Walter Russell Mead has written two pieces of work that explains the current political situation. In his first piece, he writes about the “Blue Model,” the American Social Contract that governed America from the end of World War II until the 1970s.

In the old system, both blue collar and white collar workers hold stable jobs, a professional career civil service administers a growing state, with living standards for all social classes steadily rising while the gaps between the classes remain fairly stable, and with an increasing ’social dividend’ being paid out in various forms: longer vacations, more and cheaper state-supported education, earlier retirement, shorter work weeks and so on. Graduate from high school and you were pretty much guaranteed lifetime employment in a job that gave you a comfortable lower middle class lifestyle; graduate from college and you would be better paid and equally secure.

Life would just go on getting better. From generation to generation we would live a life of incremental improvements — the details of life would keep getting better but the broad outlines of our society would stay the same. The advanced industrial democracies of had in fact reached the ‘end of history’: this is what ‘developed’ human society looked like and there would be no more radical changes because the picture had fully developed.

But things didn’t get better and better. By the 1970s, the Blue Model broke down and it has been dying a slow death since. This is a problem for the Democrats, since this model benefited them the most. You can basically see the end of the Democratic majority with the beginning of the end of the Blue Model.

In the next essay, Mead talks about “Feeding the Blue Beast.” He picks up where he left off and notes how this breakdown is problematic for the Democrats:

The blue social model was a triumph of progressive social imagination and political organizing; for two generations it effectively reconciled capitalism with the demand for a better living standard and more security for the population at large.

The breakdown of the blue model is the core problem of American society today and the key to the troubles of the Democratic party. Blue states really are blue; the ‘progressive imagination’ remains staunchly blue, and blue model interest groups like public school teachers, government employees, the remnants of the private union movement and the much healthier labor movement among public employees shape and mostly fund what Howard Dean famously called ‘the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.’

Most Americans would like the blue model to stick around and are nostalgic for the security it once provided, but they understand that the great task of our times isn’t to save the blue model but to move on. The Democratic wing of the Democratic Party believes exactly the opposite: that the blue social model is the only way to go. If our city and state governments are groaning under the dead weight of inflated labor and pension costs, the only solution is to pump federal money into them somehow. If public schools aren’t working, they need more money — but seriously restructuring the system is out of bounds. If college and university tuition is exploding as the costs of education rapidly and continuously outpaces the general level of inflation, the only solution is to pump more money into the system while leaving it to operate much as it does.

Democratic policy is increasingly limited to one goal: feeding the blue beast. The great public-service providing institutions of our society — schools, universities, the health system, and above all government at municipal, state and federal levels — are built blue and think blue. The Democratic wing of the Democratic Party thinks its job is to make them bigger and keep them blue. Bringing the long green to Big Blue: that’s what it’s all about.

Three problems: we can’t afford it, people know that, and we desperately need the things that Big Blue can’t give us.

So, we need the services that Big Blue once gave us. We still need good schools. People also want to be able to afford health care. We want our elderly to not be impoverished. We want clean water, good highways and the like. But we can’t pay for them in the way we used to. We can’t just tax our way to prosperity when as Mead notes, people are no longer in secure jobs. And yet we need them.

Mead goes on to note that one of the reasons that we have a Tea Party movement is because we are worried as a public about how to pay for government services. But the Tea Party fails in that it proposes nothing as an alternative.

Mead ends his second essay with a pointed question for the Dems, but it is also a question aimed at Republicans:

Can the Democrats unshackle themselves from their degrading and destructive servitude to the blue beast before the Republicans build a new cohort of smart policy wonks with a practical vision for the future? Can either party develop the capacity for innovative leadership before the social and economic dysfunction of the current system drives us into a massive social and financial crisis?

So, here is my question: can the Republicans come up with a new social contract, a “Red Model?” Can we design a social model that is suited for this time and age?

I think Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap” is a start. I have some issues with it, but he is trying to create a new social model based on conservative principles. He is building up instead of just tearing down as the Tea Partiers are wont to do.

But there needs to be more conservative thinkers out there who can think about these issues. Opposition to Obama and the Democrats can only go so far. We need to propose our own vision for a new social contract.

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In November 2009, voters in the State of Washington approved a referendum that created legally recognized domestic partnerships for same sex couples.  This domestic partnership status was crafted to grant same sex couples all the legal rights associated with marriage while retaining marriage formally as a union between a man and a woman.  In so doing, Washington became the first state to recognize and protect same sex unions by a popular vote. Read more »

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The blogosphere has been abuzz with the recent poll by Daily Kos/Research 2000 that points a not so favorable view of the Republican Party.  The way the poll looks it gives a picture a party filled with bigoted know-nothings.

