The Christian Science Monitor is reporting this morning that Sarah Palin will headline the first-ever Tea Party Convention. The report includes an interesting discussion about the future direction of the tea party movement, a la Howard Kurtz:
“[W]ith two wars, a continuing terror threat, huge federal deficits, and a major healthcare overhaul in the works, there is no shortage of disaffection out there … and that could prove to be political dynamite,” writes the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz. Against that backdrop, writes Mr. Kurtz, “The tea types can either blossom into a Perotista-style third-party movement or be subsumed to some degree by the GOP.’”
What really caught my attention, though, was a comment by Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University:
But courting what many call a fringe and inchoate movement carries huge risks . . .
He says a Republican shift toward the Reaganesque Tea Party ideal could lead to a sort of pogrom for moderate Republicans, forcing out those (think Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe) who don’t hew precisely to rock-hard conservative principles around economic freedom and limited government interference.
“The Republican Party is trapped by their base, which is going increasingly conservative,” says Mr. Abramowitz.
I wondered: Does Professor Abramowitz have empirical evidence demonstrating that the Republican Party is “going increasingly conservative”? So, I checked out his CV. I didn’t have time to delve into his recent journal articles, but it does appear that Professor Abramowitz has been conducting research on the increased polarization of the American electorate, partisanship, and demographic shifts that have contributed to an increase in the size of the Democratic Party voting base versus the Republican base. Nowhere did I see that the professor made an effort to independently define what conservatism means and then measure how Republican voters have moved toward or away from that definition.
If we accept that polarization is happening, it does not necessarily mean that one side is “going more conservative” while the other side is “going more progressive.” If the electorate shifted en masse to the left, for example, yet became more polarized at the same time, the conservatives could be both less conservative AND more estranged from their ideological opponents than they were before.
Many commentators have been saying lately that Republicans and tea party participants are “going more conservative,” without having much empirical support for that supposition (at least that I have seen). It’s one thing for a poltical hack to make unuspported, politically-motivated statements, but we expect better from our university-trained social science faculty.
Let’s briefly ponder the hypothesis that Republicans (and tea partiers) are “going more conservative.” Does that hypothesis even seem promising? On the surface, it would appear that Republican voters are feeling more economically conservative of late in response to TARP, stimulus, the health care “reform” fiasco, the threat of cap and trade, etc. However, non-progressives tend to accept and internalize the discourse of the progressive vanguard and their allies in the mainstream media and academia. Conservatism cannot be defined mostly in relation (or reaction) to whatever form the Democratic/progressive agenda is taking at that moment. If the Democratic/progressive regime has become hyper-ambitious and dominates all the levers of federal power, increased opposition to that agenda is by no means evidence that the oppositional voices are “going more conservative.” To accept that assumption is to give the progressive agenda more power to shape the dominant discourses.
The other problem with the above mentality is that it presents Republicans and tea partiers as reactionaries, which is what the Democrats/progressives want. Yet, in the last several decades, Republican voters, and American society in general, have become increasingly more accepting of “progressive” cultural trends. It’s possible that some attitudes have slightly reversed in the last few years in response to aggressive efforts to institutionalize gay marriage, etc., but that is not necessarily the case.
The above issues are not just about semantics. The long, successful effort to brand opponents of the progressive agenda as reactionary poses significant, long-term dangers to the American republic. It is human nature to expect (or hope) that powerful changes in society represent a positive wave of the future – modernization, progress, material improvement, greater efficiencies, more choices. Unfortunately, that is not always the case. In the first half of the 20th century, many of the brightest minds in Europe and America believed that the wave of change sweeping through the Russian empire, and later the USSR, was a positive force for progress. In reality, these forces presaged a regressive wave of mass poverty, servitude, and brutality.
I would never falsely equate hard-line, totalitarian Soviet Bolshevism with the veiled cultural Marxism of late 20th, early 21st century radical American progressivism. Americans must be aware, however, that not all demands for progress, in theory, necessarily lead to more progress in the real world. You can be a vehement proponent of tolerance, freedom, and a “live and let live” culture and yet fight against ideological currents that seek to undermine the very foundations of America’s traditional civil society. When the coercive power of the state begins to elevate the priorities of multiculti group-based identity politics over “liberty, families, opportunity, free markets, and decency,” the nation’s long-term prosperity is in jeopardy. Moreover, America’s experiment in free governance will become increasingly vulnerable to domestic and international threats.
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