|
 s
President Bush sweeps the Taliban to defeat on the plains and hills
of Afghanistan, he is finding the Democratic party a more formidable
opponent at home. Last month's elections in Virginia and New Jersey
showed modest but clear gains for the Democrats — and suggested
that the GOP's appeal to voters is fading rapidly.
It is not hard
to explain why. Republican core issues are, in the jargon of pollsters,
less salient than in the past. Voters favor tax cuts less fiercely
when the top marginal tax rate hovers around 40 percent than when
it was at its pre-Reagan rate of 70 percent. And school choice appeals
mainly to the non-Republican parents of children trapped in inner-city
"sink schools" — not to suburban parents basically
satisfied with local schools and fearful of deprived children arriving
with vouchers to demand entry.
On top of that,
however, the war on terrorism seems to be fostering a political
climate helpful to Democrat partisans of big government. Government
has, after all, been putting its best faces forward. Its most visible
agents since Sept. 11 have been firefighters, police and rescuers
rather than the IRS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service,
and the National Endowment for the Arts. And as in earlier wars,
the sense of emergency has paved the way for centralization of decision-making.
Congress has just passed by lopsided majorities an essentially Democratic
bill placing airport security in the hands of the federal government
— and Bush happily signed it.
There is, of
course, no logic underlying this renaissance of big government.
Federalizing airport security itself offers no guarantee of improvement;
the feds were in charge of border security before Sept. 11 —
and terrorists went in and out of the United States like yo-yos.
A better approach would be to lay down strict rules for private
airport security providers — decent wages, tough screening
of applicants, rigorous training — and give the feds regulatory
oversight of them.
There are certain
specific and well-defined tasks that Washington should either perform
(or perform better than before) in order to defeat terrorism. But
expanding big government in all directions to do so, as columnist
Mark Steyn points out, is like hiring people first to rescue someone
trapped in a burning building and then to rush him to the theater
to watch a transgendered performance artist subsidized by the NEA.
It makes no sense.
Whatever the
reality, though, the zeitgeist seems to have decided that for the
moment, big government is back. And that hampers a party skeptical
of government, such as the GOP, and helps the Democrats as a party
sympathetic to extending federal power.
What should
theoretically give hope to Republicans, however, is that this Democrat
advantage applies only to economic, administrative and welfare questions.
Sept. 11 also has raised less tangible but powerful questions of
patriotism and national sentiment on which the GOP enjoys a natural
advantage. It has made an unashamed patriotism respectable again;
it has aroused widespread public anxiety over uncontrolled immigration
and lax border security; it has drawn attention to the existence
of immigrants and de-assimilated native-born Americans who either
reject allegiance to the United States outright or grant it only
on highly qualified terms; it has discredited multiculturalism and
official bilingualism as eroding America's common culture, and it
has created a popular appetite for policies that would restore the
nation's unity and sense of common destiny.
As the multiculturalist
party the Democrats are ill-placed to respond to this public mood.
Making national unity a high priority would fracture Democratic
Party unity as the ethnic pressure groups such as La Raza rushed
to defend illegal immigration and official bilingualism. As the
Americanist party, however, the GOP would be expressing its deepest
instincts by introducing measures to reverse the balkanization of
America. For instance, the Republicans in Congress could reform
the INS to establish a new Bureau of Americanization that would
encourage immigrants to identify fully with their new country, as
John Fonte of the Hudson Institute has argued.
Or the White
House might support the campaign of millionaire Ron Unz to replace
the failed system of bilingual education with an "English immersion"
program that genuinely equips young people with the tools needed
for success in the American economy.
Or Bush, matching
his appeals to Americans not to discriminate against Muslims, might
ask Islamic leaders to include the Pledge of Allegiance in their
prayer services in mosques. Or immigration policy could be reformed
not only to restore border security but also to grant preference
to those would-be immigrants — irrespective of race or national
origin — who share the language, culture, and free philosophical
assumptions of America.
In the aftermath
of Sept. 11, these and similar proposals would win massive support
among voters while embarrassing and dividing the Democrats. They
have only one drawback: The Bush administration has publicly committed
itself on the other side of the debate. It has reaffirmed its decision
to grant an amnesty to illegal Mexican immigrants; it has quadrupled
spending on bilingual education, and it has in general adopted a
political pose supporting multiculturalism — notably at the
last GOP convention.
Before Sept.
11, this looked opportunistic; today, it looks suicidal.
|