This poll has bothered me for a lot of reasons.  As a gay Republican who is a moderate, it felt like yet another slam against the party that makes one wonder why one should stay.  It has also bothered me because I know a lot of Republicans and none of them seem as crazy as this poll suggests. Read more »

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Yesterday in Houston thousands of people marched to protest the opening of Planned Parenthood’s new health clinic. These kinds of protests have been staged for more than a generation across the country. Rallies have been held to influence political candidates. Billions of dollars have been raised and spent on the abortion-lobbying industry. Fierce and often ridiculous campaigns have been raised to influence the Supreme Court nomination process. After all this, the state of abortion law in the US remains more or less where it was in the mid-’70’s.

The abortion issue has become a monumental political distraction. It has been cynically manipulated by politicians on both sides of the aisle, a perfect issue to stir up volunteers and cash without any accountability for results. That can change.

It is a common misperception, fed by the politicians who depend on it, that the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade bars all state or federal abortion limits. An abortion restriction that only applied after the fetus was “viable,” and included reasonable provisions for rape, incest, and protection of the life of the mother, would almost certainly be upheld. These kinds of restrictions are common in Europe and abortion is a far-less consuming political issue there.

Imagine if the Texas legislature passed a law this session that banned abortion after the twentieth week of pregnancy, except in cases of rape, incest, fetal deformity, or to protect the life of the mother. Given the Supreme Court’s decision in a recent Nebraska case on partial-birth abortion there is very little possibility that the Court would strike down a law crafted this carefully. It could stand. The era of “abortion on demand” would be over.

What would be the effect? Out in the “reality-based community” where real people are living their lives, the effect would be modest. A small percentage of abortions performed today would be illegal under this rule. However, in the political world, the impact could be monumental.

For starters, the law, even so broadly crafted, might not pass, even in as red a state as Texas. The effort to pass the law would in itself expose the fragility of the pro-life movement. For all the noise, it has been surprising to see how narrow the true, pro-life political base has become. South Dakota, one of the country’s most socially conservative states, twice in the last decade has failed to pass an initiative banning abortion. An effort to pass real legislation that would place genuine, reasonable curbs on abortion rights would expose the fact that there is almost no support for extreme pro-life positions outside church or the Republican National Committee.

The fight over such a bill would also flush some of the fundamentalist-pandering out of the GOP. If faced with an opportunity to sign their names to enforceable abortion curbs that would actually affect their wives and daughters, politicians would be forced to show their true stripes and pay at election time. We might find out which Republican politicians are genuine fundamentalists and which ones have been decked out in the cross and flag for cynical reasons.

If states began to address abortion directly in their legislatures, passing limits that met with both popular and Constitutional approval, the bottom would drop out of the multi-million dollar abortion political machine on both sides. Imagine how boring Supreme Court nominating hearings would be – as boring as they should be.

There is value in such a law by its own merits. No matter how you approach it, abortion is a complex, morally ambiguous issue. It is tough for a reasonable person to accept either that abortion of a just-fertilized embryo is murder, or that abortion of a fetus at thirty weeks is not. A law of this type could achieve consensus on the extremes, while preserving the individual burden to resolve the most vexing cases.

There are solutions to our most troubling political problems if we have the courage and imagination to embrace them. The benefits to our politics and to the future of the Republican Party could be enormous.

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As we start this year a look at the political landscape for Republicans shows that despite calls of a Republican revolution, such a thing may not happen. Tea Party conservative and libertarian purists are running amok, demanding that those within the party who do not represent their absolute ideological views be politically destroyed and thrown out of the party. Moderate Republicans such as Mark Kirk in Illinois and Charlie Crist in Florida face a populist driven movement of conservatives from their right flank made up of all brands from social to libertarian in a similar fashion as to what happened in NY 23 last year. It is a movement that nevertheless is fractured at this point and even if it can be organized enough, will not lead to any solutions. It is a movement that is made up of those who are merely reactionary and peeved by the idea that they had lost in the last few previous elections and who sometimes even put forth grotesque dreams of revolution and secession.

This is a movement that I saw firsthand at the largest Tea Party event in the nation held in San Antonio in front of the Alamo last year. It was an incredible event to go to as it enlightened me of a movement that had just started to form and before it started to fracture among its many lines of thought or personalities. I had a keen interest in this group, as I had no idea what type of people and what kind of overall crowd would be present that day. First off, I will say that regardless of what some liberal commentators have said, this was a grassroots event and it was a movement. Some have come to believe that it was only formulated and planned by large companies and conservative groups, and while the actual grassroots may have had quite the assistance from such entities, one cannot simply perceive that those thousands that came marching did so only because they were ordered to by corporate entities. If its conception and basic organization was FOX news and Glenn Beck, the people were the real thing. To understand this movement, we as centrists cannot merely wave it off as a non-viable group of people that is falsely labeled as grassroots. No, this was the real thing and those people that day were the real and upset partakers in a Tea Party that chanted and held signs in visible discontent with Washington.

