From: hhuang@athena.mit.edu (Han-Young Huang)
Subject: The future of the GOP and conservatism
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 20:06:43 GMT


Apparently, not all Republicans feel comfortable back at the GOP roost.
_The Wall Street Journal_'s January 21, 1993's issue ran an opinion
piece entitled ``The Coming Resurrection of the GOP.''  I began reading:

	...Accepting a false media analysis of why they lost, the
 Republicans are already indulging in the politics of appeasement.
	...Warren Rudman's Republican Majority Coalition wants all
 ``moral'' issues off the table, now.  Jack Kemp's Empower America is
 ``reaching out'' to pro-abortion and gayrights Republicans with one
 hand, stiff-arming the Christian right with the other.  Irving Kristol,
 who first raised the white flag in the struggle against the Great
 Society, now wants it raised in the culture wars.  ``I regret to inform
 [Pat Buchanan] that those wars are over,'' said Professor Kristol on
 this page.  ``The left has won.''
	This is the counsel of defeatism and the politics of despair.
 Pursued, it will lead to irrelevancy and death for the GOP.  Who will
 follow a party that abandons its principles, platform and most loyal
 followers after a single stinging defeat? ... Nor can conservatives
 become conscientious objectors -- because culture shapes politics,
 culture is the Ho Chi Minh trail to power.  Surrender this province and
 we lose America.

Quite a call to arms!  I looked past the end of the article to read:

	Mr. [Patrick J.] Buchanan...is completing a new book, ``America
 First: The War for the Soul of the GOP,'' and is returning to
 journalism.

It seems that certain wings of the GOP have no intention of compromising
their individual causes or lowering their profiles any time soon.  But
there was one thing in particular I never liked about Buchanan and the
wings he speaks for:

	Even our new president knows the tug of traditional values.
 ...and today he is wary of his own pledge to open up West Point and the
 Marine barracks to gay liberation.
	...Gay rights activists seek to substitute, for laws rooted in
 Judeo-Christian morality, laws rooted in the secular humanist belief
 that all consensual sexual acts are morally equal.  That belief is
 anti-biblical and immoral; to write it into law is to codify a lie.
	...Some [ideas and lifestyles] are wrong and some are right.  We
 cannot permit the acolytes of gay rights to impose their values on our
 children.  We have to resist, as we have to fight on for the life of the
 unborn, even if defeats lie ahead.  For it is in struggle that we define
 ourselves...

Ah, yes, the famous social conservatism replete with appeals to
``courage'' and ``struggle'' in defending that hallowed biblical
Judeo-Christian heritage.  Unfortunately, I am a secular humanist
atheist classical liberal, and would not appreciate having the
``culture'' of the religious right (eccentrically obsessed, as of late,
with homosexuality) shaping politics and being codified into law.  Nor
does Buchanan escape *the* contradiction of modern intellectual
conservatism, which often likes to masquerades as libertarianism:

 All citizens are equal in their constitutional rights, but not all
 ideas, or lifestyles, are equal.

until the Morality Meter starts blinking:

 [The secular humanist belief that all consensual sexual acts are
 morally equal] is anti-biblical and immoral; to write it into law is to
 codify a lie.

So laissez-faire laws regarding sexual acts between consenting adults
are immoral (presumably because they are ``anti-biblical'').  But unless
the constitution somehow implies that citizens' private and
mutually-consensual sexual acts ought to be restricted by the state
according to each sexual act's morality, Mr. Buchanan should stick to
his own words when he says that ``all citizens are equal in their
constitutional rights.''  Here we have intellectual conservatives using
the Bible or some other tome of right-wing morality to replace the
Constitution in arbitrating over the constitutionality of laws.  So much
for the separation of church and state, something many conservatives pay
only lip service to.


I'm afraid that I don't see the religious right calming down any time
soon.  Unfortunately, and indeed as Pat Buchanan states, they form many
of the stalwarts and unsung heroes of the Republican Party.  They have
much clout in the GOP especially at the local level where, in my
opinion, the Republicans ought to be focusing much more upon.  It seems
that the Republicans, already the minority at every level of government
except the moderate-conservative coalition in the Supreme Court (and
that can change soon), have developed tunnel vision with regards to the
presidency.  You get into hot water situations such as in 1992 -- heads
you stalemate, tails you lose -- where if Republicans were to have held
onto the White House, Bush would have to again work with the fractious
Democratic Congress, but when the Democrats capture the presidency,
Republicans take a trek ``in the wilderness'' for four years at least.

