Liberty For All

by George Phillies 
 

There is some really good news out there politically.  America has a two-party electoral system, meaning that third parties such as ours have problems with winning elections.  Fortunately, the national Republican Party is preparing to get out of our way by committing political suicide and transforming itself into a regional party of eccentrics, namely the Party of Southern Sectarian Christian White Male Conservatives.  Liberal Democrats have proposed for them a new political mascot: GOPY the Gopasaurus, a red-white-and-blue dinosaur speeding to extinction.

In a certain sense, we are seeing the divergence of political opinions between different parts of the country that we have seen before.  This time, the differences with a few exceptions are less likely to lead to violence than they were in 1840 or 1850, but the divergences are still there.  One radical difference from 1850, from what we know of that distant time, is that in 2009 a major dividing line is generational more than geographical.  The people who support Republican social-conservative thinking against abortion and gay marriage, and for the war on drugs, are in substantial part an older generation that is preparing to depart this earth without being replaced, at least politically.

The 2009 general election shows the Republican Party taking additional steps toward the graveyard.  The Republican candidate for Governor of New Jersey won.  He demonstrated that if you are an incumbent Governor in difficult economic times, a man whose background is associated with the people blamed for the 2008/2009 Great Recession, if your contribution to public concern about corruption in office was a car accident in which your vehicle was traveling over 90 miles an hour and you were not wearing the legally-mandated seat belt, then you should not be surprised when the voters conclude that almost anyone might be an improvement.  The Republican also ran as a moderate, facing a governor widely seen as mediocre.

The Republican candidate for Governor of Virginia also won.  His previously-expressed personal stands on personal liberty issues, against abortion, against ‘fornicators’, against working women, against homosexuals…the list goes on a bit…made him a shining champion of the southern white male conservative Republicans, but by the same token reminded voters elsewhere in the country as to why they do not support the Republican Party and do not want social conservative Republicans representing them in Congress.  Having a weak opponent did not hurt McDonnell either.

The peculiar election in New York-23, featuring a three way race between candidates of the Democratic, Republican, and Conservative parties shows again the difficulties the Republicans face.  The legitimate Republican candidate received Republican money, but had so few prominent Republicans as supporters that she finally withdrew from the race. Indeed, many Republicans appeared in her state to aid her Conservative Party opponent.  In the polls she did so badly that she finally withdrew from the race.  As a result, northeast of Pennsylvania the Republicans are down to two Congressmen.

And now we come to the point where Republican social conservatives do not understand what happened to them or what it means.  The Republican candidate, having withdrawn, could have said nothing.  She could also have spoken up to endorse one of her opponents, and that is what she did.  Of course, she was the Republican.  Her opponents were candidates of two enemy political parties, the Democrats and the Conservatives. Was there a dime’s worth of difference between them? To her, indeed there was.  She endorsed the Democrat, who went on to win the election.  The message was very clear. To a centrist Republican, the social reactionary Conservative was simply not acceptable.   Social Conservative extremism is unsaleable is most of the United States other than the deep south and parts of the Rocky Mountains.

Conservatives are drawing a completely different conclusion from the same election, namely that Republicans should run far-right-wing conservatives. Cheer them on! They’re nailing shut their coffin…from the inside.  Evidence that this approach will elect Republicans outside the deep south are, fortunately, substantially lacking.  The Republicans are already placed to run way way way right on the National level, where at least four of their candidates, Huckabee, Palin, Pawlenty, and Paul, have made clear they do not believe in evolution.  Indeed, the first three have made clear that they believe the world is not even ten thousand years old, while the fourth sensibly only talks of his opinions on these questions in front of entirely friendly audiences.  A fifth candidate, Romney, whose political positions this week are apparently quite conservative, runs into a different religious difficulty, namely that his faith is completely unacceptable to many backbone Republicans. (Of course, JFK beat that wall.)

The Republican Party is racing toward political extinction.  Cheer it on!

George Phillies is a contributing editor for Liberty For All. You can contact Dr. Phillies at phillies@wpi.edu.