In establishing that this is a real movement one would be able to see that it has an energy that political strategists may see as opportunities to use as a source of momentum; a wave which they may be able to ride to political office. This I do not totally disagree with for to do so would ignore the feelings of discontent in some parts of the nation towards the current administration and how that could be used for political victory. But what needs to be taken into account is not whether it is a viable and continuing movement or one that will dissipate if the economy begins to recover or not. What needs to be taken into consideration is whether or not making a deal with this movement is the right thing to do, or will it merely be an act of selling ones soul for short term benefit.

In that day I was able to see up front what the Tea Parties believed in, and what they stood for and it was one that brought worry to me on that day in front of the Alamo. First, let’s get something straight: this movement is not a movement of new ideas. It is exactly the same old ideas that drove the conservative revolution in the latter half of the 20^th century. There is nothing new with people and speakers believing that abortion should be outlawed and that God’s law be followed within government. There is nothing new with the idea that government is evil and inept and that inaction in a crisis is better than action. There is nothing new when science is generally regarded as a liberal plot and that Intelligent Design aka literal belief in a holy book as science, has actual real scientific backing and that global warming or even pollution are conspiracies for the government to tell the markets to make cleaner appliances and for vehicles to have slightly higher standards of efficiency, of which would be an infringement on their perceived rights and desire to do as they please regardless of the consequences to those around them and to our lands. There is nothing new with jingoistic and nativist sentiments that was dominant among the crowd and how the same sentiment towards the world that led to the neo-conservative foreign policy mishaps of the W. Bush administration were still present among these people who would say that they were so different from the prior administration. If anything other than the lack of spending vetoes they are every bit an embodiment not of W. Bush, but of the view of the nation and of the world that his administration implemented: arrogant unilateralism, general environmental policy negligence and denial, and a belief of government not as a tool to ensure balance and stability within the markets but as a hindrance to be left basically unused or without reform no matter the real world consequences. With most of these ideas, the Tea Party movement is one and the same.

As with most populist movements, it is by and large not made up of intellectuals or academics. In fact, these are the same people who believe that academics is elitism and that Sarah Palin with her hokey soundbites is better candidate for president than one that can actually present a nuanced view of policies. While I disagree with many conservative thinkers on their take on governance, at least they have given an actual amount of learned thinking to the process that led to their conclusions. Instead, this populist movement is based on sheer reactionary emotions towards how the political process panned out for their side. They simply did not like Obama from the start, and to a degree this is understandable. Their side had been blamed for symbolizing power or “the man” who was running the economy into the ground, creating an unnecessary war without finishing the correct one, and just being generally representative of a segment of the country that believes that God and guns is what we should be about while the rest of the nation became disconcerted enough to vote out their representatives in the Republican party twice. Now the Tea Party people like to tell how they are different from the Republican Party representatives, but in the end they actually agree with almost every aspect of the George W. Bush doctrine and his domestic views including the budget busting across the board, corporate aimed tax cuts. Now if only he had gotten rid of the Environmental Protection Agency and sold the national parks off to private owners to shrink the federal government. Then he would have started to gain real conservative/libertarian credentials. Whatever W. Bush has done was mostly within the realm of conservatism, and it is impressive to see those out there who actually want an even more hardline conservative take on government than what he has done. In the end, what is not reasonable is the absolute hatred towards the President that exists today within the Tea Party crowd.

By far and large there is no plan for America put forth by this movement that isn’t sheer idealism with a near complete lack of realistic thinking. It cannot see the problems that a complex world has brought and how it can’t be solved by merely chanting U.S.A and following a strict conservative ideology. It is a movement that was spearheaded by Glenn Beck and his misinformation and conspiratorial views. Only mere tub thumping that I had previously thought found only in protests based on the far-left was present that day as well. Most of the college students at the University of Texas at San Antonio by far and large did not participate, which will lead to another problem in having the Republican Party adopt this movement for its own. Most fit the description of white, middle aged and I would suppose at one time youthful members of the Reagan Revolution. It was interesting how many of them fit this bill, and how few minorities were present. I believe I could count the number of black people there on my fingers with the count being slightly higher with those of Hispanic origin. The average age of a Tea Party person was usually 40 with relatively few in the teens and twenties. Even 30 year olds seemed sparse. Confederate flags waved and secession/ states’ rights extremists were abundant. This is not some youth revolution: it is merely a disgruntled and aging echo of what happened in the 80’s.