So when I hear the cries of ``[insert last name of favorite Republican
presidential hopeful] in '96,'' I hear the obsessive focus on the
presidency and the desperation of a party which failed to capitalize on
twelve years in the White House when it came to changing the political
landscape and more importantly the culture of America.  I hear a party
which, for all its ideology about decentralizing government, has grown
comfortable in Washington, and its intellectuals and other
pundits-wanna-be's infatuated with the trappings of federal power.
Instead of trying to instill ideas into the culture at large, and trying
to instill those ideas into the local level, where the religious right
is strong and where, in my opinion, Republicans need to think long and
hard about how they are going to win, and instead of tidying up their
own corner of the world, intellectual conservatives (and libertarians,
it should be added) gravitated towards where the prestige was for twelve
years, sat on their bottoms perusing policy papers, attending think
tanks, having lunch with the big boys, written wise and witty columns,
putting out obscure journals, commenting on the media and the culture at
large, and in general wasting their talents on resume-padding and other
intellectual foolery.  Meanwhile, the real wheels of power turn slowly
and inexorably, as the culture drags its feet down the path where the
liberals have been tugging like mad for a generation and a half.
Eventually, conservatives awake to find themselves treated like objects
in a museum: people to gawk at, but hardly to be taken seriously.

Patrick Buchanan is correct -- it is the culture that matters in the
end.  Did conservatives triumph over communism abroad only to lose the
inner cities, the culture, and an entire generation of citizens to their
arch-enemies, the liberals?  When the media is liberal and the
educational school systems are liberal, conservatives must realize that
if by being conservative means being against change, then the
conservatives may as well forfeit now.  If being conservative means
nothing more than shaking one's head upon seeing the fantastic new
breeds of liberalism: homosexuals, divorced families, abortions, public
promiscuity, AIDS, out-of-control government spending and regulation, an
entire generation of poorly educated American citizens, political
correctness, the wholesale death of values, then this type of
conservatism is a dead ideology.  To use an analogy, many parents,
bereft of the moral conviction of their values, and caught by the
increasing complexity of today's economy and just making ends meet, no
longer have it within themselves to impart a real, living set of values
to their children.  William Safire once coined the phrase of the
Democrats as those ``nattering nabobs of negativism.''  But if
conservatism has become nothing more than a reaction to liberalism (just
like anti-PC'ism is often nothing more than a reaction to political
correctness), then who are the true nattering nabobs of negativism, but
those nagging conservatives who talk of nothing these days if it's not
about The Moral Decay of America?  But just like the parents who no
longer hold sway over their TV-watching, Nintendo-playing (or worse,
gun-toting, crack-inhaling) children, the conservatives no longer hold
sway in the culture of sex, violence, rock and roll, lies, videotape, ad
nauseum.

So if many conservatives care about the future at all, they should think
long and hard about how to ``take back America.''  Of course, in my
humble non-registered-Republican opinion, the way for the GOP to do that
is to dump the intolerant social agenda of the GOP's 1992 platform and
to focus on affirmative action, corruption, and crime, social issues
which have been winners for the Republicans.  More importantly, focus on
economic issues instead of making these incendiary statements about the
cultural and religious wars in America.  Reagan wasn't elected and then
re-elected because Americans fell for his social conservatism.  Rather,
he was elected and then re-elected, on an economic mandate.  On issues
of fiscal responsibility, social conservatives can win America away from
the fiendish ``loose-morals'' ``tax-and-spend'' liberals.  So with a
wink, I say to conservatives -- focus on economic issues, and then argue
over and then promote your social agenda, whatever it may be, when you
are in power.  After all, it can be argued that that's exactly what the
Democrats did in '92.

But of course, millions of Republicans would disagree with me, because
they truly believe they can win on a platform primarily concerned with
conservative culture, conservative values, and a conservative social
agenda.  And few can speak on this eloquently than champion of genuine
conservatism, Patrick Buchanan, admittedly (and it is a shame) a man who
can really speak and write.  But unfortunately, I do not believe most
Americans will welcome these conservatives.  It is not the Grand Old
Party of Judeo-Christian Tradition that Americans want.  It's the
security of free-market economic opportunity and of individual freedom
and liberty, those things which immigrants unto this day still consider
as the defining elements of the American dream.  If these certain
particular conservatives cannot realize their time is past (the hour
hand of a clock hardly moves upon observation, but it moves irreversibly
nonetheless), then that odd free-market of sorts, the republic and its
institution of voting, will teach these conservatives a rude lesson
about supply and demand.
Newsgroups: alt.rush-limbaugh,alt.politics.homosexuality,talk.religion.misc