The Political Spectrum

Since the Miers nomination I’ve taken to perusing even more “conservative” blogs than I previously did. Mostly out of curiosity and an honest interest to see if my long predicted schism between so-called social conservatives and economic conservatives has finally come about. (As I often feel compelled to do, I note the general disclaimer that goes along with my use of these terms. I’m trying to use them in their popular sense. I don’t like generalizations and labels and try my best to avoid them and the silly arguments in the comments that they produce, so if you have a problem with the terminology, don’t talk to me as I didn’t invent it.)

My travels today took me to National Reivew Online’s the Corner, where I found this except from a Jonah Goldberg post:

I actually think this is a profoundly significant signal in the ongoing -- and
at times somewhat lamentable -- transformation of the GOP into a populist party.
For example, I've written many times about how liberals don't understand that
Fox News' popularity has had less to do with conservatism and more to do with
populism than they are prepared to see. Liberals think they're the party of the
people, so they tend not to understand populism when it comes from non-liberal
quarters. But it is Fox's anti-elitism which pulls in the ratings more than its
conservatism. This has been hard to see in the past because Fox's anti-elitism
has generally been aimed at liberal institutions -- the New York Times, the
ACLU, Harvard, etc. But anti-elitism and conservatism are not and never have
been the same thing. And I do think this will be more obvious in the months and
years to come. I think this new "elites" versus "heartlanders" trend is only
going to grow within the ranks of the GOP. I can't say it's all bad or all good.
But it is a major sociological change if the arguments within conservatism are
now going to be about "loyalty" to our people (trans: our Party) instead of
loyalty to our ideas.

All I can say is right you are Mr. Goldberg. The simple fact is that neither major party is populist, at least not in the technical meaning of the term. True, political liberals (as opposed to philosophical liberals, though I consider myself both) have more recently been aligned with populist leanings; however, we’ve never really adopted this into the mainstream of liberalism. More importantly, conservatives are generally the last people that you think of when you think of populists. In fact, one might with some degree of success argue that conservatism (both political and philosophical) is antithetical to populism, which is why much of the arguments from some branches of the so-called conservative base have so shocked me.

Political philosophies are all about ideas, thus, I suppose they can be considered elitist. How those ideas get translated into specific practical policies and play out in the game of politics, however, is a different animal. Both major political parties have their elites and those elites spar against one and other in academia and think tanks and through less popular publications like the National Review and its liberal counterpart the New Republic. Similarly, both parties have their “rank and file,” who by and large make up much of the bloc that decides elections. Needless to say both of these groups need one and other to form a cohesive successful powerful political apparatus that is capable of governing a nation. In my opinion, one of the major reasons that the Democrats have been in such disarray is that we’ve lost connection with our elites. In other words, we’ve been loosing the war of ideas. Democrats have been beaten by Republicans over things like economic policy, tax policy, and international relations policy pretty consistently over the last 10 or so years. While Democrats have made some strides in areas like health care policy and more or less have retained some hold on judicial philosophy (though that has been weakening as well recently) we’ve been trying to win elections with old ideas and haven’t appealed to our elites to develop new policies to effectively combat the Republicans on all fronts. Sure we might win one or two battles, but we keep loosing the war. Could this be happening to the Republicans and the conservative elite that has been the driving force behind their electoral success? Goldberg seems to think so, and I have to say I agree.

Populism isn’t intrinsically evil or bad (though Paul might disagree) it is, however, seductive. To think that leaders are to be just like the average person is a comforting thought. To believe that your elected leaders share your values; think like you do; or would be good people to sit down and have a beer with on a Sunday afternoon might be great come election time, but are these the things to build a sustainable governing majority around? I don’t think so, and neither do the elites in both parties. Populism ebbs and flows much like the business cycle in economics, so it may just be that its time is here again and the GOP is the victim this time around. I’m not sure that it can’t be defeated or at least squelched, but at some level it appears that the White House has embraced it or at least a part of it, and that should be cause for concern. Democrats should recognize this trend in the GOP and try to capitalize on it with new and innovative ideas; that is how we will have success in 2006 and hopefully 2008.