Wes Riddle's Horse Sense Column #385

Life of the Party
Wes Riddle

Both parties in America’s unofficial “two-party system” are large, constantly morphing national coalitions comprised of individuals and interests forming vehicles for political participation. Political parties facilitate policymaking and governance of course, but they by and large nominate and run the candidates whom people choose from to elect. Elected officials in turn become our Government, constitutional or otherwise, wise as not. They also become de facto leaders of the party that got them there.

Political parties are also porous things, and any individual so inclined is able to join, leave and try some other brand, or decide to come back again. Many do it all the time, depending on whom which candidates are, and on what the party platforms say. Of course those platform documents are imperfect and never binding, but imperfect as they are they do attempt to codify the ideational basis of a party, at least for the season. One does have to ask, however, just what it means to be a lifelong Republican or Democrat, considering how different either given party has been, and will be again over the course of a typical lifespan. This leaves many citizens saying with perfectly good conscience that, “I don’t vote for the party, I vote for the man or woman” or “I didn’t leave my party, my party left me.” Neither of the two major parties it turns out has the proverbial corner on better character or better solutions.

Then again times change, history moves on, and situations alter. This leads the likes of Rush Limbaugh to ask as he did in remarks at the Hillsdale College Churchill Dinner in Washington, D.C., “Do conservatives [and in this case the more conservative party or Republicans] need to get beyond Reagan?” His answer might be predictable, but not for reasons one may think based on liberal stereotype of the talk-show host. Limbaugh concludes “there is no pragmatic reason today for conservatives to abandon the ideas [emphasis mine] of Reagan.” Then he proceeds to pick one idea from out of many that Reagan used to talk about, one that may yet form a kernel of some future Republican Party majority. He admits Reagan anti-communism lost relevance in the post-Cold War world, and supply side economics is spent in the current environment. Notwithstanding, Limbaugh says Reagan argued and history has shown “that America does best when it is true to its original idea [emphasis mine]. It does best when its people are left free to work in their individual self-interest—not meant in the sense of being selfish, but in the sense that they are left free to work to improve their own lives and the lives of their families, and for the good of their communities and of the nation at large.”

He tells Republicans to seek a reformulation along old lines about individual liberty and freedom. He further defines what the Party should be by negative reference to what it should not be. That is, he says there is no such thing as “big-government conservatism,” thereby castigating the neoconservative wing and most of eight years of economic and regulatory policy under George W. Bush. Limbaugh is trying to breathe new life into the GOP by redirecting its energies, its younger candidates and its platform to the cause of limited government. Whether states rights and federalism are a prominent part of this “original idea” to which he alludes is implied, though less clear. We are nevertheless witnessing a classic morphing process ongoing inside a national party that went through significant electoral defeat in 2008.

Indeed, various stripes of conservatism and libertarianism are coalescing within the Republican Party towards the firm fixed idea of limited government, Founders-style. The Ron Paul movement has broken way out of bounds from the growing fan club built around a single individual to a nascent political movement called Campaign For Liberty built upon specific and well-developed Pauline ideas. While C4L affects both political parties, its impetus is likely to force advocates out of the party advocating new and bigger New Deal approaches to the party that intelligently mounts opposition. Of course it remains to be seen if that will be Republican Party. After all, the last major political party and national coalition to disappear in American politics was the Whig Party. Whigs ostensibly comprised the conservative party of their time too, at least before 1854. While it is generally conceded the rising Republican Party in the North was a beneficiary of the Whigs’ demise, Whigs also reinforced the constitutional and cultural conservatism of the South.

It is possible that conservative voices are the most likely to abandon liberalizing coalitions, as opposed to liberal voices saying goodbye to conservative ones. If for no other reason than that change is usually most pronounced in liberal coalitions, and liberal positions are more tolerant of the quantitative and qualitative gaps from whatever the new now is to whatever is conceived as the nation’s “original idea.” Conservatives don’t normally brook the distance but instead keep returning.