The same silly argument keeps popping up in the wake of Terri Schiavo's killing: Somehow, say hopeful Democrats and a few worried Republicans, this is going to lead to a crack-up of the conservative coalition and bring the Democrats back to power. Here's just one example, from Gil Smart, an editor at the Sunday News of Lancaster, Pa. Smart observes that John Kerry* came close to outpolling President Bush in a tony area of Lancaster:
Observers suggest that School Lane Hills, dominated by country-club Republicanism, is a neighborhood more willing to vote Democrat when the choice is between a moderate Democrat and a social conservative Republican.
I've thought of this often in the months since, as social conservatives have sought to wield their reinvigorated clout, the culmination of which, of course, was the Terri Schiavo standoff.
Schiavo died Thursday, but the moralistic outrage of the cultural right, stoked by nearly two weeks of media saturation, guaranteed that neither she nor this issue would go quietly into the night. . . .
The Schiavo case was wrenchingly complex, with no easy answers. But to the extremists, the answers were easy. They always are.
And it's only going to get worse. Danforth-esqe calls for moderation will fall on deaf ears.
In a very broad sense, of course, Smart is right. There is a danger in adopting extreme positions on social issues. As we've noted, this is why abortion is such a great issue for Republicans: The continued existence of Roe v. Wade ensures that the GOP need not take extreme antiabortion positions, while trapping the Democrats into taking extreme pro-abortion ones.
But there are problems with applying this reasoning to the Schiavo case. For one thing, we're not at all convinced that starving her to death was a "moderate" thing to do. But for the sake of argument, let's assume it was. As in the case of abortion, the courts have assured that the "religious-right extremists" did not prevail. As a gleeful John Zutz puts it in a letter to the editor of the Milwaukee Sentinel (last letter):
After the November elections, a number of my right-wing friends gleefully commented: "It's over, Bush is president, you lost, get over it."
Today, I have to reply: "It's over, Terri Schiavo is dead, you lost, get over it."
What will the campaign slogan be in 2006 or 2008? "Keep Terri dead: Vote Democratic"? Will the Dems seek out other women who depend on feeding tubes and run negative ads against them? "This is Jane Roe. She's in a persistent vegetative state, and doctors say she has no hope of recovery. But the religious right wants to keep her alive at taxpayer expense. Send Congress a message on Nov. 7. Don't let the extremists prevail."
Those who talk of a conservative crack-up have something bigger in mind than just the Schiavo case. Their argument is that the Republican coalition is too diverse to be sustainable, and that the Schiavo case exposes the tensions between Christians and libertarians, between Hamiltonians and states rights advocates, and so forth.
It seems to us, though, that this gets things precisely backward. As David Brooks writes in today's New York Times:
Conservatives have thrived because they are split into feuding factions that squabble incessantly. As these factions have multiplied, more people have come to call themselves conservatives because they've found one faction to agree with.
By contrast, fewer people have come to call themselves liberal in part because liberals are eager to cast out heretics. As Marc Cooper of The Nation writes for The Atlantic:
I've heard liberals, in their post-election malaise, obsess just as much over who they don't want in their ranks, culturally speaking, as over who they'd like to recruit. After some polls suggested that Bush won in November because a large percentage of Americans voted their "moral values," I was involved in discussions with dozens of panicked progressives who openly feared that someone, somewhere in the Democratic Party, might actually try to accommodate these lunatics.
Developing a political majority is a matter of addition, not subtraction, and the GOP's openness to a variety of viewpoints is a strength, not a weakness.
* The haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat, who by the way promised 65 days ago to release his military records.
Jack Nargundkar Responds
We got an e-mail from Jack Nargundkar of Germantown, Md., whose letter to the editor of the New York Times was the subject of an item yesterday. He asked us to relay "what I said in an e-mail yesterday to a Christian conservative," and we're happy to oblige:
My intention was not to offend Christian conservatives--so if I have offended you as a Christian, who is also conservative, I would like to apologize. However, I am concerned that if we continue to blur the separation between church and state at home, it will become more and more difficult to win the hearts and minds of nondemocratic nations abroad.
While I find the "culture of life" argument appealing, conservatives use it only where it is convenient. For example, conservatives have abused the Second Amendment to promote a "culture of death" with their unbridled support for all kinds of weapons, which are rarely purchased by law-abiding citizens but more frequently by criminals and visiting aliens (who probably export them to terrorists abroad).
I do not like to compare and equate religions for better or worse--religion has been the cause of the world's major problems throughout history--so it's best to keep one's faith personal. I can only hope you got my underlying message--the war on terror cannot be won if we start doing what they have been doing--defending political behavior and governance under the garb of a particular religion.
We won't respond to all his points, but we'd like to say that we for one were not offended by the Times letter; indeed, we appreciated the opportunity to call attention to sloppy thinking. And we're going to take this opportunity to do so again.
The problem here is that very few people really believe that "defending political behavior and governance under the garb of a particular religion" is wrong--or, we should say, almost everyone who claims to espouse this principle applies it selectively. If you applied it consistently, you'd have to say not only that the "Christian right" is of a piece with Osama bin Laden, but that so was Martin Luther King, who made no effort to separate his belief in racial equality from its roots in Christianity. For that matter, just about everyone has found at least something to praise in the politics of Pope John Paul II, even though they were indistinguishable from his Catholicism.
This doesn't mean that those who urged on religious grounds that Mrs. Schiavo not be killed were the equivalent of Dr. King or the pope (though the latter was among their number). Nor does it mean they were right. But equating them to fundamentalist terrorists is a cheap shot, and an intellectually indefensible one. |