This is a movement, but one that is a minority movement and not one that can be translated into a moderate or long term base of success. It a movement that only encases a small section of the white population and virtually none of the fast growing minority populations. It is a movement that is sheer emotion and one most clearly defined by unreasonable hate and vitriol and delusion by those that make up its members. Even if this was to bring short term success to the Republican party in the 2010 or even 2012 elections, it would fail to translate into a true winning strategy afterwards. This would mirror the same problems the democratic party experienced in the 1980’s with the then powerful liberal wing. Simply put, the Democratic party ended up realizing that despite their midterm wins during Reagan’s first term by going hard-left in their ideology, it was simply not the answer most Americans looked for in the long run of the late 20^th century. Despite the current leaders of the party who say otherwise, the Tea Party and its Tea Baggers are not the logical future of the Republican Party and a Republican resurgence. The Tea Party is merely a wild forest fire that unfortunately for the Republican Party will hurt many in the short term, both those who support them and those brave enough to stand against them; but it will eventually burn itself out and as a wildfire show how non-enduring populist movements rooted in anti-intellectualism are. When that happens, we as Republicans do not want to be on that same burnt out field. As we start off the new year which looks to be very rough to centrist republicanism everywhere, take heed and don’t cave in and I hope everyone had a happy new year.

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Progressive blogger Ed Kilgore thinks the belief that the United States is a “center-right” nation is not as true as some would like to think:

Yes, polls of self-identification on this scale do show a very stable “center-right country” in which conservatives typically outnumber liberals three-to-two or even more. This is how Scott arrives at his fundamental argument that polarized elected officials don’t adequately represent the people who elected them, and also how he somehow concludes that the notable shift of Republican opinion to the right in recent years has made the system more, not less representative (that’s his major refutation of the Hacker-Pierson contention that the GOP has dragged the political center to the right).

Self-identification measurements are always iffy, as is made most evident by the vast gap between the number of voters who call themselves “independents” and the number who actually behave in an independent manner. But the hoary liberal-moderate-conservative scale is particularly influenced by the unpopularity of the “liberal” term, even among many voters who are “liberal” by the normal standards. This is what conservatives have bought with so many years and so many billions of dollars invested in the demonization of “liberalism,” compounded by the very different meanings the term has denoted here and abroad.

The kicker here though is what this belief in a “center-right nation” does to the GOP:

It’s worth noting as well that the “center-right nation” meme has the perverse effect of holding Democrats to a higher standard of “bipartisanship” than Republicans, since “liberals” obviously have to move further to reach the actual political center than “conservatives.” And indeed, that’s pretty much what Scott suggests.

Now, Kilgore is a lefty and this is a blog with a liberal bias, but he does share some truth here. I believe one of the reasons that the Republicans have for the most part held their ground and not cooperated with the Democrats is on the belief that the American people don’t want a “government takeover of healthcare.” They believe that the public is on their side since this is a “center-right nation.” In essence, they believe they don’t have to give an inch because most of the nation agrees with them ideologically.

But is that really true? Voters put a Democratic Congress and a Democratic President in office last year. The Democratic President said he was going to reform health care and yet voters voted for him. Also this Democratic President is the first Northern Liberal in the White House in about two generations. If we are such a center-right nation, one would think that President Obama would have had a hard time getting elected.

The danger of believing that we are a center-right country is that it allows Republicans to live in denial. Why do they have to change? Why bother with trying to appeal to independents, or why bother running moderates in Democratic areas? The last two elections should have woken us up and allowed us to make strategic changes, but the belief in the center-right nation allows us to think that 2006 and 2008 are abberations and that sooner or later, America will come back home to the GOP.

But I think there is even a bigger danger: it leaves Republicans thinking they don’t have to solve issues like health care reform or the environment, or the economy. Their vision of the right makes these issues irrelevant.

2010 will be an interesting year to find out if this belief in a center-right nation is real or just something a convenient little lie to hold on to during hard times.

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Richard Ivory of Hip-Hop Republicans.com shares his views on social conservatives, African Americans and the GOP.

For decades, social conservatives have relentlessly targeted Black Churches as a way to bring more African-Americans into the Republican Party. Despite many sincere efforts, the numbers of church going African-Americans who vote Republican is smaller now than ever before.

While there has been much debate and talk about the Religious Right within the Republican Party, one could equally and strongly argue that African-Americans make up one of the largest socially conservative voting blocs in the Democrat Party. Earlier this year, the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life released a detailed study on the religious views of most African-Americans. The research was unique in that the new analysis found blacks to be the most religious group of people in the United States population as a whole.

According to the research, when compared to other racial and ethnic groups, African-Americans are among the most likely to report a formal religious affiliation with 87% of African-Americans describing themselves as belonging to one religious group or another. The analysis also finds that nearly eight-in-ten African-Americans (79%) say religion is very important in their lives compared with 56% among all U.S. adults.

