Celebrating GOP Diversity
Mark Steyn points out that when you come right down to it, in the GOP people have a wide variety of choices while in the Democratic party the debate ranges from “Bush is stupid” all the way over to “Bush is evil”:
as National Review’s Jonah Goldberg pointed out, the mainstream media are always demanding the GOP demonstrate its commitment to “big tent” Republicanism, and here we are with the biggest of big tents in history, and what credit do they get? You want an anti-war Republican? A pro-abortion Republican? An anti-gun Republican? A pro-illegal immigration Republican? You got ‘em! Short of drafting Fidel Castro and Mullah Omar, it’s hard to see how the tent could get much bigger. As the new GOP bumper sticker says, “Celebrate Diversity.”
Over on the Democratic side, meanwhile, they’ve got a woman, a black, a Hispanic, a preening metrosexual with an angled nape – and they all think exactly the same. They remind me of “The Johnny Mathis Christmas Album,” which Columbia used to re-release every year in a different sleeve: same old songs, new cover. When your ideas are identical, there’s not a lot to argue about except biography. Last week, asked about his experience in foreign relations, Barack Obama noted that his father was Kenyan, and he’d been at grade school in Indonesia. “Probably the strongest experience I have in foreign relations,” he said, “is the fact I spent four years overseas when I was a child in Southeast Asia.” When it comes to foreign relations, he has more of them on his Christmas card list than Hillary or Haircut Boy.
Sen. Clinton was gleefully derisive of this argument. “Voters will have to judge if living in a foreign country at the age of 10 prepares one to face the big, complex international challenges the next president will face”…
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When I mentioned on the radio how much I was enjoying the Hillary/Barack snippiness, I received a lot of huffy e-mails from Democrats saying, “Oh yeah, well, how much foreign policy experience do Romney or Giuliani have?” Sorry, but you’re missing the point. On the GOP side, the debate isn’t being conducted on the basis of who was where in fourth grade.
Steyn also goes on to note that no matter how infuriating various McCain or Giuliani opinions might be for some, they are at least willing to stick to their opinions, even in the face of a party base which overwhelmingly believes otherwise (immigraiton for McCain, abortion/gay marriage for Giuliani, eg). The oddity of American political life is that the standard line is “if only we had politicians who were honest and willing to stick to what they say”…in the GOP, from George Bush on down, we’ve got precisely that. You don’t have to agree with them, but any honest appraisal would have to be one of honest men who stand foursquare for their beliefs.
Because the GOP is a party filled with honest men and women willing to stand tall for core beliefs, the GOP is a party of immense diversity. This is different from the Democratic party - which is a party of faction. Diversity, in politics, is where you have people with a common goal but different ideas on how to get there…faction is people who don’t give a two penny damn about whether there even is a goal, but are bound and determined that their faction get what it demands.
Giuliani tells me we’ll get to a reduction of abortion without necessarily putting legal restrictions on it. McCain tells me that a central plank in cleaning up politics is his CFR. Romney says a main part of dealing with Iran’s nuclear program is attempting to isolate Iran in the international community. Thompson has as part of his effort to secure the borders a demand that we make English the official language of the United States. I want a reduction in abortions; I want corruption cleaned up; I want Iran’s nuclear program ended; I want our borders secured - Giuliani, McCain, Romney, Thompson and I all have common goals - but for each of these proposed tactics I find things to take exception to. None of these four proposals puts the candidate making it out of the realm of possibility for me - as a GOPer, I won’t demand that it be all or nothing for me.
Over on the Democrat side, the special interest factions rule the roost. You must be opposed to the campaign in Iraq - you can be outright opposed like Edwards, or opposed with some reservations, like Hillary; but opposed you must be. You must be in favor of abortion on demand - you can make all the rhetorical statements about making it “safe, legal and rare” you like, but when push comes to shove each and every action and appointee which has anything to do with abortion better be a something or someone committed to abortion on demand. You must be opposed to SDI - call for a strong national defense until the cows come home, but at the end of the day you’d better have nothing but contempt for the very concept of shooting down incoming ballistic missiles. You must be a complete advocate of the most definitive anthropogenic global warming theory - you can dance around the edges on what you would do about it, but you’d better not breath even the slightest doubt on any aspect of global warming theory.
On and on it goes - and the people who are most interested in opposing Iraq don’t particularly care about what you would do on abortion. The people who are most concerned with keeping abortion on demand don’t particularly care about your SDI position…on and on, each faction only concerned with itself and demanding rote recitation of their core beliefs, or you’ll be cast into political outer darkness…as Joe Lieberman found out; even a lifetime of supporting liberalism didn’t protect him from those liberals who decided that ending Iraq was the paramount issue of our times.
So, if you want diversity and a real debate about how to attain shared goals, the GOP is the only place to be. Sure, the party has its screw ups and, given that it is stafffed with people, it does do the boneheaded thing from time to time - but, at bottom, there is a spirit of open inquiry and a willingness to tolerate dissent in the GOP which is sadly lacking in the Democratic party. As we move into 2008, I believe the ideological rigidity of the Democrats will end up being their undoing - that they will, in the end, decide to lose the election rather than risk offending even the least of the factions which make up the Democratic party.
50 comments November 25th, 2007
