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Effecting a Realignment, Part One
I have been arguing for some time – first here in August 2009, then in posts linked here and archived here, here, and here – that a realignment might be in the offing. By now, it should be obvious that such an opportunity has presented itself to the Republicans. Last week, the Gallup poll suggested that on the generic Congressional ballot the Republicans have a 10% advantage. Yesterday, as Peter Robinson has pointed out, the Rasmussen poll suggested that the Republicans have a 12% advantage – which means that the Gallup poll was not an outlier: it was indicative of a powerful trend still underway.
This in turn suggests that on the first Tuesday in November the Republicans are likely to win an historic victory. If current trends continue, I suspect that they will pick up more than seventy seats in the House and perhaps as many as twelve in the Senate. How, one might ask, can they take full advantage of this remarkable opportunity? How might they transform a victory into a realignment?
They face, I think, two obstacles – one internal, the other external – and they cannot get past the latter if they do not get past the former.
The external obstacle is simple: next to no one trusts them. Their conduct when last in the majority in both houses was unprincipled and appalling.
The internal obstacle is less easy to describe. In an earlier post, entitled Patronage, Principles, and Political Parties, I remarked on the fact that the Founding Fathers made no provision for organized political parties, that Americans thereafter found it impossible to govern effectively in their absence, and that the separation of powers tends to subvert their cohesion. Congressman and Senators are caught between the dictates of the party discipline necessary for effective governance and the demands of local constituents, and the parties they form within the House and the Senate tend to oscillate between operating as parties of patronage and functioning as parties of principle.
In a later post entitled John Boehner’s Testing Time, I argued that the Republicans will be unable to get past the internal obstacle standing in the way of their seizing the opportunity Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid have afforded them unless they turn themselves into a party of principle, and I suggested that they do so by drafting a new Contract with America in which they promise to restore constitutional government in this country and spell out in some detail what this entails. In this fashion, they can bind their members to vote for a repeal of Obamacare and for rolling back the administrative state, and in this fashion they can begin to recover the trust of the American people.
In my next post, I will spell out what, I believe, should be the unifying theme of their campaign this Fall and over the next two years.
Published in General
I think we should ban the term “realignment” from our discussions. This indicates dominance and a dominant party is a lazy and more often than not, spendthrift one.
In 1994 the GOP talked of realignment and sought to spend themselves into permanent majority status. After 2004 the Democrats did the exact same thing. I want a Congress that fears the people, not a people that either fears or clings to the Congress for sustenance.
A new Contract with America is an excellent idea, but I worry that so much damage has been done that we have ‘crossed the Rubicon’, so to speak.
The best scenario would be this: The Democrats panic and use all their union and black ops muscle to steal enough elections so they continue to hang onto the House and Senate by a thread. Then Americans will realize two things: that Dems are hopelessly corrupt, and our system must be entirely overhauled. We need a crisis just bad enough to spur deep reform and reinforce the awareness that traditional limits, God, and Constitutional integrity are all we have that can save us from chaos and destruction. We must return to the starting point.
The Republicans foolishly allowed themselves to be maneuvered into tax policies that effectively took nearly 50% of wage-earners off the income tax rolls.
Realignment requires that those people have some skin the game – something they see on every pay stub.
Otherwise, spending and deficits are – somebody else’s problem.
In 1994 the GOP talked of realignment and sought to spend themselves into permanent majority status. After 2004 the Democrats did the exact same thing. I want a Congress that fears the people, not a people that either fears or clings to the Congress for sustenance. ·Sep 7 at 5:55am
I absolutely agree. In the interim, just call it “Recovery November.”
I knew that the Republican “realignment” was bogus in 1995 when they couldn’t bring themselves to defund the National Endowment for the Arts.
It simply proved they had no Giulianis, and were never going to perform as advertised.
Drafting a “New Contract with America” is easily done. Why don’t they already have one?? The absence of said Contract is a sign of laxity and it bothers me. It suggests that Congressional Republicans are neither sincere nor serious. It is going to take a lot of political will to repeal the Obama agenda and I am not convinced that John Boehner has the cajones for the job. I hate Pelosi, but I have to concede that, as Speaker, she showed real guts & determination (not to mention ruthlessness).
Even if the Democrats are routed in November (very likely), even if Obama’s agenda is repealed & overturned (less likely), we, as conservatives, are still left with several chronic problems. We cannot vote out the liberal cackle-heads who dominate the MSM. We cannot vote out the Marxists, aging hippies & tenured terrorists who dominate American academia. Have you ever Googled up “conservative college”? You are lucky to get twenty hits (and most of them are, not surprisingly, small Christian campuses). As long as those conditions remain, the battle for the heart & soul of this country will be bitter & endless.
