What now for the American right?
Right here, right now
After twenty per cent of conservatives voted for Obama, the Republican party was left in tatters.
Oliver Burkeman asks key figures - what next?
Oliver Burkeman The Guardian, Saturday 18 April 2009 In British politics, the solution to such a muddle might be for a fresh-faced leader - a Blair or a Cameron - to take on his own party, forcing reform on the infighting members. But it's far harder for such a leader to emerge in the US if your party doesn't control the White House, harder still if you're a minority in Congress. "In Britain, political change is always imposed from the top down - half a dozen people who have houses next door to each other in London come to an understanding, win a contest and impose their vision on the party," says the former Bush speech-writer David Frum. "In America, change tends to come from the middle up - from the activists." And the problem with activists is that they tend to prefer passionate commitment to pragmatism. "I call them say-it-louder conservatives," says Frum, in a coffee shop around the corner from the American Enterprise Institute, a neoconservative thinktank where he now has an office. "If people don't like what you're saying, say it louder! Then they'll like it!"
It's odd that Frum has emerged as a figurehead of the moderate reformers - those calling for the American right to abandon its extremes and accept that issues from global warming to the financial crisis require a new approach. In Europe, he's probably best known as the person who coined the phrase "axis of evil" (though his version was "axis of hatred"). He co-authored a book with Richard Perle defending the Iraq war, and a book in praise of Bush, The Right Man. But now he says US conservatism has suffered a "psychic defeat" - a disease of which the Palin-worship at CPAC was a symptom. "One of the stages in the decline of a political movement is the moment when it comes to feel beaten. And in that moment it becomes reactionary, because there's a sense that to engage with the modern world in any way is to give up your beliefs."
A big part of the problem, Frum argues, is precisely that American conservatism was so successful. From this perspective, the popular revolution spearheaded by Ronald Reagan identified real problems - crime and chaos in American cities, rampant inflation, industries held hostage by unions - and implemented tough solutions, which worked. "The things we promised to do, we did." Government shrank; taxes were cut; worker protections were reduced: the free market, in short, was given a freer hand. Today's conservative activists were in their 20s then, excited by the sense of change. "But now 30 years have passed, and we're 30 years older, and what happens to the mind as it approaches 50 is it tends to become more rigid, more reluctant to absorb new impressions. We need to understand that the country has new problems, which require new solutions."
Cutting taxes, for example, might have been the right thing to do in 1980 - but if you keep on blindly cutting taxes, as if always cutting taxes were a keystone of conservatism, you'll reach a point where people think taxes are low enough; they don't want to lose the services the taxes pay for. "It's calcification," Frum says. "Our problem is we make principles of our policies. Limited government is a principle. The idea that income tax rates must always be cut, no matter what they are? That's not a principle." Frum's plan, outlined in his book Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again, calls for the Republican party to emphasise healthcare reform over tax cuts, to develop an environmental message, tone down the pro-life, anti-gay marriage rhetoric, and focus on the factor that drew so many conservatives away from McCain/Palin and towards Obama: not political ideology, but the sheer question of competence.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/18/us-politics-republican-partyWhat Frum is arguing about is that the GOP should borrow a page from David Cameron's Tories. This is an unlikely event in view of the rejectionism of American social conservatives and their strident and rigid ideology.
Interesting also is Burkeman's description of Joe the Plumber's reception at CPAC as the epitome of "cheap populism and anti-intellectual rabble-rousing."
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