Whether or not the Frums of the punditosphere are correct, it might be dangerous for the Republican Party to elevate the stakes for this election to a death match between competing ideologies. If Barack Obama's victory is as decisive as it is shaping up to be, the Democrats can justifiably claim that conservatism itself has been rejected as a political and governing philosophy. In the closing weeks of the campaign, as the Republican ticket continues to run against the very idea of progressive politics, they are sowing the seeds of the post-election realignment narrative.
"Socialist" ... "redistributive" ... These are 20th century words with 20th century connotations; indeed, the point of Obama's relfection was that the most progressive -- most liberal -- court of the era could not bring itself to violate a core American principle and could not extend the sphere of justice to the economy. Obama wasn't simply making a technical point about jurisprudence and history; he was expressing a liberal positivist's lament about the court's reluctance in one specific case -- San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez -- which dealt with education funding.
And here's the redistributionist part:
"One of the, I think, the tragedies of the civil rights movement, was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change, and in some ways we still stuffer from that."
"..so court focused..." is the tragedy, not the court's refusal to redistribute wealth.
Conservatives find it absurd that Americans are about to elect the most liberal president of the modern era and aren't terribly upset by it; but in capitalizing on this particular argument of Obama's, the Republicans are rearguing whether some form of economic redistributions from white people to black people was necessary -- even though Obama never really made the point.
Obama has been talking about the larger GOP governing philosophy for a while now, but until recently, the race hasn't seemed like as much of a referendum on Republicanism; it's been more of a referendum on the Bush years.
What changed?
The GOP went all in on an ideological war.
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This is actually a very salient and perceptive point Marc's bringing up. The failure of the modern Republican party is essentially a failure of Bush, Rove, and the Congressional leadership like Tom Delay which pretty much drove their party (and by extension, our country) into the ground. But what they're trying to do no to Obama is re-litigate the left/right ideological battle -- a battle that Obama had planned to originally avoid -- at a time when Obama is seen as the centrist and the Right as extremists. This is dangerous ground that they're treading on. The headwinds are simply too strong right now. Although personally, I'd love to see them push this until trickledown as a economic philosophy is completely discredited.
Posted by dannity | October 27, 2008 4:48 PM