Anyone in the habit of talking politics with me knows I have a fascination with the American right.
As a left-leaning person, I feel I can't help it; more than a few of my friends are conservatives, and they seem to have a fundamentally different conception of everything. And yet, despite the yawning ideological chasm, I find nonetheless that I have reached with most of them very much more than a cool détente and that our similarities ultimately far outweigh our differences. So I ask myself: why conservatism? Why was it ever successful? Where will it go from here?
Although I was only a child back in 1994, even I recall the birth of the so-called “Contract With America”—the GOP's post-Reagan hostile takeover of the legislative branch, engineered by Newt Gingrich—and over the following few years, the change in the zeitgeist proved itself to be genuine. Socialism had officially become the political and economic albatross of the twentieth-century, domestic crime was at an all-time low, and Wall Street was abuzz about a 36,000-point Dow and the possibility of a federal surplus. America's moderates—those with a gradual inclination toward social permissiveness, a commitment to foreign humanitarianism and a general trust in laissez-faire capitalism—were now alleging to take a “pragmatic” rather than “ideological” approach, and there was no talk of unemployment and no worry of depression. It seemed we had finally found the Grand Unified Theory of politics; Francis Fukuyama wrote famously of “the end of history,” declaring that we had reached the singularity, and we believed it.
But then along came 9/11, the endless incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the unraveling of the financial system, and the center-left started to get its way in the national elections. Long overdue elements of their agenda—the universalization of our healthcare system, expanded support for public education, more comprehensive regulation of our financial system—are inevitable in this climate. The pendulum has swung back to the left, and it seems to show no sign of slowing; in 2010 and 2012, is the GOP going to regain its proud majority and reassert its existence, or is it just going to sink even deeper into political debt? They must adopt a torchbearer, and he or she must be more lucid than Rush Limbaugh. But who shall it be?
Sarah Palin is a twit, and everyone knows it. I wouldn't trust her to hold an actual torch.
The only other person really getting attention in conservative circles, though, is Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana. On paper, it's not difficult to see why; he's young, smart, ethnically distinct, memorable, relatively well-spoken, and a proven bureaucrat. Unfortunately, he continues to insist on describing creationism as good science and takes a dogmatic, draconian stance on abortion, both positions that will ensure he gets little-to-no support from the center. He has gotten more recent publicity than any other Republican, but it's been mostly negative: his abysmal rebuttal to the State of the Union Address was aimless and patronizing, and it seemed only to prove that he wasn't the kind of transformative political figure the GOP has insisted he was.
Everyone else recedes into the background, for one or more reasons. Tim Pawlenty, Governor of Minnesota, is somewhat popular in his state but has little national name recognition. Mike Huckabee is well-known and terrifically charming, but wants to abolish the income tax and change the United States into a theocracy. Mitt Romney also has a strong national presence, but has waffled on key issues in the past and will probably forever be hampered politically by his religion. John McCain declined to endorse any of them, saying he wished to wait for the situation to develop.
Hopefully he doesn't take too long.
