On the Contrary

Moderate Republicans like Senator Olympia Snowe from Maine are upset about Arlen Specter’s move to the Democratic Party.  She wrote this in the New York Times on Wednesday:

“It is for this reason that we should heed the words of President Ronald Reagan, who urged, “We should emphasize the things that unite us and make these the only ‘litmus test’ of what constitutes a Republican: our belief in restraining government spending, pro-growth policies, tax reduction, sound national defense, and maximum individual liberty.” He continued, “As to the other issues that draw on the deep springs of morality and emotion, let us decide that we can disagree among ourselves as Republicans and tolerate the disagreement.””

Said more plainly, lose the social issues, and focus on fiscal restraint.  I still think this approach loses.  How does restraining government spending help each child have an opportunity for a college education, provide us with an energy policy and way forward to free us from oil, or solve our healthcare crisis?  How does tax reduction address the money needed for investment in research for the innovation in the future, not to mention fixing the infrastructure?  And of course how does the torture policies of the Republicans and their suspension of habeas corpus defend individual liberty?  The basic flaw here is that what was good policy in the 19th century does not address the complex world we live in the 21st century.  Small town values are quaint, but don’t deal with the complexities of the world around us.

Nobody wants wasteful spending, but the Republicans are famous for labeling wasteful spending any investment in our future.  It would seem their horizons are limited by the short-term impact and they can do no long term planning or investing.  A prime example is to wonder why in the early 2000s, did they not raise taxes to retire the deficit when everyone was flush?  Their underlying philosophy is that the private sector, once the incentives are right, will solve all problems. They have been tinkering with the health care system for years with this philosophy and it is a mess.  The business model for health insurance companies is counterproductive to providing universal healthcare (insure the healthy, deny claims) and can only be modified by requiring them to take on all comers.  But that would entail regulation and government interference.  So tinkering with the private insurers and placing all your bets on the private sector is going nowhere and most people understand that today.

Take our energy problems, which are in abeyance now in our suppressed economy, but will come back with a vengeance just as we start to recover.  History tells us that our automobile companies cannot plan for the future and are focused on the short-term, high return automobiles that will make them totally unprepared for the eventual high price of oil.  Well actually they are already going under.  It is government’s role to protect all of the people by raising fuel standards and forcing the industries to do some long term planning.  The fact that they have been so successful in the past lobbying Washington to keep that from happening tells you all you need to know about the free market solving these problems.  The free market is made up of very powerful vested interests who do not want to lose their piece of the pie.  If you doubt this ask yourself what just happened in our financial industry.  They made a ton of money and the rest of us are screwed.  Worked okay for them.

Probably the biggest indicator that the Republican philosophy no longer applies is that they have no solutions for our future other than to cut taxes and reduce government.  Reducing the deficit when government is the only thing keeping people employed is madness.  Once again long-term thinking applies (spend now, save later, or during good  times, raising taxes to prepare for rainy days) and they just can’t manage it.  Pundits decry the lack of Republicans stepping to the plate with Republican solutions for the massive problems that face us.  That is because their underlying conservative philosophy offers no solutions.

The way forward is to lose the philosophy altogether.  The important thing is not how a policy complies with our dogma, but does it work.  Sometimes big government is a good thing and sometimes it isn’t.  Sometimes taxes are required, and sometimes they are constricting our economy.  Sometimes regulation is essential, and sometimes it chokes innovation.  Sometimes the government must provide services, and sometimes the private sector is better equipped.  The key here is sometimes.  Moderates of either party and Progressives believe in sometimes.   In the conservative dogma, sometimes doesn’t exist and is why we are in the mess we are in today.   There is a reason that this conservative right wing dogma appeals so to the religious nuts.  It is a religion and is therefore uninformed by reality.  It doesn’t require thinking. It is very unlikely that they will ever compromise and see the sometimes.  They certainly haven’t so far.

With Arlen Specter’s switch to the Democratic Party, one has to wonder what is going on.  Well for one thing with the Republican Party only representing 21% of the population and shrinking, the math for the primary in Pennsylvania was fairly straightforward.  He could not win the primary against a hard-line conservative, but could probably win the general election.  So from this calculation, it was the only choice for a chance to survive.  But this raises all kinds of issues.

First is how Pennsylvania would see this.  From the Democratic point of view, they had a good chance to run a more liberal Democrat to win against a hard-line conservative.  This scenario presented the Democrats with someone more supportive of their agenda. Whoever was going to run for that seat from the Democratic Party in Pennsylvania must feel like he just got his legs cut out from under him.  Is Senator Specter moderate enough to be elected?  I don’t know and this is the chance the Democrats are taking.

