The 21^st Century Republican Party

RattlerGator

Tallahassee, FL

August 30, 2004

In 1964 Ronald Reagan made a declarative statement followed by a series of pertinent questions while on the stump, traveling nationwide in his support for the candidacy of Barry Goldwater for President:

I am going to talk of controversial things. I make no apology for this.

It's time we asked ourselves if we still know the freedoms intended for us by the Founding Fathers. James Madison said, "We base all our experiments on the capacity of mankind for self government."

This idea that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of power is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

We know now that this lit a fire in a Republican base sufficient to successfully fight the necessary war against communists, marxists, and socialists. Now that Reaganism (which is to say, the governing spirit of Republican Party) is ascendant, which Republican Party will carry forward as the governing spirit of this majority party?

David Brooks does a fantastic job of providing a window into the Republican Party of 2004:

There used to be a spirit of solidarity binding all the embattled members of the conservative movement. But with conservatism ascendant, that spirit has eroded. Should Bush lose, it will be like a pack of wolves that suddenly turns on itself. The civil war over the future of the party will be ruthless and bloody. The foreign-policy realists will battle the democracy-promoting Reaganites. The immigrant-bashing nativists will battle the free marketeers. The tax-cutting growth wing will battle the fiscally prudent deficit hawks. The social conservatives will war with the social moderates, the biotech skeptics with the biotech enthusiasts, the K Street corporatists with the tariff-loving populists, the civil libertarians with the security-minded Ashcroftians. In short, the Republican Party is unstable.

That certainly does give a good snapshot of Republican diversity but . . . he could just as easily have said, “In short, the Republican Party is dynamic” in the sense that Virginia Postrel means dynamic. For Postrel, as best I can tell, we live in a dynamic world full of dynamists and their 24/7 around-the-clock engagement with the here and now results in what she calls a dynamism:

where creativity and enterprise, operating under general and predictable rules, generate progress in unpredictable ways. Dynamists appreciate evolutionary processes such as market competition, playful experimentation, scientific inquiry, and technological innovation. A dynamist is one who works creatively across barriers and obstacles and in areas once thought to be disparate to construct combinations based on the free play of imagination and discovery. Dynamists seek progress, rather than perfection, through trial and error, feedback loops, incremental improvement, diversity, and choice. They are learners, experimenters, risk takers, and entrepreneurs who understand the importance of local knowledge and evolved solutions to complex problems. Not surprisingly, dynamists are frequently attracted to biological metaphors as symbols of unpredictable change and growth, variety, experimentation, feedback, and adaptation.  

[Postrel] explains that dynamism is for people who like process and pattern and an order that is unpredictable, spontaneous, and ever-shifting. Dynamists appreciate dispersed, even tacit, knowledge and recognize the limits of the human mind at the same time that they celebrate learning. They also prefer competing nested rule sets and want to limit universal rule-making to broadly applicable and rarely changed principles. Dynamists also permit many visions and accept competing dreams. To work together, they do not have to agree on metaphysical principles or what the future should look like.  

Unfortunately, African Americans seem to be COMPLETELY absent, as a national community, from considering and discussing this possible gateway into the Republican Party (which, by the way, appears to be the GOVERNING party in this nation for the foreseeable future). Meanwhile, that governing party is having a serious discussion about the role of government in our 21^st Century world. This is a conversation that African Americans (again, as a national community) would be idiots to ignore. David Brooks details how the Bush Administration has taken the first basis steps necessary to engage the coming transformation of government:

On domestic policy, Casse writes, the Bush administration has agreed to greater federal spending in exchange for the seeds of market reform -- a big prescription drug benefit in exchange for the hint of a new approach to Medicare that emphasizes choice and accountability. This is not traditional big government, nor is it small government. It is strong government, Casse writes, which provides services while giving individuals choice about how they want them delivered.

This sort of conservatism measures its success not by how big or small government is but by the habits it encourages in its citizens. Does it encourage dependence or self-reliance? Does it sap individual initiative or give it new forums to exert itself? As Jonathan Rauch wrote in The National Journal: ''Conservatives have been obsessed with reducing the supply of government when instead they should reduce the demand for it; and the way to do that is by repudiating the Washington-knows-best legacy of the New Deal. Republicans will empower people, and the people will empower Republicans.''

Brooks goes on to say that in the near future, say 2008, the winning Republican nominee for President will have to:

lay out a vision that would rebuild the bonds among free-market conservatives, who dream of liberty; social conservatives, who dream of decency; middle-class suburbanites, who dream of opportunity; and foreign-policy hawks, who dream of security and democracy.

This, Brooks says, would not be a revolution in the Party but a revival of what it used to be: the party of Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. And that, my friends, is extremely compelling to me.