A Long Essay On How The Republican Party Lost Me

Ryan Sager in Reason Online writes an article about what the Republican party did to my political leanings:

Back in 2000, Texas Gov. George W. Bush's political savior, Karl Rove, was performing nothing short of an electoral resurrection, running around South Carolina calling Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) an unpatriotic, illegitimate-black-baby-fathering Manchurian Candidate.

I favored John McCain back in that election. It was my third presidential election since becoming politically savvy in 1992. I had followed the Republican campaign to impeach Clinton, and found it a rather tasteless and mean-spirited effort, but I didn't let it change my Republican leanings. But watching Carl Rove's slimy tricks against McCain in the primary was a real turn-off for me. Watching Republicans ignorantly fall for those tricks was the deal breaker. It was the first election I didn't vote Republican, and voted Libertarian instead: It was the first time I witnessed (with the help of the internet) the angry, strongly-Christian-yet-dishonest underbelly of the Republican party, and the portion of the party they represented. Of course that had always been there, but I never really paid attention.

Who could have guessed that eight years later, the senator from Arizona would be dedicating the remainder of his political life to finishing Karl Rove's good works on Earth?

I know. In this 2008 election, I favored Ron Paul as the Republican candidate (and I might even have voted for him over Obama), and put him ahead of John McCain because Paul's strict constitutionalism and stark conservatism is music to my ears. I never disliked John McCain until he actually won this nomination and let his moderate conservativism be overshadowed by campaign tactics that were originally used against him by Carl Rove. Bob Dole never did that, even when he knew he was sure to lose if he didn't.

And yet, as McCain runs around the country this fall, calling Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) an unpatriotic, socialistic terrorist-paller-around-with, it seems he's taken it upon himself to complete what should be called the Rove Realignment.

No, not the once-envisioned "rolling realignment," under which the Republican Party would add to its base of white Evangelical Protestants, bringing in Hispanics, culturally conservative African Americans, and economically vulnerable whites—those who supported Medicare Part D and opposed gay marriage in equal measure—to create a "permanent" Republican majority that would last at least a generation.

That "rolling realignment" could have happened at one point. Most people are conservative about the majority of things that get discussed in politics. Liberal domestic policies and government programs have never gained much traction with Americans. In my early years, when it came to politics, I was budget-focused. (I still am.) I always sided with the Republicans in fiscal matters. When it came to the Religious Right's occasional pushing of their pet issues and pulling of the Republican party strings, my favorite thing to say was, "You can't legislate morality." What I was saying was: The religious right will never get the Republican party to give up its conservative foundations. I'm sure that's what most people thought. Then the new milenium, and the new Republican party showed up.

Click here for the rest of the article.

McCain's working on the other realignment: The one where eight years of fiscal recklessness and cultural warfare alienates swing voters and withers the Republican Party until the very base of the conservative movement cracks in half—splitting a coalition that has endured since the Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964.

Yeah. I'll skip how the "conservative" party ran up the national debt into the trillions. Cultural warfare really was what it was all about for me originally: The religious right from 1996 to 2006 steered the Republicans right over a cliff with their dogma (for me, Terri Schiavo is the apotheosis of that time) but I jumped ship just before all that. The libertarian-style Republicans (holding on by a thread when the Contract With America brought them roaring back in 1994) lost control to the Religious Right probably because of Clinton's reelection. First, they went after Clinton (reasonable but tacky in a down-to-their-level kind of way). Then, they smeared the Pro-Choice McCain straight out of his election bid, and got George Bush into the White House. Then, after the 9-11 terrorist attacks, they learned to use fear as their primary political tool and use tests of faith and patriotism to smear their opponents instead of engaging them on the issues.

Who were the Republicans ever going to win over with those tactics? Not me... but it sure did "play well to the base" (those scum who perpetuated the "McCain's black baby" lie, and the retards who believed it). In the end, after all the Religious Right had done to the Republican party, McCain's nomination of Palin almost didn't seem surprising in a way. McCain could have nominated James Dobson and I wouldn't have been surprised.

That coalition between social conservatives and economic libertarians (who tend to be socially moderate to liberal), served the GOP well from 1964 to 2006. It gave the party eight years of Ronald Reagan and 12 years of a Republican Congress. But the Bush years have proven to be one long pulling apart. And, in a matter of days, we may just see the final snap.

Actually, it didn't serve the GOP well from 2000 to 2006. That was the problem: Libertarian-leaning Republicans generally didn't figure shit out in the 2000 elections (though some of us did). If they had, the Republican party wouldn't have had 8 years to paint itself into the ideological corner it finds itself in now. In the 2002 elections, people got suckered into making the "fear" vote... the save-us-from-the-terrorists vote.

By 2004, a large portion of the libertarian-leaning Republicans had gotten a clue... but nobody wanted to vote for Kerry. I'm surprised that enough people were able to hold their nose and re-elect Bush, but there it was. Republicans gained congressional seats in 2004 only in the deep South... the heart of Religious Right territory, but lost elsewhere. That was the beginning.

In 2006 though, voter dissatisfaction with the Religious Right's control of the Republican party really showed up with a vengeance. Unfortunately, the Republican party's attitude was only half-hearted to making change... and the Religious Right's leash was not coming off.

In 2008, the Republicans (those who were still around after 8 years anyway) finally figured stuff out, and nominated McCain over at least two other candidates that the Religious Right would have preferred. Unfortunately, McCain ran up against a perfect storm with his campaign: Being a Republican following the most unpopular Republican President in American history, some of the worst economic conditions since The Great Depression, and the other team's game-changing barrier-breaking candidate. What did candidate McCain do? Something very stupid: He turned to the Religious Right and asked, "What do I do?" Hence, McCain's campaign to date.