The study also states that six-in-ten African-Americans (61%) say Houses of Worship should express their views on social and political matters, while only 36% of African-Americans say churches should avoid these topics. On this question of expression, African-Americans closely resemble White Evangelical Protestants, among whom 59% say churches should express their views while 38% say churches should keep out of social and political matters.

The study finds, additionally, that half of all African-Americans feel that there have been too few expressions of faith by political leaders while an additional 24% say there has been the right amount of religious expression by political leaders. Only 23% of African-Americans say there has been too much religious talk from politicians.

Overall, 49% of African-Americans are in favor of keeping abortion legal in most or all cases, while 44% of African-Americans want abortion to be illegal in most or all cases.

Four-in-ten African-Americans (41%) overall, think that homosexuality should be accepted by society, while 46% of African-Americans say that homosexuality should be discouraged. According to other Pew Research Center surveys, conducted during the summer of 2008, nearly two-thirds of African-Americans (64%) say they oppose allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally, which is a significantly higher level of opposition than among Whites (51%).

If the numbers are correct, African-Americans should be running into the arms of Republicans and, especially, socially conservative ones. The same data, nevertheless, shows that despite African-American’s deep social conservative beliefs, the community does not as a whole “vote exclusively” on such issues.

Proof of this is in the same data which demonstrates that despite their conservative, social view, by far African-Americans (76%) self describe themselves as Democrats. The same study found that on an average, only about 10% of African-Americans self describe themselves as being Republicans. Across all religious groups, at least two-thirds of African-Americans express support for the Democratic Party.

My own personal view of the data is that while African- Americans agree with social conservative politicians on many issues, it is concerning the issue of race, social justice and economics that these two groups part company.

With regards race, many blacks who lived in the South remembered that many of the leaders of the Moral Majority had deep connections to the Southern Baptist Convention. The SBC’s racist history and its deep connections to the GOP in the 80’s had a great impact on black church members. The SBC’s silence during the Jim Crow Era and during the era of Desegregation was not to be forgotten.

This divide in the south between black churches and white churches is still visible today. It was not surprising, therefore, that when the Religious Right began to grow in political dominance in The Republican Party on a wave of pro- family values that many blacks saw this as the height of hypocrisy and irony given the following:

Where were these ministers who were so outraged over the issue of abortion when little Black Boys were being lynched and denied the right to vote?

Where were these same religious leaders and politicians when their Black and socially conservative brothers were suffering?

Historically, social conservatives have talked about “teaching folks how to fish” but have very little to show for it. In fact, most of the non-profit empowerment groups in minority and urban areas lean toward the left. Social conservative groups will continue to fail in reaching black churches as long as urban folks and minorities worry about getting a job and putting food on their tables.

Views about tax cuts make little sense to a woman who does not pay taxes due to her low -income status. The only way tax cuts will ever make genuine sense to a woman like her is if she owns something or is employed. When the cupboards are bare, and the baby needs milk technical debates about stem cell research or gay marriage will rarely be a priority.

In California, the only way social conservatives could get Blacks out to vote against Proposition 8 was by getting them to come out in large enough numbers to vote for Barrack Obama. What this dichotomy demonstrates is that many minorities agree with social conservatives on many social issues, yet not to the degree that minorities prioritize economic and social justice issues. It does not mean that minorities and social conservatives do not agree; they simply do not agree on what the priorities should be. And as long as these two communities see their “moral issues” as being more important than the other, the two shall never meet.

Richard Ivory is the Publisher and Founder, of Hip-HopRepublican.com, a blog that delves into urban issues from centrist perspective. Mr. Ivory is a political consultant who has worked on over a dozen political campaigns around the country. He has worked for both the Republican National Committee and was the College outreach director for Republican Youth Majority. He is presently the founder of The John Langston Forum and is the College outreach director for Republicans for Black Empowerment.

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Finally,something that describes who I am.Â

 Let me explain. I’m a fairly well-educated guy that lives in the city, drive a Prius, gives to public radio and likes organic food. But if you think that his means I’m some kind of lefty liberal, you are so wrong. I don’t support the President’s health care plan (even though I do think there is room for reform). I am upset at his high spending habits. That should be something that would want to make the GOP go after people like me. But as Michael Petrilli notes, many in the Republican Party are not interested:

As less-educated seniors pass away and better-educated 20- and 30-somethings take their place in the electorate, this bloc will exert growing influence. And here’s the distressing news for the GOP: According to exit-poll data, a majority of college-educated voters (53%) pulled the lever for Mr. Obama in 2008—the first time a Democratic candidate has won this key segment since the 1970s.