The press is making a big deal about getting the 60th vote in the Senate to be filibuster proof, but it is a foolish claim.  Senator Specter will vote as he always does, and that is independently.  Additionally, the Democratic Party has a large spectrum of political beliefs from liberal to conservative.  They usually don’t vote in a block.  It may help, but probably not when it really counts.

Here is the really sad thing.  There is no room for moderate Republicans in the Republican Party.  They have moved to a party of litmus tests for the radical right.  On the other hand, the Democratic Party is really a party of three camps.  You have the very liberal side, which is how the Republicans paint everyone in the Democratic Party and is actually a small minority of it; then you have the moderates who are really progressives, which is the majority of the party; and then you have the conservative Democrats who really can not be distinguished from moderate Republicans a few years ago.  No there aren’t any socialists in there.  The Republican Party is being made irrelevant by their hard-line dogma, which they refuse to examine.  More about that in a moment.

The final issue that is raised by Senator Specter’s defection is what does this say about primary elections?  If the primaries are really a function of the hard left and the hard right, the nation is not getting choices that represent their views.  If hard-line Democrats or hard-line Republicans control the primaries, the choices we all get at election time are no choice at all.  In this environment where the Republican Party is a small and radicalized party, it may be time to rethink open primaries.  California is moving in that direction at the behest of the Republicans here because they feel disenfranchised in a Democrat controlled State legislature.  But they may rue their plan when they find out that the independents will vote most of their radical brethren out of office and instead move much more to the center.  In my small mind I would like to see an open primary and top two run off for the office in November even if it turns out they are both from the same party..

Finally, what do the Republicans have to do to stem what is going to be an ongoing desertion of their party members?  First they have to understand, as well as the press, that the middle is in the Democratic Party and the Republicans are a right fringe party.  If Arlen Specter is center right and he has moved to the Democratic Party, just where do you think the center is?

I listened to Michelle Bernard, a conservative political analyst on MSNBC, tell us that the Republicans need to find their soul: “That doesn’t mean Republicans should give up their belief in limited government or free markets. I don’t think that’s the case at all. But the Republican Party needs to find a way to reach out to many, many people, not just the religious right.” The problem with that prescription is that in order to reach out to more people, their basic belief in limited government and the free market needs major modifications and just dropping the right wing and the religious nuts isn’t going to solve that because it just makes them smaller without solving the root problem.  Limited government and what they mean by free markets is no longer selling in the market place.

First, right now we are having two immediate crises, economic and medical (swine flu).  In both cases the people expect our government to be there to resolve these crises.  How does that fit into limited government?   Republicans want to starve so it will never have the resources to help anyone.  Remember Katrina?  If this argument is going to have any credibility at all in the future, then the Republicans have to stop their knee jerk reaction to government programs and understand that government is part of the solution.  Then looking at what is appropriate to government and what is appropriate to the private sector might have a little more credence.  The swine flu epidemic is a case in point.  They cut funds for the CDC and preparation for just such a disaster.  Now they see a need, but their present ideology doesn’t allow for government planning and funding of the results of that planning.  By hating all things government except the military, thinking the private sector will provide all the solutions, the are emasculating the very solutions people are crying out for and we have found we need to address many of our complex problems that face us in our future.

On the free market thing, who ever said Democrats were against the free market?  What this is code for is little or no regulation or interference in business.  Think about the economic crisis we are in and then consider why no regulation is such a jim dandy idea.  It is out of touch with the reality of what is happening around us and our changing world.  A moderate approach, which may I add many Democrats are proposing, is smart regulations.  If Republicans could get off their “No” soapbox and say that the free market needs some fixing and requires more regulations to make our economy more stable, then we can have an honest debate on what those controls should be.    But they still hold to climate change isn’t happening, regulation of the environment is unnecessary, anything that impacts business is bad, and government is bad at everything.  These beliefs make them irrelevant in today’s world.  And it is forcing moderates to move to the Democratic Party where dissent and real debate are still allowed and real solutions to our problems can be proposed.

So what have is real diversity of both race and ideas in the Democratic party on all issues from health care to stimulus.  The Republicans have become the party of the white southern bigot.  The Republican Party has made themselves irrelevant by their hard-line, no compromise positions and until they change their own ideology to reflect a changing world, they are irrelevant.  The only way they are going to appeal to a wider electorate is take this radical step to reinvent themselves.  I don’t think they can do it because it requires tolerance and they don’t have any.  It’s like giving up religion for them and they are Republican bible thumpers.  Without their dogmatic beliefs, their world would crumble.  Suprise!  It is crumbling.