Culture Vulture

The votes are in and the people have spoken. While the early returns indicate that the Republican Party across the nation took one on the chin, further analysis may reveal the supposed carnage was not quite as awful as first reports indicated.
It’s certainly not as bad as the defeat suffered in 1964, when the youth vote of the time, buttressed by grief over the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, seemed to presage a generation of Democratic Party domination. Instead, the opposite happened; since then Republicans have captured the White House in all but four of the 11 presidential elections, including this year’s. And if the Democrats can recover from the total drubbing they suffered in 1984, when Ronald Reagan led the party to victory in 49 out of 50 states, then anything is possible.
However, things have certainly changed, and this week’s election may well mark a turning point where some of the cultural issues Republicans have successfully exploited — abortion, patriotism, family values, gay rights and, to a degree, in certain quarters at least, let’s be honest, racism — may have finally run their course. And thank God if they finally have. Those sorts of issues may have played well in parts of the sunbelt states but they gain the GOP little traction here. It’s important that the party not lose whatever toehold it has left in the Northeast and Midwest, because if the party is to have any future it needs to find a way to balance its pre-eminent social conservative voice with a more, and traditional Republican, moderate one.
It used to be that the party represented small town values of thriftiness, hard work, self-reliance, free enterprise, Main street businesses, along with big corporate interests. It needs to find a way back to that, and push the evangelical wing back into the corner they came out of. Not that Evangelicals and Christian fundamentalists shouldn’t have a voice in a “big tent” GOP, but it’s not a winning electoral formula to make that your base. And many would quibble with the exclusivity aura that emanates from a political party that draws its inspiration largely from an overly literal interpretation of Biblical tracts that may be great literature and offer important moral lessons, but don’t fit easily into 21st century realities.
Rather, there is ample space waiting to be occupied by some kind of political party that articulates the socially liberal, economically conservative mix that both Democrats and Republicans seem to continually fumble. Why is this so hard? The broad middle of American politics is moderate and pragmatic. It’s a philosophy that doesn’t look for excess government intrusion in private lives or the marketplace, but does see a role for government in providing for national defense, infrastructure, education and health insurance. There are things and services the private sector is inherently not well situated to provide. The rest should be left to ambitious, entrepreneurial individuals.
When it comes to social policy, the government ought to stay out of people’s personal business and intervene only when they are threats to themselves or others.
Why it’s so hard for both political parties to get this is surprising, but it would seem to offer Republicans a way out of the political wilderness. This year, a perfect storm of an extraordinarily gifted politician, Barack Obama, a severe economic downturn, lingering dissatisfaction with a poorly-thought through war of our own making, a deeply unpopular incumbent president undermined by mistakes both foreign and domestic, made for an uphill struggle for John McCain, the Republican nominee. That struggle was not made any easier by his poor choice of a running mate, Sarah Palin, whom we will probably — unfortunately — hear from again, coupled with an incredibly hamfisted campaign left the voice many expected to hear muted, until his magnificent concession speech, which reminded many people of why they liked the guy in the first place. Too late. And maybe, at 72, John McCain was just too old.
But times will change again. If there’s one thing a few decades of following politics will teach you, it’s that whatever you expect will happen, won’t happen. The world will always surprise you. The sands will shift, and even if Obama successfully negotiates the extraordinary array of difficulties that await his presidency — and let’s hope as Americans that he does — the mixture could look very different in four or eight years.
Meanwhile, Republicans have an opening if they want to recast themselves as defenders of the political center, but it’s more likely internecine warfare will break out and the neoconservative, social conservative alliance that has led the party to disaster in 2008 will continue to bicker and fumble its way deeper into an out-of-step, out -of-date vision of where American society should head and what our role should be in the global community. Whatever vigor that vision had when Ronald Reagan ushered in the modern Republican party in 1980 has long dissipated. As the poet and philosopher George Santayana once said, those who cannot recall the mistakes of the past are condemned to repeat them. Little of the above should be seen as applying to the Vermont Republicans, who by and large have a much clearer sense of where their party should head. But the mistakes of the national Republican Party need to be remembered, if they want to regain electoral and political relevance on a national scale. Otherwise the comparisons with 2008 being the new 1932, and Obama the new Roosevelt, could really take hold.