Party like it's 1854 - Granite Grok

Party like it’s 1854

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There’s a lot of discussion just now about Eddie Edwards’s decision to pull out of the first Republican Congressional District 1 (CD1) debate rather than sign a pledge to support the eventual primary winner.

Is he showing ‘character’, and ‘standing up for his principles’, by refusing to sign the pledge?  That’s one way of looking at it.  Another is that he’s indicating a basic misunderstanding of what a political party is for, and what it means to belong to one.  He’s not alone. 

The Republican party was formed in 1854, with a very clear goal, and a very clear statement of principles.  The goal was to stop the spread of slavery.  And the principles?

[1856] Resolved: That the maintenance of the principles promulgated in the Declaration of Independence, and embodied in the Federal Constitution are essential to the preservation of our Republican institutions, and that the Federal Constitution, the rights of the States, and the union of the States, must and shall be preserved.

Compare this with what I take to be the central statement of principles in the most recent party platform:

[2016] We believe our constitutional system — limited government, separation of powers, federalism, and the rights of the people — must be preserved uncompromised for future generations.

A lot else has changed in 160 years, but this much has been constant:  The Republican party has always been not so much a conservative party as a preservative party.  At least on paper.

The platform also listed a few other goals:  the admission of Kansas as a state, the construction of a transcontinental railway, and the improvement of ‘rivers and harbors of a national character’.  And it ended with this:

Resolved, That we invite the affiliation and cooperation of the men of all parties, however differing from us in other respects, in support of the principles herein declared; and believing that the spirit of our institutions as well as the Constitution of our country, guarantees liberty of conscience and equality of rights among citizens, we oppose all legislation impairing their security.

I mention this because for a while now, there has been a lot of talk about how to make the Republican party into a ‘bigger tent’, to make it more inclusive, so that people who aren’t so conservative in their views might feel comfortable joining and supporting it.

But the 1856 platform is a big tent because it is a small platform. If you oppose the spread of slavery, and support the preservation of the principles in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, come join us!

There are a couple of ways to create a big tent.  The first is to dilute your standards, so that just about anyone, who believes in just about anything, can find a place under it.  That’s basically what both major parties have been doing for as long as I’ve been alive.  And it’s led to the current situation, in which party labels have very little, if any, predictive power.

That is, if I tell you that I’m a Republican, it tells you almost nothing about me, except that I think my chances of getting elected are better with an ‘R’ next to my name on the ballot.

I could be pro-gun or anti-gun.  I could be pro-choice or pro-life.  I could be in favor of creating new taxes, or reducing existing ones.  I could be for or against school choice.  I could prefer more federal influence within the state, or less.  And so on.  You just don’t know.  And so when it happens that we have a government in which Republicans control both houses of the legislature and the governor’s office, and they vote for expanding Medicaid while voting against expanding school choice, people are justifiably confused.  And angry.

The second way to create a big tent is to distill your standards so that anyone can find a place under the tent if he supports all of a handful of well-defined core agenda items.  This is the approach the Republicans took in 1854.  And it’s the approach that they should be taking in 2018.

To put this in other terms, think about what makes McDonald’s successful.  It’s not quality, or variety, or even price.  It’s predictability.  You can walk into any McDonald’s, whether it’s in Kansas City, or Kokomo, or Kalamazoo, or Kyoto, or Kuala Lumpur, and you know exactly what you’re getting.

But suppose I open up a restaurant and say that it’s a McDonald’s, but serve only vegetarian food.  It might be a very good restaurant, but it would be misleading.  And McDonald’s would be within its rights to make me either change the name or find some way to differentiate my restaurant from its franchises.

It’s similarly misleading if a candidate says that he’s a Republican, but supports expanding the size or power of government, or undermining the separation of powers, or undermining federalism, or abridging the rights of the people.  He might be a fine person, and have some great ideas, but he’s not committed to preserving the republic so that it can be passed on uncompromised to future generations.  And the Republican party should insist that such a person align himself with a different party, or run as an independent.

But I don’t think the people running the party even realize that they can do this.  They seem to think that it’s anyone’s right to join what is, after all, a private club.

The party could, for example, make a list of all the self-declared Republicans who voted for Medicaid expansion (or signed it into law), and tell them:  You’re on probation.  Do something like that again, and you can go out and collect signatures when you run for re-election, just like any other independent.

Corporations, labor unions, and political parties are all good ideas, ways for people to focus and amplify their efforts through cooperation, in order to accomplish as a group what they could not accomplish as individuals. Unfortunately, they have all been corrupted through entanglement with government.

(I’ll bet the majority of Americans would fully expect to find ‘the two party system’ mentioned in the Constitution — somewhere after ‘our democracy’, but before ‘separation of church and state’.)

But to bring this all back to the subject of debates, staging debates in an attempt to find someone with the widest appeal, so everyone can line up behind him, creates two huge problems.

The first is that it practically guarantees pandering, weaseling, double-talking, and all the other things we have come to expect from our candidates, and our campaigns.

The second is that it makes the candidate into the standard, which is backwards.  The candidate is supposed to be the standard-bearer.

If the Republicans want to act like a political party, then what they should be doing is (1) distilling to its essence what virtually everyone in the party wants to accomplish, and (2) looking for the person who is most likely to stay faithful to those aims.

What the party is doing now is business as usual, talking one game, while playing quite a different one.   There are a couple of other things it might do instead, either of which would be preferable to the current approach.

One would be to keep the rhetoric, and live up to it.  That’s the approach I’ve advised elsewhere.

Another would be to drop the rhetoric, and write a new platform that better expresses what the party, as a party, is actually trying to do — which, as far as I can tell, amounts to winning elections, and little else.

But in any case, saying I’m a Republican has got to mean something more than I don’t have to collect signatures to get on the ballot, which is pretty much all it seems to mean now.

The Republican party could do a lot worse than to become the McDonald’s of political parties.

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