Some in the GOP see this trend as an opportunity rather than a problem. Let the Democrats have the Starbucks set, goes the thinking, and we’ll grab working-class families. Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, for instance, wants to embrace “Sam’s Club” Republicans. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee pitched himself in 2008 as the guy who “looks like your co-worker, not your boss.” Even Mitt Romney blasted “Eastern elites.” And of course there’s Sarah Palin, whose entire brand is anti-intellectual.

Ross Douthat and Riehan Salam have written an entire book that tends to praise the “Sam’s Club” Republican while giving short shrift to more upscale Republicans, branding them as nothing more than Democrats in drag.

As Petrilli notes, the other the name for “Whole Foods Republicans” is moderate Republicans, those socially moderate-to-liberal, fiscally conservative Republicans. But these people have been tagged as “RINOs” and have been ignored by the GOP. And because the GOP has targeted such people as worthy of being purged, these “Whole Foods Republicans” aren’t showing a whole lotta love back at the GOP:

Do these Republican party leaders even appreciate how off-putting their comments are to someone who has at least an undergraduate college education, let alone an educated individual who can even think independently for themself? The Republican leaders of my youth were people like New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Massachusetts U.S. Senator Edward Brooke. Those Republicans were generally socially moderate to liberal and fiscally conservative. Where have all of those Rockefeller Republicans gone? The above has made me very suspicious of the Republican Party.

I am equally suspicious, if not even more so, of the Democratic Party. Lifestyle choices aside, I view big government (and the often associated ineffective bloated bureaucracies) with great suspicion. “There’s no law that someone who enjoys organic food, rides his bike to work, or wants a diverse school for his kids must also believe that the federal government should take over the health-care system or waste money on thousands of social programs with no evidence of effectiveness. Nor do highly educated people have to agree that a strong national defense is harmful to the cause of peace and international cooperation.”

Perhaps this is why I remain an independent voter (and more and more college educated people like me are becoming so). What is wrong with having moderate to liberal views on social issues and being fiscally conservative at the same time?

Indeed, what is wrong with having moderate to liberal views on social issues and yet being fiscally moderate?

Right now, the GOP is withholding outreach towards more upscale folks for a few reasons: one, they are afraid of being painted as an “elitist” and then run out of the party; and two, because some still adhere to the Karl Rove school of electoral politics- rally the base and get just enough moderates to win narrowly. But the math shows the such a strategy will only last for so long. At somepoint, you will lose the moderates and the base is not big enough to bring victory.

In the end, three things will happen to the GOP in regards to “Whole Foods” voters: either they will reach out to them on their own, be forced to change by younger voters, or ignore them and become the modern “Know-Nothing” party that will be a regional party at best.

It’s up to the GOP leadership to decide.

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I won’t be tagged a “moderate” Republican. What’s moderate? Lukewarm coffee, a half-finished job, and the flavorless eggs they serve at the hospital. I’ll pass.

And if I’m moderate, then who is extreme? So, far the people supposedly to the “right” of me think the President was born in Kenya, science is propaganda, Jesus is telling them what to do, Fascists and Communists are the same thing, and Newt Gingrich is a closet-liberal. Calling them “extreme” implies that they are just farther along on a political spectrum. They are not more conservative than me. They are not on the political spectrum. They are just less interested in events that occur in the real world.

Am I a moderate? In my fifth grade social studies class I took Reagan’s side in our cute little mock Presidential debate and nearly lead the class in a riot. As an aside, I’m really sorry, Mrs. Vanover. I got carried away. That winter morning in 1989 I had tears in my eyes as Reagan left the White House and boarded a helicopter bound for private life. I woke up my roommates and ran cheering out the door early on November 7, 1994 when I discovered the scale of our victory.

Like millions of other committed conservatives I believe passionately that the story of America is the story of ordinary people finding the freedom to pursue their own way of living. Like generations of conservatives before me I believe that the best government is small both in scope and ambition, but I understand that government has a critical role to play in supporting a civilization. My statement of beliefs is not a list of things I “oppose.” My politics is based on a belief in prosperity, progress, freedom, and the dignity of all people.

When Reagan used the Nutjob Gambit to manipulate an oddball fringe and gain just enough momentum to defeat Carter, part of his legacy to us was the problem of what to do with them. Nothing in the history of his era suggests he ever imagined the power these people, who he treated like convenient idiots, would acquire within the Party. No one imagined they could ever wag the dog. Now look at where we are.

Twenty years later, we are still imagining that reasonable people can stand quietly on their dignity and these ranting lunatics will somehow just exhaust themselves. It’s not working. There are no mature adults in the back rooms who will rein them in. Not anymore, anyway. It’s up to us.

