and I was simply shouting at the ocean in my attempts to make it come back. In January of 2005 I finally realized he was right and traded in my GOP card for a shiny new independent registration and a long, hard look at the small L libertarians.
Rather than coming from a minority background, my only GOP sin was growing up in the northeast with some of those small government, fiscal conservative, “leave us alone” Republicans who looked back fondly on the Rockefeller days. Once I broke out of the local cocoon through writing and other media I was quickly introduced to the phrase “RINO” and found out about the level of disdain which the “serious” social conservatives held for us. Without even knowing it I had inherited all manner of near-fatal political flaws. I had no taste for military adventurism in unprovoked situations, so I was apparently a secret admirer of something called “Code Pink” and was dubious in my patriotism, if not an outright, cowardly wuss. The notion of two lesbians in California tying the knot didn’t send me into spasms of outrage and see me sadly begin packing my wife’s belongings because our marriage had somehow been “damaged” by that event. (In fact, the idea of somebody else winding up paying alimony gave me the giggles.) Because of this, I was horrified to discover that I had no traditional values and was not a Good Christian American.
To my credit, though, upon learning of any Democrats who planned to take away my guns I would still light up the odd torch and run a whetstone halfheartedly over the tines of my pitchfork.
It took me a while to figure out why the GOP was so miserably bad at building support among minority voters. Even in oh so liberal New York, it wasn’t that there weren’t blacks, Asians or Latinos who wanted privacy, a lower national debt and a smaller tax bite nibbling at their paychecks. In fact, there were quite a few. It was just those other areas, mostly… those oh so dominant “social conservative issues” that gave many of them the screaming meemies. It had the same effect on me.
I applaud Sophia’s efforts, but I waited a long time for that bus to show up and have long since hailed a cab. I wish her the best, but as I view the reactions to Election 2008 around the Starboard leaning side of the blogosphere, I don’t expect it’s going to get back on schedule any time soon. I’ve also witnessed more than my fair share of the “Drive Out The RINOs!” movement these past couple of weeks. The environment is still not only one which isn’t welcoming to the moderates… it’s even more hostile in some quarters.