A Political Home For Conservatives

Note -- This is reprinted from my personal blog.

Conservatives need a political home.

What's that, you say? You thought the GOP was their home? Guess again.

First, we need a working definition of conservative. Not an easy thing to do. The mainstream media portrays anyone to the immediate right of their membership as conservative. That ends up putting all sorts of strange bedfellows together. It also successfully marginalizes most of the people who would self-define as conservative and most of the rank and file of any of the more objective classifications of conservatives. Additionally, there is this absolutely bizarre dichotomy of social and fiscal conservatives. I'll save the destruction of that particular mythology for another blog entry.

For the sake of this discussion, let's classify conservatives as those who fundamentally believe in the constitutional limits placed on government by the founders. Admittedly, that can get a little fuzzy in places, but there are obvious boundaries as well. The founders would recoil in horror at what their great experiment has become, but I digress. In general, we should also include as conservative, those people who believe, as the founders did, that limited government can successfully contain the excesses of human immorality without imposing tyranny. This would include federal laws banning abortion and euthanasia and no federal sanction of homosexual relationships. Lots of shades of gray, but it works for this discussion.

As I said in the opening, these folks have no political home. Some of them think they do because of certain small gains within the Republican Party over the last twenty-five years, but the fact of the matter is that their presence in that party home causes the same uneasiness as a cigar-smoking uncle in a home full of health nuts. In fact, over its nearly 150 year history, the number of occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue who fit the above descriptions has been exactly, let's see, one. That's right. Of course we can all guess that person was Ronald Reagan.

Of the 18 men who have held the office of President of the United States simultaneously with Republican Party affiliation, only one in the twentieth century consistently executed his duties within the general constraints of the United States Constitutiuon and furthered policy strictly in keeping with those constraints. Interestingly enough, that is exactly the same number of conservatives who have been President while holding Democratic Party affiliation. Within the same broad brushstrokes, Harry Truman fits the above categorization of conservative.

Right, you say, but Truman got us into the very unconstitutional "police action" in Korea. True, but Reagan had his constitutional faux pas as well. Grenada comes to mind as well as his willingness to suffer monstrous budget shortfalls. No one is perfect. In any case, the point should be clear: while the Democrats have run headlong to the left in the last century, the Republicans haven't been far behind them. Neither of these represents a comfortable political home for conservatives.

Ironically, there is a great deal of similarity in how both parties treat their minorities. Blacks and conservatives are both taken for granted by their respective majority choices in political affiliation. Both major parties undertake this attitude at their own peril. Should Blacks or conservatives decide to vacate their respective plantations, the manor house would enter decrepitude in short order. Blacks are courted heavily by the Democrats who, in return for the block vote of this group, toss them a few bones here and there to keep them interested. Unfortunately, the bones end up being detrimental to Blacks' own self-interest in that they create a dependency on the Nanny state to keep themselves alive. The same could be said for the relationship between conservatives and the GOP. Noises are made here and there about certain conservative social issues and the GOP uses tax cuts to keep conservatives hanging around like the Democrats use Affirmative Action and socialized medicine. Conservatives fall into a dependency relationship with the GOP for the few crumbs of progress on the issues they deem important. Meanwhile, the headlong pursuit of socialism in America rolls on largely unhindered.

So where can conservatives go? Stay tuned. It isn't pretty.