GOP Reformist vs. Traditionalist
It’s only been a week since the defeat, but the battle lines have already been drawn in the fight over the future of conservatism.I think Brooks puts himself in the reformist category. To win back a majority, Republicans need to do a better job of framing the issues. That is what Karl Rove excelled at and why Democrats hated him so much. When you look at the results of referendums on gay marriage and some energy issues during this election the conservative position prevailed in most of these elections.In one camp, there are the Traditionalists, the people who believe that conservatives have lost elections because they have strayed from the true creed. George W. Bush was a big-government type who betrayed conservatism. John McCain was a Republican moderate, and his defeat discredits the moderate wing.
To regain power, the Traditionalists argue, the G.O.P. should return to its core ideas: Cut government, cut taxes, restrict immigration. Rally behind Sarah Palin.
Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are the most prominent voices in the Traditionalist camp, but there is also the alliance of Old Guard institutions. For example, a group of Traditionalists met in Virginia last weekend to plot strategy, including Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. According to reports, the attendees were pleased that the election wiped out some of the party’s remaining moderates. “There’s a sense that the Republicans on Capitol Hill are freer of wobbly-kneed Republicans than they were before the election,” the writer R. Emmett Tyrrell told a reporter.
The other camp, the Reformers, argue that the old G.O.P. priorities were fine for the 1970s but need to be modernized for new conditions. The reformers tend to believe that American voters will not support a party whose main idea is slashing government. The Reformers propose new policies to address inequality and middle-class economic anxiety. They tend to take global warming seriously. They tend to be intrigued by the way David Cameron has modernized the British Conservative Party.
Moreover, the Reformers say, conservatives need to pay attention to the way the country has changed. Conservatives have to appeal more to Hispanics, independents and younger voters. They cannot continue to insult the sensibilities of the educated class and the entire East and West Coasts.
...The debate between the camps is heating up. Only one thing is for sure: In the near term, the Traditionalists are going to win the fight for supremacy in the G.O.P.
They are going to win, first, because Congressional Republicans are predominantly Traditionalists. Republicans from the coasts and the upper Midwest are largely gone. Among the remaining members, the popular view is that Republicans have been losing because they haven’t been conservative enough.
Second, Traditionalists have the institutions. Over the past 40 years, the Conservative Old Guard has built up a movement of activist groups, donor networks, think tanks and publicity arms. The reformists, on the other hand, have no institutions.
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Some have argued that Obama's tax cut position was framed to appeal to conservative voters however dishonest it might be framed. Obama knew he could not win with his real position on taxes so he put a conservative skirt on a give away program by calling it a tax cut even for people who pay no income tax.
When questions are framed about smaller government and letting people keep more of their money, the conservative position wins. That is why Democrats were so desperate to disparage Joe the Plumber who had the audacity to challenge Obama on his wealth transfer plan disguised as a tax cut.
A more important thing Republicans need to do is find away to fight back against the Democrat smear machine that has destroyed the political viability of people like Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay and George Bush. They are gearing this machine up to go after Sarah Palin now and it is time to fight back against these attempts at personal destruction. They are hanging frames around our best politicians in order to discredit our polices and we need to do a better job of fighting those frames.
Jonah Goldberg also has an interesting take on the reformist vs. traditionalist debate and where President Bush fits in:
...If you look at Compassionate Conservatism as a way to frame issues to bridge between conservatism and the Democrats pursuits of the politics of empathy, you get a better explanation of the Bush years. It helped him win elections, but it did not build the party as he had hoped.
What is fascinating is that both camps seem implicitly to agree that the real challenge lurks in how to account for the Bush years. For the young Turks and their older allies -- my National Review colleagues Ramesh Ponnuru, Yuval Levin and David Frum, the Atlantic's Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, New York Times columnist David Brooks et al -- the problem is that Bush botched the GOP's shot at real reform. For the Limbaugh crowd, the issue seems to be that we've already tried this reform stuff -- from both Bush and McCain -- and look where it's gotten us.
Neither camp has adequately explained where Bush figures in their vision for the future of the party. Is reform going to be a debugged compassionate conservatism 2.0 or a Reaganesque revival of conservative problem solving? Does back-to-basics mean breaking with the precedents of the last eight years or building on them?
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