Off Center?
The American Scene
By Ross Douthat
David Ignatius's column today is an example of inside-the-Beltway thinking at its most thoughtless and banal. It belongs to a world in which the "center" is always good, the "hard right" is always bad, and every political difficulty can be explained by a politician or a party's unwillingness to moderate "ideological purity" and be a "uniter, not a divider." Here's the Ignatian explanation for the current GOP difficulties:
washingtonpost.com
The hard right, which is the soul of the modern GOP, would rather be ideologically pure than successful. Governing requires making compromises and getting your hands dirty, but the conservative purists disdain those qualities. They swim for that beach with a fiercely misguided determination, and they demand that the other whales accompany them.
And then this:
Principles are a fine thing, but a narrow, partisan definition of principle has led the Republicans to a dead end. Their inability to transcend their base and speak to the country as a whole is now painfully obvious. Like the Democrats in their years of decline, they are screaming at each other -- not realizing how far they have drifted from the mid-channel markers that have always led to open waters and defined success in American politics.
Where to begin? I suppose with the fact that the current political situation is infinitely more complicated than this. Sure, some of the GOP's problems are arguably the result of steering away from the political center - the failure of Social Security reform, for instance, and to a lesser extent the Congressional intervention in the Schiavo case (though I'm pretty sure the latter has almost no bearing on the party's current crisis). But others are a function of abandoning conservative principles - see, for instance, the current outcry over pork and spending excess (and, arguably, the more democracy-obsessed aspects of the Bush foreign policy). Others still are just a matter of old-fashioned shadiness, unrelated to any ideology, hard right or otherwise. Did Tom DeLay's scandals really result, as Ignatius suggests, from an unwillingness to get his "hands dirty"? I mean, come on.
And then there are judges. Ignatius thinks that the Miers nomination and ensuing outcry exposes the gulf between the anti-abortion GOP and the pro-choice center, and therefore "epitomizes the right's refusal to assume the role of a majoritarian governing party." It would assume this role, he implies, by giving up on the whole Roe v. Wade business and appointing Sandra Day O'Connor clones to the high court. Leaving aside the question of what the American people actually think about abortion (as far as I can tell, most people support Roe because they think that it's far more restrictive than it actually is), does the back-to-back experience of Roberts and Miers really suggest that the GOP's current problem is its unwillingness to appoint centrists to the Court? Sure, Roberts bobbed and weaved on abortion, and I'd be surprised but not shocked if he ended up respecting the Roe precedent - but everything else in his record suggested that he's as true-blue a conservative jurist as you're likely to find, and he sailed through his confirmation hearings and was an obvious political plus to the President. Why? Because even if Americans don't agree with the GOP about abortion, they agree with them about the broader principle of what judges should be - umpires, not ballplayers, to quote the new Chief Justice - which is why a fight about the courts is usually a winner for Republicans, unless they nominate someone easily caricatured like Bork.
And this, in turn, explains why the "hard right" is so mad at Bush for nominating a nonentity like Miers - not because he's sacrificing ideological purity for the sake of centrism and an easy confirmation, but because it seems as though he's sacrificing both political principle and political advantage for the sake of cronyism.
All of which suggests that the world is a little more complicated than David Ignatius would have you believe. |
