Migration of the Elephants: “GOP icons lament party’s drift, head for other side”

For much of the 20th century, the Saltonstall, Lodge, and Phillips families took pride in their leadership of the state Republican Party. Now, citing their opposition to the war in Iraq and the state Republican Party’s positions on social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage, representatives of the North Shore families say they have decided to vote for Democrat Deval Patrick on Tuesday.

Last month, former state senator William Saltonstall, 79, officially changed his party affiliation from Republican to Democrat so he could vote for Patrick in the primary.  Saltonstall, whose father, Leverett Saltonstall, was a Republican governor and US senator, said he believes state Republicans have drifted from the fiscal conservatism that helped define the party for most of the last century?. [H]is decision to vote Democratic also was swayed by dissatisfaction with national Republican politics. “I’ve been active in the gay rights movement, because my daughter is gay — she lives in Alaska — and the party has not been favorable to people like her.?

George Lodge, 79, son of former Republican US senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., voted for Mitt Romney in the last governor’s race. This year he donated $250 to Patrick’s campaign and plans to vote Democratic. “I think he sees government as a creator, a positive force, instead of something that is to be diminished and limited the way some Republicans see it,” said Lodge, who lives in Beverly.  Lodge also said he believes the state’s Republican party has changed dramatically since he ran as the Republican candidate for senator against Edward M. Kennedy in 1962.

“Massachusetts Republicans used to be concerned with the problems of the poor, concerned with education, health, and were well known for taking a positive approach to government and what it can do to help the community.”

A lot of good, sincere Republicans around the country are wrestling with feelings like these.  In many cases, they may choose to stick with the Party and try to promote “change from within”, either out of a long-standing sense of loyalty or a continuing distrust of the Democratic Party to present the kind of alternative that they seek.  There’s always the Libertarian Party or simply Independence for many (the latter being an increasing choice for numerous liberals AND conservatives), but the bottom line is that “Republicanism”, whatever it may once have stood for in the minds of a huge segment of the American electorate, has changed dramatically for many of these people, and the consequences for the U.S. political system are only just beginning to be felt.

This has happened before, many times in fact, in our history.  We could go all the way back to the formation of today’s Republican Party itself, evolving from the Whigs of the mid-19th Century under Lincoln’s leadership, to reflect the heavy shift in attitudes concerning Slavery, states’ rights, and other issues.  Or we can look at the shifts of the Wilson era, when Democrats increasingly took up the mantle of working class concerns and progressive reforms in labor, business, voting rights, and other areas, a direction that FDR’s New Deal solidified.  However, even during the mid-20th Century, the moderate Republican represented the most prevalent strain of that Party.  Indeed, it was the Democrats who played host to the more extreme elements, the Southern anti-integrationists, for example, and many of the prohibitionists and other social/religious extremists.

The trends that set in motion today’s more fundamental split between the parties, and especially the far-right drift of the Republican Party, really began in the 1960s, and gained their greatest momentum with Reagan’s election in 1980.  The Johnson-era social programs rubbed many fiscal conservatives the wrong way, while in-fighting between anti-Vietnam War, pro-Civil Rights Democrats and the more hawkish and segregationist wings of the Democratic Party created a rift that the Republicans under Reagan were able to exploit powerfully.  The so-called Dixiecrats, mostly conservative Southern Democrats who flocked to Reagan’s combined message of fiscal conservatism, social Darwinism, and bellicose militarism against the Commies and the Iranian jihadists, gave the Republican Party a coalition that has now endured for more than a generation.

In the process, however, the Republicans may also have set in motion a set of forces that has now led, early in the 21st century, to a backlash from within their own original core ranks.  It was the party of Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower — along with the Lodges and Saltonstalls and Rockefellers — that won the admiration and respect of my parents’ generation, and the loyalty of many moderate, responsible, and thoughtful Americans: most especially, of the so-called “Silent Majority”, the mainly white, middle class, suburban, quietly religious, and patriotic Center of the American body politic.  It was not called the “Grand Old Party” for nothing: there was a sense of tradition, maturity, seriousness that was attached to this segment of the electorate, and while they may have been slow to respond to the challenges arising from shifting economic, social, and cultural conditions, they could generally be counted on to offer consistent, sincere, “conservative” perspectives to the national political debate, and to shy away from extremism, mud-slinging, and demagoguery in most instances.

Today’s Republican Party leadership, and the majority of its high-level elected officials, along with many of the most hard-core grass-roots elements supporting them, have all but abandoned these core constituents.  The Neoconservative movement is something that most middle Americans either don’t understand or don’t trust, as it smacks of the kind of hegemonistic foreign policy that conservatives have warned against for generations.  The 9-11 attacks created a momentary window, in which a vast cross-section of Americans were both outraged and galvanized to “fight back” against Al-Qaeda, quite similar to the patriotic, militaristic attitudes that Reagan was able to accentuate following the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.  But the neocons made an even bigger mistake in Iraq than the Reaganites did in places like Nicaragua, pushing their agenda far beyond the mandate that a majority of even traditional conservatives would accept.  Meanwhile, the intolerant and offensive posturing of the so-called Religious Right is even more of a turn-off to the mainstream.  At the same time, in their thirst to gain and remain in power, the Republicans have largely abandoned their principles of fiscal responsibility, allowing pet projects and deep-pocketed contributors to bloat the federal budget (along with the out-of-control cost of the Iraq enterprise), while continuing to champion a Reagan-era “trickle-down” mentality of tax cuts that mostly benefit the wealthy, which makes less and less sense to their middle class constituents.  Combine these developments with the power-grubbing, corruption, malfeasance, and outright lying of so many Republican officials who have grown all too comfortable with the trappings of power, and it is no surprise at all to see the type of seismic shift that is occurring among so many traditional Republicans (even a few surprising ones).

The most important questions involve not how these trends will play out in Tuesday’s elections, but where they will go from there.  It seems probable that Democrats will regain control of the House, and fall short in the Senate by a vote or two, while Bush will remain President for another two years, and an all-out war for the White House will begin in earnest on November 8th.  Both parties, it seems to me, are going to be faced with very difficult choices,
and competing forces that will make it especially challenging to manufacture longer-term workable majorities.  The Republicans, to reverse the trends of the past few years, will somehow have to figure out a way to jettison Bush and the Neocons and the Fundamentalists, and return to a grass-roots, traditional conservative message.  The Democrats will have to learn how to consolidate and energize those who are giving them a new look, without falling victim to their own internal fractionalization, and at the same time define a new ideological path that embraces their strongest elements of inclusion and empowerment together with economic realism and responsible foreign policy.  From where I sit, the ball is in the Democrats’ court.

(Cross-posted from Truth and Progress)

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