There is nothing conservative about disrupting a Congressman’s town hall meeting to rant like an idiot. There is nothing conservative about displaying such disrespect for the President as to shout him down during the State of the Union Address (honestly, what would Reagan have said about that!?). There is nothing conservative about trying to convert your personal religious convictions into laws enforced on all of us. There is nothing conservative about revolution. There is nothing conservative about Fascism. Anyone who considers himself a radical conservative doesn’t know what “conservative” means.

Let’s be absolutely clear, the choice facing the Party is not whether to elect “real” conservatives or “fake” conservatives. The choice we face is whether we have the courage, integrity, and maturity to embrace the adult responsibilities of citizenship. Are we responsible grown-ups worthy of the awesome legacy we’ve been granted, or are we contestants in some reality show?

Don’t accept the label “moderate.” If you’d called Teddy Roosevelt a moderate you’d risk a sharp stick in the eye. Let’s drop the gloves and stand for what we believe in.

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We’re blamed when the Party loses, but we’re never thanked when the Party wins.

We’re the ones called RINOs, yet we’re not the ones who run to a 3^rd Party when things don’t go their way.

We’re the ones who founded the Party, saw it through its greatest expansion and were essential parts of the coalitions that helped it to power multiple times, yet now we’re the targets of purges and purity tests.

What is it going to take to make Moderate Republicans stand up and say “No More?” When will Moderate Republicans organize their own groups within the Party and fight the rumors and lies about them? At what point do we see moderates start to publish their own magazines and newsletters?  Where are the moderate think tanks and PACs? When do moderates take a stand?

If not now, when their own party are actively trying to purge them from it, when?

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Rod Paige, an African-American and George W. Bush’s first Secretary of Education, has an interesting response to the often-posed question, how can a Black man be a Republican? He reminds listeners that it was Democrats who turned dogs and fire hoses on Civil Rights protesters in Mississippi when he was growing up. The Democratic Party in the South was the core of the resistance to the Civil Rights movement. It was only with the support of a sizable majority of GOP Congressmen that President Johnson was able to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Read more »

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One of the knocks against moderate Republicans have been that we don’t really have any principles. But the fact is we do have values that have long been a part of the GOP. Earlier this year, Geoffrey Kabaservice wrote a series of articles on famous moderates in the GOP. The figures give us a road map for today to claim our seat at the GOP table. I am reposting this series third profile one is on former Congressman Thomas Curtis.

Historically, moderate Republicanism was most strongly associated with the East Coast and regions settled by New Englanders such as the upper Midwest, the Northwest, and California. There were many exceptions to this rule, however, and one of the most notable Congressional moderates in the ’50s and ’60s was Thomas B. Curtis, a Missourian who considered himself a “constructive conservative.”

Curtis came from a long line of Democrats, but turned against his ancestral party to fight bossism, like Kansas City’s Pendergast machine that produced Harry Truman. Elected to Congress in 1950, at a time when he was one of only a handful of GOP officials in Missouri, Curtis followed a process of studying and deliberating issues individually, without reference to a pre-cast ideology or opinion polls. Typically this led him to take positions that were highly conservative on fiscal matters but moderate or liberal on social issues, which led to his being one of the few Republicans supported by the liberal political action group The National Committee for an Effective Congress.

Curtis campaigned for Taft in 1948 and 1952, but approved of Eisenhower’s restraint with regard to fiscal matters and the power of the executive branch. Curtis won his first election attacking Truman for his failure to seek adequate Congressional authorization for the Korean war, and later would make the same criticism of Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam. He believed that Eisenhower’s military reputation gave him unique credibility to check the growth of what Ike called “the military-industrial complex.” Curtis (who served in the Navy during WWII) led the effort to reduce waste within the military bureaucracy, and helped end the services’ practice of running their own procurement agencies; the Navy, he discovered, was in the business of roasting its own coffee. At the same time, Curtis also attacked Eisenhower for failing to adhere to strict standards of good government by allowing his attorney general, Herbert Brownell, to retain patronage power.

Curtis was one of the prime movers in the “Young Turks” revolt against two successive Republican House minority leaders, Joe Martin and Charles Halleck. At issue was the gross imbalance in Democratic to Republican Congressional staff workers – researchers, writers, counsels, and clerks. While this was partly a matter of the GOP leaders’ failure to stand up against majority Democratic bullying, it also pointed to the party’s underdeveloped research and policy-making capacities, which limited Republicans’ ability to advance original and positive proposals rather than simply dragging their feet in response to Democratic initiatives.

