The future of the Republican party

I mentioned previously that Rush has said a Huckabee nomination would destroy the Republican party. I think that is both dead-on correct and dead-on incorrect.

Let me explain...

If, God forbid **drips of irony fall from his forehead**, Huckabee were to win the Republican nomination it would destroy the party. Huckabee's candidacy is a stark departure from what built the party, namely low taxes, small government, personal freedom and responsibility, strong military, resolute foreign policy, and all that didactic social policy crap. Say what you will about various Republican office-holders' tendency to stray from these principles. But Huckabee doesn't so much stray from them as disavow them. If he were to win it would be on the votes of Christian do-gooders who embrace big government in the name of Jesus.

This would destroy the party because it would separate the fiscal and foreign policy conservatives from the social conservatives. If Huck wins the primary it would necessarily mean that a majority of the party have chosen his side. The result would be a new Republican party unmoored from its foundation.

This is where I part with Rush.

Each of the two major political parties are a coalition of disparate interest groups. The Democrats have environmentalists, unions, collectivists, blacks, and gays. With the exception of gays all these groups tend to be collectivist in nature. Other than that they really share no common interests. Specifically unions and environmentalists tend to be in direct opposition to each other. On the Republican side there is the famous three-legged stool of social, fiscal, and foreign policy conservatives.

If the current make-up of the Republican party splinters into social conservatives as the largest segment and fiscal and foreign policy conservatives as the smaller segment, it could lead to the formation of a third party. Social conservatives are naturally aligned with unions on fiscal policy, and blacks and Hispanics on religion. Since the social conservatives believe in actively helping the poor, they would be more inclined to do so via the government once they are unhitched from fiscal conservatives.

It wouldn't require a majority of unions, blacks, and Hispanics to join the evangelicals in order to become a formidable political party. I bet they could even win over some greens with their WWJD? rhetoric.

This would force the left further left and the right further right. The Democrat party would be hollowed out into a gay, secularist, socialist, radical environmentalist party (difficult as that may be to imagine) and the right would likely become a pseudo-Libertarian party of war-mongering, government-hating, tax protesters (again, shocking).

But I believe that the center party described above would continue to bear the label of the Republican party. If this comes to pass we could finally achieve that European ideal the left has been longing for; ironically with the help of evangelical Christians.