Can you picture it? It’s November 9th, 2016, and the Republican candidate has won! After all singing and cheering and tears of relief are over, well, what would you get?
In “Late Republic Studies: Three Scenarios for the Short Term” (scroll below), I said you’d get an era of Marginal Republican Dominance, with these political under-girdings: a non-maverick GOP candidate—“maverick” includes Rand Paul–wins in 2016, and the Senate stays GOP. Continued hold of the House, and holding of previous gains in statehouses and governorships. The odds for a similar victory in 2020 look decent. But I also said that because the Senate will remain close and liberals will still control the bureaucracy, much of the judiciary, academia, entertainment/arts, legacy media, and many big tech corporations, what ought to feel like dominance, will actually feel and function like a marginal dominance or advantage.
Now the main motive I have for trying to sketch this scenario is to consider whether America has entered “Late Republican Times.” I hold there are three plausible scenarios for the short term, one of which this is one, and that the long-term hopes and fears whose development we have the greatest need to predict, in any of the three scenarios are the following: a) the new political correctness, and its threats to liberty of religion, association, speech, and education, b) the character of the Supreme Court, c) the character of the federal bureaucracy, d) executive legislating, e) prospects for the emergence of Reform Democrats, f) prospects for the strengthening of economic leftism, and g) prospects for the emergence of a Liberal-tarian Party.
So, keeping those in mind, what could we expect from a short-term era of Marginal Republican Dominance?
1) The Supreme Court goes originalist. A bloc of 5. Roe/Casey would come under threat of reversal or drastic revision; state resistance to the pro same-sex marriage decision we will very likely get this year could emerge, perhaps leading to its reversal; major set-backs to affirmative action; hundreds of smaller but vital victories and dodged bullets in constitutional matters.
2) Obamacare would be repealed. Or, would be killed by a thousand cuts, judicial and legislative.
3) A big question would be whether the Republican president had the guts to try to weed progressive ideologues and other corrupt actors out of federal bureaucracies. If so, major battle and stink will develop. Stink-wise, think Wisconsin and the sort of legacy media behavior we saw during the Valerie Plame affair. Every media and bureaucratic trick in the book will come into play. Hard-ball, ugly stuff, victory uncertain. But if the fight is dodged, what I’ve described as marginal dominance won’t even be that.
4) A less necessary series of fights would emerge about how far to pursue the threads of various Obama-era scandals.
5) A big or little war, in the Middle-East; if ISIS delivers serious attacks against us or upon Europe, the Republican president will face insurmountable pressure to go to war. And it may be two wars, since the Iran deal is unlikely to hold. Much will depend on how he or she conducts these wars. Thankfully, a safer situation with Russia, China, and North Korea will be likely—their leaders will know better than to tempt fate while a Republican president and congress are in power.
6) Buh-bye Senate filibuster. The Dems we have today are the same sort that will be in Congress in 2017. Little legislatively is going to move, including Obamacare repeal, if the filibuster remains. I don’t say it is a good thing, simply an inevitable one in this scenario.
7) Economically, I’d guess a mixed-bag for the first few years, given uncertainty due to Obamacare repeal and budget cutting fights, but also encouragement due to these, followed by better times overall, but still facing many of the structural and inquality-increasing weaknesses of the aughties economy. Budget-wise, big cuts, but hard to see us getting back to pre-2002 or even pre-2009 deficit and debt levels. So government-growth-wise and burdening-future-generations-wise, only a somewhat better picture.
8) Big incentive for emergence of Reform Democrats, and especially if GOP also wins in 2020.
9) Big incentive for race-card provocations, Ferguson-incident protests, etc., from radical activists, as fear of emergence of Reform Dems and a collapse of dominant black identity grows.
Now what would these likely aspects of the short-term era imply for the longer term?
Reform Democrats
A lot could depend on the type of Reform Democrats which emerge, whether they incline in a more liberal-tarian direction, or in more populist democratic leftism direction. A return to the old Bill Galston model of the Reform Democrat, the Democrat who is more friendly to—i.e., is on speaking terms with–both economic conservatives and social conservatives might not be possible anymore. And I fear that what America also needs, a Democratic Party desire to promote localism a la Wendell Berry, Wilson Carey McWilliams, and The Front Porch Republic, is even more unlikely.
Most pomocons would prefer the emergence of the populist type of New Democrat if we had to choose, but that perhaps requires both more economic distress and a greater upswing of orthodox religion than anyone should predict with confidence. What is more, such Reformers might only be able to compete for popularity within the Dems if they were allied with radical economic progressives and environmentalists. That is, a more Acorn-ish Jim Webb might be the type of politician they would have to put forward. Hard to see how that type could emerge to set the tone for whole the party. For one thing, as Daniel DiSalvo’s work suggests, the Democrats’ embrace of public-sector union reform is one of the self-reforms America most needs them to adopt, and it is hard to see economic progressives pulling it off.
Liberal-tarians
So the more likely Reform Democrat of the future is one that leans liberal-tarian. That could be bad news, since the longer an era of Marginal Republican Dominance held, and thus began to develop into more-than-marginal dominance, the greater the likelihood of the emergence of a strong third party that positions itself in a certain kind of “center,” a liberal-tarian one built out of libertarian-minded voters that bolt from the Republican tent, and not-that-concerned-about-economic-inequality ones from the Democratic tent. And note, this could happen even without any sort of Reform Democratic movement paving the way. All it might take is a leader slightly more charismatic and less dogmatically libertarian than Rand Paul.
