Since the election of Barack Obama to be the 44th U.S. President, there has been much gnashing of teeth within Republican circles concerning how to rebuild a national party. Some say a return to hardline Conservatism is the solution. Others insist that, in order to win elections, the GOP should jetttison divisive social issues and focus instead on the meat and potatoes of Reaganism through the promotion of reduced taxes, a strong military, and respect for American traditions.
Instead, I argue that instead of looking backward, the GOP should go ballistic. It should make good on California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s promise to “blow up the box!” and go big or stay home.
To have a fighting chance to actually mean something to the American electorate in the coming years, Republicans should rebuild themselves as a true National party that applies Conservative principles to the most critical problem facing the nation today: i.e., problem of national governance. The GOP, more so than a hidebound Democratic party has the opportunity to remake itself as a true party of National Reform that can break with the dilemmas of the past to offer true, just-in-time leadership for our nation in the 21st Century.
The election of Obama as a harbinger of Roosevelt’s New Deal 2.0 is no accident. It is an open secret that the American civil religion in the 20th Century has vacillated between the followers of Roosevelt and Reagan. Big government used to respond to economic crisis and wars (Roosevelt); Federal government used to define and uphold new rights (Johnson); followed by reactionary cutting of wasteful Federal expenditures, reaffirmation of governance by the States, and invoking the physiocrat ideal of laissez faire (Reagan).
But bouncing between these two dialectical poles of Classical Liberalism over the past 75 years has ignored the development of a true national polity. Like it or not, our nation is no longer primarily a federally protected collection of state polities. This is a new historical fact. More obvious, the U.S. has, like it or not, become an increasingly interdependent part of a shrinking world, no longer able to set its own course on its own terms.
Republicans must be the first to recognize that the approaches to governance taken by Roosevelt and Johnson and by Reagan and Bush no longer deal with reality. As a nationally integrated political community, the U.S. requires coherent and accountable national governance. And, as an interdependent player in a shrinking world, the U.S. requires a foreign policy very different from that appropriate during World War II and the Cold War.
Internally, there is an immense problem that our anachronistic left-right, liberal-conservative political sloganeering and policy formation overlooks to our detriment. Only the President is nationally elected and accountable to all the people. Meanwhile, each member of the House and Senate owes allegiance to local constituents, not to the national public. And because of this system, local and national interest groups have far greater influence in Congress than do the American people. Moreover, America’s economy is now tied into international markets in ways that leave a weak government in Washington even weaker. So the American people are underserved both domestically and internationally by an out-of-date, ineffective system of government that frustrates the will of the people in favor of special interests and foreign powers.
Consider for a moment the actions of the Federal government in the current domestic and international financial crisis that strives to save a National banking system and National economy with unprecedented government take-over schemes driven by Congressional brokering of competing regional interests, business and national interest groups.
In short, nationwide governance has been forced upon our leadership even though they wish the markets ought to care of themselves. Consequently, the outcome we are witnessing is Bush—and soon Obama’s— hit-and-miss approach of piecemeal pragmatism that changes day by day.
Look at our other hot button issues: health-care, energy, transportation, the environment; not to mention our crumbling infrastructure and Social Security crisis; abortion, failing schools, and “same-sex” marriage. These are precisely the kinds of issues that illustrate the problem of inadequate national governance. Within the framework of the Constitution, all of these issues belong to the governing authority of the 50 states. Marriage law, education and welfare policies, for example, are not original responsibilities of the federal government. Yet, they have all become national issues, and disputes over them frequently go to the US Supreme Court, which should not resolve these kinds of national policy questions. National issues of this kind can no longer be handled simply by saying, “Let the states decide.”
Simply put, given the issues that face our country today, no amount of ideological purity from the Left or the Right can change the fact that our current Federal government is not designed to be a nationally accountable legislative body.
Republicans, therefore, have the unique opportunity to develop a new generation of scholarship, policy, and leadership that can begin to address anew the relationship of state governments to a national government that requires revision and a stronger, more direct accountability of Congress and the presidency to the national citizenry.
In so doing, Republicans should also champion true reform of our antiquated electoral systems that no amount of ID checks, voting machine certifications, resdistricting commissions, term limits, or campaign finance regulation can address. By advocating true electoral reform that implements judicious forms of preference voting, whether in single- or multi-member districts, the GOP can once again be the party of reform that insures a vote for every citizen, and makes the votes of ordinary citizens matter.
By championing these reforms, the core Republican principles of limited government under law as a servant of civil society, will follow more easily and offer more context and meaning in the coming battles for basic civil rights and religious freedoms involving school choice, as well as the rights of workers, minorities, and families of all kinds. By becoming over time a true National Party of reform, Republicans can again aspire to lead this country and win the praise, hopes, and following of a new majority of American citizens.