Democratic Heretics

Democratic Heretics

The never-ending Democratic attempt to resurrect the strategy that destroyed Barry Goldwater in 1964—he’s an extremist, don’t you know—rolls on, with liberals and the media trying to tar the Republican party as an “ideological outlier” in American politics. 

There are three legs to this rickety barstool of an argument. One is the pseudo-social science findings of Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann that congressional Republican voting records have lurched sharply to the right in recent years (though it is not obvious why this should be bad news). The second is the populism of the Tea Party, which, to be sure, is a disruptive force in the Republican party much as the anti-Vietnam war movement was a disruptive force in the Democratic party in the late 1960s and 1970s. The wobbliest leg of the triad is the argument, unfortunately abetted by Jeb Bush, that the GOP has become too extreme even for Ronald Reagan.

The use and abuse of Reagan has been going on for a while now, but the claim that Reagan could not be nominated by today’s GOP takes absurdity to a new level. You really need a poker face to suggest that the party that, since 1988, has nominated two Bushes, Bob Dole, John McCain, and now Mitt Romney would find Reagan insufficiently conservative. And Reagan would surely delight in the stronger ideological composition of the House GOP caucus today. One unappreciated aspect of Reagan’s diary is how often he expressed disappointment with congressional Republicans who ran for the tall grass on tough votes. Reagan complained about weak-kneed Republicans in his diary almost as often as he did about Democrats and the media. “We had rabbits when we needed tigers,” was a frequent lament. Today’s Tea Party-influenced GOP caucus would gladden the Gipper’s heart.