Man, that title has to have some heads hitting keyboards.  Wait!  It's not boring!  It's about sex and violence!

(Well, it isn't really about sex and violence, but I had to say something.)

OK, while you're still conscious: all politically-minded groups have some core idea(s) that are not subject to negotiation or discussion - an idee fixe as our French enemies would say before we kicked them back into silence. These fixed ideas (that's what the Frog talk means) are generally the organizing principle of the group.  For example, everybody who has joined the NRA thinks that guns ought to be legal.  NOW is not open to a discussion of whether women's place really is in the kitchen after all.  The NEA thinks that public school teachers should get more money, period.  None of this stuff is up for debate: the ideas are the reason the groups exist in the first place, and they aren't subject to change.  The same principle holds for groups that aren't formally organized; there are a lot of people for whom "gay marriage should be legal" or its converse is a fixed idea, not subject to change or debate, but they haven't all joined advocacy groups.

This has implications for the American political scene.

Political parties have been, from the times of the Romans if not earlier, collections of interest groups, whether formally defined or vague as the autumn mists.  People don't wake up one day and decide "I am a Democrat"; they assess their positions and their interests, and they decide to join and/or vote for the party that ends up representing them most effectively.  Over time this identification can transform itself into a pure partisan affiliation - Jack votes Republican because he's always voted Republican.  However, the origin of the decision is always in cultural compatibility or policy position or some other relatively rational criteria, and it's always subject to change if the disconnect between the person and the party becomes too great (Jack devolves into an abortion-supporting, gun-banning, pro-gay-marriage public school teacher.)

The Republican coalition consists of four basic ideological groups, with some overlap.  There are businesspeople and entrepreneurs whose fixed idea is "taxes should be low".  There are cultural and religious conservatives whose fixed idea is "our religious traditions are good and fine, and we don't need to abandon them".  There are culture of life proponents whose fixed idea is "killing babies is wrong, and we should stop doing it."  And (increasingly post-9/11) there are strong-state militarists whose fixed idea is "if there are Muslims who want to die for Allah, we should help them with that project".

These values do not pose much of a barrier to someone who wants to become a Republican.  "So you're going to cut my taxes, let my town have a nativity scene, rein in some abortions, and blow up terrorists.  OK, I can deal with that."

The Democratic coalition consists of about ten thousand splinter groups, again with some overlap.  There are uber-abortionistas ("public-funded abortions available everywhere at any time"), UN-niks ("don't sneeze until Kofi says 'God bless you'"), secularists ("don't say 'God'!"), the peace crowd ("war is always bad"), Greens ("nature is more important than people"), the public school lobby ("give us money or little Jonny comes home metrosexual"), trial lawyers ("we can get you money from the people who did this to little Jonny"), and the list goes on. 

These values aren't all wrong, but they pose quite a thicket to the would-be Democratic convert. 

(I realize that I have oversimplified the positions of groups all over the spectrum.  As is often the case when I oversimplify, I don't care.)

You only have to believe a few things to be a Republican, and the party goes out of its way to be inclusive about the other things. There are a lot of areas where the party has a position, but only a few of them are non-negotiable.  Even some of the things that part of our coalition believes have been deemed recommended-but-optional:  "you're pro-choice, Governor Schwarzenegger?  Well, we disagree, but your position on taxes and killing Al-Qaeda make you A-OK in our book."

Contrast to the Democrats, where heresy on any one of a vast and sometimes bewildering array of fatwas is enough to get you pushed to the margins, or drummed out of the party entirely.

The Republicans have a big recruiting advantage here, and it's only going to get stronger as time goes on.  The Democrats are frantic for votes, so they can't afford to ditch any part of their porcupine coalition, no matter how many people one particular barb keeps stabbing.  And everyone in the coalition is tightly married to their one personal hobby-horse, so there's no way to get them to agree to mellow out for a while, as the Republicans have successfully done with the anti-abortion lobby.  NARAL isn't going to chill out, and neither is NOW or NEA or ANSWER.

All Republicans have to do is have fidelity towards our core principles (even the ones we honor more in the breach) and govern with reasonable competence (which is harder than it sounds), and continue to work like twenty demons every election cycle.  We can watch our numbers get better, year after year.  And the screams coming out of left field will get more entertaining as they see power slipping forever from their grasp.

Robert @ 16:33 | | | . | E-Mail This Post