Kathleen Parker has some advice for Republicans

by Jay McDonough

Gee, conservative columnist Kathleen Parker is getting pretty good at creating a stir.  Ms. Parker caused a number of Republicans to hyperventilate (and a number of Democrats to applaud) when she wrote a blistering criticism of then VP candidate, Sarah Palin.  Ms. Parker's op-ed in today's Washington Post is creating like buzz.

To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn't soon cometh.

Simply put: Armband religion is killing the Republican Party. And, the truth -- as long as we're setting ourselves free -- is that if one were to eavesdrop on private conversations among the party intelligentsia, one would hear precisely that.

The choir has become absurdly off-key, and many Republicans know it.

...the GOP has surrendered its high ground to its lowest brows. In the process, the party has alienated its non-base constituents, including other people of faith (those who prefer a more private approach to worship), as well as secularists and conservative-leaning Democrats who otherwise might be tempted to cross the aisle.

Parker's column has sparked an interesting online debate between Andrew Sullivan and Daniel Larison.  Larison began:

It never ceases to amaze me how the least influential, but most reliable factions in the GOP are so readily blamed for what is wrong with that party... Despite their numbers, and in large part because of their reliability as Republican voters, evangelicals and social conservatives draw very little water in the GOP. Each cycle GOP leaders see how little it will take to get these voters to turn out for their candidates, and what that amount of lip service is each cycle they try to reduce it.

Certainly there is an argument to be made that dead-end partisans qua dead-end partisans who cannot speak to anyone outside their party are a problem, and you can make the case that the holdouts who still think Bush has done a good job are complicit to some degree in all of his errors and crimes

To which Sullivan responded:

And why were they so trusting of Bush and unable to see his flaws, Daniel? You have to see the link between the fundamentalist psyche and the suspension of critical judgment in the Republican party for the past eight years. A non-born-again president would never have been allowed to get away with it.

And Larison's reply:

Actually, I think we could attribute just as much of this inability to see (or perhaps it was merely unwillingness to criticize?) Bush’s flaws to their identification with Bush’s own religion. This is the same identification or bonding with a politician that made supporters of Palin so livid when she was criticized, because they took it as a criticism of themselves.

...one reason they are so easy to blame is the same reliability of support that allows them and their issues to be taken for granted by the party.

It strikes me there are a couple issues here.  The first is Ms. Parker's contention the Republican Party is erring by placing all it's eggs in the Evangelical basket.  Demographics highlight the problem for Republicans:  In a 2007 study, 26% of voters identified themselves as Evangelical Protestants and about two thirds of evangelicals identify themselves as Republicans.

OK. some math:  If two thirds of Evangelicals, totaling 17% of all voters, identify themselves as Republicans and 27% of all voters identify themselves as Republicans, that means Evangelicals represent 63% of the Republican Party.  That's a big chunk of the Republican Party and, to Sullivan's point, a blindly loyal component of the Party.  That's pretty hard to ignore.

(And, by the way, that group of "party intelligensia", who's conversations Ms. Parker eavesdrops now represent a very small faction of the GOP.  Like it or not, those are the folks who are now the minor players in the Republican Party).

Though it's hard not to agree with Ms. Parker.  If the Republicans have any hopes of reemerging a broadly based, issues centric party and avoid becoming known as just the party of Evangelicals, they will have to figure out a way to not only keep that Evangelical constituency but grow their party with policy that's compelling to more moderate voters.

But the other issue from Mr. Larison:  For all the allegiance the Evangelical community has shown the Republican Party, they've not really gotten much in return.  A couple Supreme Court Justices, but no Constitutional amendments on same sex marriage bans or overturning of Roe v. Wade.  No prayer in school and public displays of Christian symbolism.  Apart from some world class pandering, the Republicans haven't provided much for this fairly loyal and sizeable constituency.   Those Evangelicals may become impatient with the GOP at some point.

Those Republicans has managed to paint themselves into quite a corner here.  

Comments

[Cheryl Rofer]

Backing off a bit from the immediate manifestations of oogedy-boogedy, it seems to me that we can look at this as a historical problem.

Much of this sort of religious prejudice and enthusiastic religion (which I take to be what Ms. Parker is talking about) is centered in the Southeast, the old Confederacy.

The mothers and fathers of these now-Republicans were once Democrats who waved Confederate flags and insisted on segregation, also known as Dixiecrats. Then Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and presciently observed that the Democrats had lost the South for a generation.

The good news is that the overt discrimination against blacks, and even much of the private prejudice, is gone. The bad news is that the energy has gone into crazy religiosity.

Yes, it's time to say it: this anti-science, anti-thought cultishness isn't good for anyone, including its practitioners.

But we might wonder if it isn't still a manifestation of a defeated country. I'm not sure what insight this gives us to try to bring these people back into the mainstream. Probably another defeat, even an electoral one, will add to the pathology.

It's too large a group of voters for a political party to just cut them off at the knees. But as Jay observes, the Republican haven't given them much. And there's no motivation for them to move to the Democrats.

One possibility: the Republican cuts in social services have given the mega-churches a market. Perhaps a rewritten social contract might give the oogedy-boogedy crowd a reason to join the rest of us.