It simply proved they had no Giulianis, and were never going to perform as advertised. ·Sep 7 at 8:46am
Wow!! Great memory, Jaydee.
That’s the exact moment I knew the Gingrich Revolution was gutless, too.
Worse than gutless: they just didn’t want to be frowned at by all the Ladies in Ballgowns as they made their way to their boxes at the JFK Center for the Performing Arts.
In 1994 the GOP talked of realignment and sought to spend themselves into permanent majority status. After 2004 the Democrats did the exact same thing. I want a Congress that fears the people, not a people that either fears or clings to the Congress for sustenance. ·Sep 7 at 5:55am
Edited on Sep 07 at 08:06 am
Seems to me, EJ, that ‘realignment’ is one of those words that’s been given political media tenure. Perhaps we can simply shift our understanding of the term back to its plain meaning. You know — realign it. Consider:
I agree with Paul — I think “realignment” is the right word. It doesn’t, of course, mean anything permanent, but I’m struck by the basic thread running through all of the polls and numbers that are starting to come out: people want a smaller government, and they’re willing to give things up to get it.
A true, lasting, realignment can come, and I think it’ll be a generational move. It’s entitlements that are killing us in the federal budget — and it’s another form of entitlement, massive state employee pensions — that are killing us on the state level. Both of these are, essentially, generational conflicts: workers and young people vs. retirees and near-retirees. If these things are tamed (and it looks possible, for the first time in generations) then we’ll have done an amazing thing. We’ll have created a generation of fiscal skinflints. And that would be a realignment I can live with.
Know what amazes me (well, it’s predictable, but still amazing)? How many commentators don’t believe that this kind of attitudinal change on the right is even remotely likely. Andrew Sullivan speaks for a lot of pundits when he writes
Not that our job is to please the skeptics, but it is a challenge to be taken with a smile, isn’t it? What more can we do to make plain that this is serious?
First, Paul, if I may, a compliment: you’re a professional academic, an accomplished historian and political scientist. But you possess the skill, rare among academics–Milton Friedman had it, and there aren’t many like him–of explaining yourself in accessible, conversational English. Milton, for that matter, always felt that it was something like his duty to explain his thinking to laymen; he took our democracy that seriously. No doubt you feel the same way.
Now a question: Where does the Tea Party fit into your analysis? Does the Tea Party represent, do you suppose, a temporary phenomenon? A kind of holding tank for Independents who believe in limited government and individual liberty–but find themselves too disgusted with the Republican Party to join it? But who, ultimately, after the GOP reestablishes itself as a party of principle are likely to be won over to the GOP at last? Or do you see some real prospect that the Tea Party will achieve some kind of lasting status, perhaps even supplanting the GOP?
Yes. Also “realignment” sounds like an orthodontic procedure.
There seems to be an assumption in this thread that Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap” is not comparable to the “Contract with America” and is insufficient. If so, what’s missing? If not, why are we shooting ourselves in the feet by pretending it doesn’t exist?
It’s a mistake to think of Tea Party participants as independents. A good portion of them have long histories of voting Republican and identify themselves as such. They’ll absolutely vote for Republican incumbents if no good anti-D.C. candidates emerge for their areas. Don’t mistake a desire for a reformed Republican Party as an inclination toward party independence.
The one thing I’ve always said about entitlements is this – they helped hold the Democratic coalition together as long as people believed that the promise of future benefits had merit. I’ve paid into the Social Security “trust fund” for thirty years now, but as I look at the situation now the system will be totally bankrupt before I am eligible to collect anything. Surely I am not alone in this view.
Good. I keep hearing the Old Republicans advising each other to hunker down and avoid controversy. I cannot easily remain polite while expressing how much I detest this pusillanimous blather. Even when winning they scare each other by predicting defeat and contemplating how bad it will be to have won. It is like watching your little boy–far ahead of the pack–in a Red Flyer derby suddenly stop just before the finish line, get out of the cart and look up at you in the stands with a puzzled look his face–all the while you are jumping up and down with arms flailing and screaming: “Push It Over! Push It Over, Now!” Republicans, please dump the three-piece mumbling. Yes, be intelligent, but for once in your dismal, pathetic, insecure public lives show some intelligent passion. Squashing passion is not good Thomistic integration of the person, it is not admirable, and it is not the sign of a noble hero. No, better yet, we’ll just replace you.