This week’s announcement by Arlen Specter, Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, of his intention to switch party affiliation and to seek the Democratic nomination from his state has generated considerable discussion in the news. It has largely been discussion that speaks to the increasingly partisan cultural landscape just one hundred days into an Obama administration that ran on the promise of “changing the culture of Washington, DC.” Plus ça change…
Cultures do not change as easily as political affiliation, alas. And most of the current discussion misses the mark in some profound ways. The questions concerning what this means for the future of the Republican Party are premature, at least in the terms currently posed. For the embittered leadership of the Republican Party, Specter’s was a personal decision with absolutely zero broader electoral implications.
That is and is not the case, since this same leadership had far more of a hand in alienating Specter from the Party and forcing him out than it currently cares to admit. Arlen Specter is hardly the first Republican moderate to leave his party after the bullying conducted in the name of policy and Party purity. Remember Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island? As Arlen Specter sees it, the Party abandoned him well before he left the Republican Party.
This question of ideological purity is an interesting one. There are radical conservatives, like Rush Limbaugh, who are quick to cry “good riddance,” and who insist that only a partisan purge of such moderate tendencies can present a unified electoral front capable of winning future elections. Yet it is increasingly the case that such purism goes hand-in-hand with an anti-establishment philosophy that borders on the paranoid. Limbaugh also suggested this week that the furor over swine flu is being used by the Obama administration to shore up its centralization of power in the nation’s capitol.
The alleged trick? First create a panic, and then gobble up power in the name of increasing public safety. Yup, that’s what Limbaugh said. With not so much as a gesture to the last eight years, when the Bush team did precisely that in the name of terrorism, not pandemic.
Others in the Republican leadership have been more thoughtful, and their calls for ideological purity make for more interesting reflection. In their judgment, the Party has not been conservative for quite some time, and it was the very abandonment of conservative principles that led to the Party’s deserved ouster in last November’s elections. The Party of limited government and fiscal responsibility became the administrator of massive police actions around the globe and the custodian of record deficits here at home.
That is not conservative, they note with dismay; it is radical. That’s the more sober reflection of a more sober sector of the Republican coalition.
The deafening silence in this entire debate concerns religion. There are indeed radical conservatives in the Republican coalition, and they are indeed trying to take over the Party in the name of ideological purity.
The battle-lines will soon be drawn, as they always are, over Supreme Court nominations. Justice Souter’s surprise announcement that he will step down, and the possibility this creates for President Obama to appoint his first Supreme Court Justice, have interesting implications for the question of religion’s role in both Parties’ constitutions. Specter, you may recall, was the ranking Republican on the Judicial Committee and must now be replaced before the first Obama nominee has a hearing. The longest ranking Republican members of that committee, like Orrin Hatch, have given the game away, acknowledging that there should not be “litmus tests” for nominees. In other words, everyone knows that President Obama will appoint someone who has no desire to revisit Roe v Wade. The Republicans can’t fight that fight again and hope to win.
The very ease with which Specter can admit such a thing is what rankles Christian conservatives within the Republican fold, the very radical conservatives who are indeed trying to take the Party over and maintain its purity by exposing and then expelling the likes of Arlen Specter.