Curtis faced repeated primary challenges from the right for his support of free trade (much resented by protectionist industries such as Monsanto in St. Louis) and civil liberties (against the likes of Joe McCarthy). What particularly raised anger against him in the Jim Crow state of Missouri, however, was his unswerving advocacy of civil rights for African-Americans. Contrary to much later mythology, civil rights efforts in Congress during the 1950s and early ’60s were led by Republican moderates like Curtis rather than better known Democratic liberals.Â

Washington Post reporter Meg Greenfield recalled that when she first arrived in the nation’s capital in the early ’60s, she gradually discovered that in terms of the political forces at work opposing and defending segregation, “I seemed to have the lineup of players just about completely wrong.” With the Democratic Party heavily dependent on its autocratic Southern chairmen, even the northern liberal Democrats who were most vociferous in their denunciations of Jim Crow were mainly posturing. “At that moment,” Greenfield wrote, “the principal force truly committed to taking immediate action against the kinds of crude racial repression still officially in place seemed to be, of all things, a bunch of Republicans, many of them unknown.” Some were northeasterners with urban constituencies, but “the effort’s most tireless organizers and/or communicants were a few generally conservative midwestern House members, notably Tom Curtis of Missouri.”

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 originated in Curtis’ office in 1962, and it was mainly Republican pressure from Curtis and his fellow Republican Judiciary Committee member William McCulloch of Ohio that forced John F. Kennedy to make his first, hesitant message on civil rights in April 1963. Curtis’ defense of civil rights was rooted partly in the Lincoln tradition of the GOP, but more simply in the belief that civil rights were at the base of the American philosophy of government and Judeo-Christian morality and that their defense was “the most fundamental issue that confronts any government at any time,” as he wrote in 1952.

Curtis’ independence continued to distinguish him when he resigned as chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 1973, accusing the Nixon administration of “tampering” with the agency in an attempt to gain political control, and later when he quarreled with Congress over the autonomy of the Federal Election Commission, of which he was the founding chairman. In all of his government service, Curtis consciously attempted to live up to the standard set by Edmund Burke in his 1774 speech to the Electors of Bristol: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

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This is a selection from an old post at The Big Stick.Â

What Republicans need to realize is that there is a HUGE network of conservationists out there, among them millions of hunters and fisherman, who closely identify with a message of conservation and are motivated to push hard for what they believe in. We are already doing the right things in supporting their causes, but we aren’t doing nearly enough to highlight that fact and also to link it to other right-of-center policies.

Unfortunately the decline in popularity of both hunting and fishing, especially hunting, has forced many of these conservation-minded outdoorsmen to become less vocal, while liberal-inclined preservationists see more and more publicity. Social stigmas attached to the pursuit of game have alienated many sportsmen and taken away their voice, but it is my sense that they are poised for a comeback.

One group that has been leading the charge while partnering with other conservation groups is the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. Their mission statement reads:

“The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership is a coalition of leading hunting, fishing and conservation organizations, labor unions and individual grassroots partners working together to preserve the traditions of hunting and fishing by a.) expanding access to places to hunt and fish, b.) conserving fish and wildlife and the habitats necessary to sustain them, and c.) increasing funding for conservation and management.” – TRCP

TRCP is allied closely with groups like Ducks Unlimited, Quail Unlimited and Trout Unlimited who have jointly saved millions of acres of natural spaces for wildlife, a feat no environmental group can match. What’s even more impressive is that they have partnered with 19 major trade unions to help engage their members who are sportsmen and sportswomen in conservation efforts. Here is a list from the TRCP:

Trade Union	# of Members
United Steel Workers of America	800,000
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW)	780,000
International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW)	760,000
Communication Workers of America (CWA)	600,000
United Association of Plumbers and Pipe Fitters (UA)	300,000
International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF)	267,000
Sheet Metal Workers International Association (SMWIA)	150,000
International Association of Bridge, Structural, Ornamental and Reinforcing Iron Workers	127,000
Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM)	120,000
International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT)	115,000
International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers (BAC)	100,000
International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, Iron Ship Builders, Blacksmiths, Forgers and Helpers	75,000
United Mine Workers of America (UMWA)	60,000
Utility Workers Union of America (UWUA)	50,000
Operative Plasterers and Cement Masons International Association (OPCMIA)	40,000
International Union of Elevator Constructors (IUEC)	26,000
United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers	25,000
International Association of Heat and Frost Insulators & Asbestos Workers	20,000
Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen	9,500
Building and Construction Trades Department of the AFL-CIO	n/a
Total	4,424,500

 As you can see, this gives them access to over 4 million blue collar workers. These are just the kinds of folks that Republicans should be pursuing because many of them are already inclined towards the Right, they just don’t know it. A strong conservationist message and a close and public partnership with conservation groups, coupled with some sensible regulation of businesses along environmental lines is a recipe for success. As I said, the GOP has already laid the foundation of a successful partnership, we just need to do a much better job of advertising it.

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MSNBC’s First Read is reporting that a resolution is floating around that could be interpreted as an official litmus test as to whether or not the Republican National Committee should support a candidate. Read more »

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