The Cato Institute has done excellent work over the last few years tracking the shift in the libertarian vote—the roughly 10 percent to 15 percent of the American public that can be categorized as fiscally conservative and socially liberal.

Based on an analysis of the American National Election Studies, Cato found that between 2000 and 2004, there was a substantial flight of libertarians away from the Republican Party and toward the Democrats. While libertarians preferred Bush by a margin of 52 points over Al Gore in 2000, that margin shrank to 21 points in 2004, when many libertarians—disaffected by the Iraq war, massive GOP spending increases, and the campaign against gay marriage—switched to John Kerry.

Like I said, I'm just surprised it took Libertarians so long to jump ship.

I'm equally surprised that the Republicans didn't figure out that with their bloated budget and mean-spirited and often wacky religious/moral legislative efforts (remember Terri Schiavo?) that the only reason they were still able to call themselves "conservative" was because nobody else was interested in laying claim to the title.

Polling on libertarian voters is somewhat sparse during elections, but there are a couple of data points and some broad trends that can give us an idea of where things stand now. An early October Zogby Interactive poll found that self-identified libertarians (about 6 percent of the poll's sample) give McCain only 36 percent of their vote, lower than the 45 percent and 42 percent Zogby found them giving Bush in the last two elections. The libertarian voters claim to be defecting mainly to Libertarian Party candidate Bob Barr and other third-party candidates, not to Obama. A Gallup poll conducted in September, which identified libertarian-minded voters with a series of ideological questions about the role of government in the economy and society (pegging them at around 23 percent of the electorate), found that only 43 percent of these voters plan pull the lever for McCain, slightly fewer than did for Bush in 2004. The Gallup poll also finds a significant uptick in libertarians planning to vote third-party, with 3.5 percent supporting Barr.

The reason that I'm supporting Obama (unlike other Libertarians who are voting third party) is the same reason I've given from the very beginning: Living overseas, I'm concerned a lot about people's opinion of America, and how it effects not just me, but the American economy and American security. I believe that no other Presidential candidate comes remotely close to what I believe is Obama's ability to make America the most admired and respected country on the planet by people around the world.

At the broader level, McCain's problems with the libertarian side of the conservative base are evident in how he's faring regionally. While the GOP can win the South without libertarian voters, as McCain is doing handily, it can't win the "leave-me-alone" Interior West without a healthy portion of them. And even before the economic crisis took over the national headlines in mid-September, the three up-for-grabs Mountain states—which by themselves, when added to the 2004 Kerry states, hold enough electoral votes to swing the election to Obama—looked grim for McCain. New Mexico (Bush by 1) has looked solid for Obama all year; Colorado (Bush by 5), likewise, has hardly deviated from an Obama lead in the RealClearPolitics average this election season. Only Nevada (Bush by 3) has seen the advantage teeter back and forth (it's now leaning Obama).

The fact is, it is getting to the point where Republicans who are both socially and fiscally conservative (instead of culturally liberal and fiscally conservative) are having an argument with themselves as to where they want to take their vote. The Republicans have not been fiscally conservative for years now, and what's worse is that Republicans have accomplished nothing socially conservative on the national level either... unless you count "Don't Ask Don't Tell" and several all-but-meaningless abortion laws.

Why would libertarians abandon McCain? After all, they believe in low taxes—and McCain is the one promising those. And if they're concerned about social issues, well, McCain's never shown much of a stomach for cultural warfare.

Well, there is also the war in Iraq. A lot of us don't like McCain's back-out-so-slowly-maybe-no-one-will-notice approach.

That is, of course, until now.

The real McCain, whoever that is or was, may still believe that major swathes of the Religious Right represent "agents of intolerance" in our politics. But he has decided to stake both his election and the Republican Party's future upon them—from the barely coded racial refrain of "Who is Barack Obama?," to the rallies with shouts of "terrorist" and "kill him," to the corrosive choice of pipeline-prayer Sarah Palin as his running mate and heir apparent.

Well, I wouldn't read racist stuff into that "Who is Barack Obama?" refrain... but I would read the same old "Is he faithful? Is he patriotic? Does he know any French or eat organically grown food or wear imported underwear?" fear-of-the-foreign line that the Religious Right has been using since 2002 into it.

Tax cuts or no tax cuts, a party that can be roused in time of deep crisis only by fear and tribalism—a party that a supposed moderate is now deeding to its most extreme elements—can scarcely serve as a safe home to liberty or the voters who cherish it.

Two years ago, I wrote a book imploring the Republican Party not to follow its worst elements off a cliff—not to evolve, in short, into an insular party with little-to-no appeal outside of the rural, the southern, the Evangelical. As the McCain campaign flames out in a ball of Rovian disgrace, scorching the center in an attempt to fire up the base, it's difficult to reach any other conclusion than that the battle for the soul of the Republican Party has been lost.

I also cannot see the Religious Right giving control of the Republican party back to moderates. They have mixed their religious goals so thoroughly with their political goals (stopping abortion, stopping gay marriage, stopping Islam and saving Israel) that ceding any ground on those issues... compromising their politics... is tantamount to compromising their religious beliefs. People from the Religious Right tolerating the Republican party changing those planks in their platform to attract new Republicans is the same as people from the Religious Right tolerating their church changing the fundamentals of Christianity in order to attract new Christians.