Yesterday, the New York Times ran a piece by Blake Hounshell titled “How a New Class of Republicans Could Push America to the Right.” Some of these candidates have endorsed Donald Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen, but Hounshell’s article does not dwell on that. It focuses instead on what he casts as their extreme conservative positions on other issues. But on those issues, there’s very little in the article, if anything, that suggests a substantive departure from conservative orthodoxy.
On climate change, the article cites Republican Senate candidates such as Mehmet Oz, running in Pennsylvania, and Herschel Walker, running in Georgia, making some silly and uninformed comments about the science of global warming. I tend to think those comments are just that — silly and uninformed — but they do not represent a substantive break with the GOP’s traditional position on climate policy.
On education, the article cites Republicans such as Eric Schmitt, running for the Senate in Missouri, floating “the idea of getting rid of the Education Department and reallocating the money in block grants to states instead.” But that, too, has been a conservative policy ambition for some time — none other than Ronald Reagan campaigned on closing down the agency. Hounshell acknowledges as much, and points out that Reagan “didn’t succeed in doing so despite serving two terms as president.” Yet he says that today’s Republicans “go further.” As far as I can tell, the goal of eliminating the department is pretty much the same. Where, exactly, is the rightward shift?
On same-sex marriage, the Times points to the opposition of Blake Masters, running for Senate in Arizona, while noting that several Republican Senate candidates “have expressed their opposition to same-sex marriage in . . . muted terms.” The GOP’s policy platform, as it stands today, still opposes same-sex marriage. What’s more, the article cites Senator Ron Johnson’s plans to vote for the Democratic bill codifying gay marriage when it comes to the Senate. If anything, the “muted” opposition to same-sex marriage expressed by some Republicans, and the active support for it expressed by others, represents a significant leftward movement on the issue.
Perhaps most notably, on abortion, the Times reports that Republicans such as Kari Lake, running to be Arizona’s governor, Masters, and Doug Mastriano, running to be Pennsylvania governor, support bans on abortion without exceptions for rape and incest. That’s a pretty standard pro-life position. While many Republicans support rape and incest exceptions, some of them for political reasons, the philosophically consistent pro-life view holds that unborn children have a right to life regardless of the nature of their conception: Even if the child was conceived by an act as horrific and evil as rape, the child is innocent. The Times notes that Masters “has also raised questions about whether Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court decision granting couples the federal right to use contraception, was correctly decided — but he does not support a ban on contraception.” That, too, is standard conservative jurisprudence. One can believe that the constitutional argument for Griswold was unconvincing while also opposing a ban on contraception. Yet the Times is unwilling — or unable — to draw distinctions between a preferred policy outcome and the constitutional merits of a particular case.