And unfortunately, the way in which an originalist Supreme Court would provoke fresh fights over abortion, and particularly over gay marriage, would help the liberal-tarian cause. With abortion, I want conservatives to fight any fight, and gain any gain, because unborn lives matter, but also because I know the overturning of Roe/Casey would return the abortion issue to the states, which in many states would become a compromise-amenable debate of degrees about how many months back from birth abortion should remain legal. And everyone would know that the price of a bus-ticket and a one-night hotel-stay would be sufficient for women living in states that prohibited abortion to still get one in a neighboring state. (Ultimately, I’m for abolition, cap-stoned by a right-to-life amendment, but that’s a very long-term hope.) I don’t see Democratic re-runs of the “war on women” angle as a winner with young libertarian-leaners and there is increasing discomfort among such with the idea of an inherent abortion right.
With same-sex marriage, however, conservatives have strong strategic incentive to want that fight to be over, because if it isn’t, it will remain an issue that can unite liberals and libertarians in coalition, and more potently than “abortion rights.” But, note carefully, that’s an incentive conservatives cannot act upon, because any coherent version of conservatism has to put originalists on the bench, and any coherent version of originalism is going to have to say that the right to same-sex marriage isn’t in the Constitution. Because it isn’t. So, if states like Alabama pass laws, once a 5-4 orginalist Supreme Court is seated, that force it to choose whether to overturn the (coming soon) pro-SSM decision of 2015, it will have to do just that.
The good news, however, would be that the greater the stinks the Dems raise over budget-cutting, the more they will increase the friction between libertarians and liberals. The racial-grievance and gender-grievance politics that have become second-nature to liberals will also pose a real difficulty to the formation of a Liberal-tarian Party
If, God forbid, dominance by a Liberal-tarian Party was the net result of a season of Marginal Republican Dominance, such a party would protect a good deal of economic liberty, free-speech liberty, and it might push back against the campaign-finance and member-selection threats to associational liberty, but I do think the threats to religious liberty and sane family law would remain very much at work. (This is because the ideological hard-core of liberal-tarianism would be for the emerging American creed and regime focused upon health, safety, and personal autonomy, the one James Poulos provocatively dubbed The Pink Police State.) A Liberal-tarian Party would prove highly selective about which parts of the Constitution to be stickler about, and so long as internet privacy rights and other ACLU-type individual rights are protected, I don’t see great liberal-tarian incentive to resist executive legislating, further erosion of federalism, or even international governance, so long as their policies are the ones being put in place.
Moreover, the radical left would likely come into full possession of the rump Democratic Party, and many of its institutional redoubts, in academia and arts/entertainment particularly. And given the way our system strongly favors the development of two coalitions, which rump party would become the main competitor against a successful Liberal-tarian Party? Probably not the rump GOP. That means big-time political exile for social conservatives, and for constitutional conservatives of the consistent sort. So the originalist Court of say, 2018-2025, could turn out to be such conservatives’ last hurrah.
So long as the new Liberal-tarian Party could supply a floor of economic and entertainment provision for the majority population of “losers” in the new economy(see Tyler Cowen), while still providing an increase of basic prosperity in the aggregate, the danger of the more leftist Democratic Party regularly winning elections outside blue-state cities could remain low. Probably.
If the fundamentals of the future economy permit that, and the Liberal-tarians could, as they would certainly desire to, keep bureaucratic corruption under check, this overall medium-term scenario would at least avoid moving us into late republican times. However, as indicated, the Court would in a number of areas of life become more powerful, the trend towards Executive Supremacy would remain in play, federalism/localism would be weakened, and across the board, democratic say diminished. Religious/social conservatives and constitutional conservatives, including us Postmodern Conservatives, could only regard the situation as being a mixed-bag at best—we would see key long-term trends as still heading in despotism-empowering directions, and would feel politically homeless. And our poor friends the Porchers and Rod Dreher would hate the situation so much they’d vote for the rump Marx-oid Democrats, if they voted at all.
The Same Old
Of course, it could happen that the era of Marginal Republican Dominance is replaced by the Democrats, ones basically as they are at present in ideology and spirit. At the least, they would be pushing things back to the Divided Government scenario. Maybe it is wisdom’s part to expect more of the same.
How to Get to Long-Term Republican Dominance
But what if the era of Marginal Republican Dominance looked to be developing into a deeper dominance? How could conservatives avoid a Liberal-tarian third party emerging out of the Democratic wreckage and sweeping all before it? Well, unless I’m just wrong about the potential strength of liberal-tarianism, it would require a several good leaders in a row, restrained enough and effective enough war-fighting, an economic prosperity that is not too prosperous, perhaps an originalism that is not too triumphant, and a couple of the right wild cards coming into play and the wrong ones not. It might also require more Democrats to become more smitten with Piketty-like 21st-century democratic socialism, so as to make libertarians more fearful of bolting the GOP coalition. What ought to also help is if the more fulsome type of Reform Democrat, the one Constitution-honoring and Galston-and-McWilliams-guided, was to emerge as a serious factor.
In terms of present debates, conservatives seeking to prevent a future bolting of libertarians from their coalition need to develop ways to meet them half-way. But caution, only in the right half-way ways.
One thing that can help is to try to focus debates upon smart policy alterations and innovations—that is where Yuval Levin Reform Conservatives come into play. Get things back to more debate about the more solid numbers, and conservatives and libertarians can together promote policy improvements to ordinary Americans against entrenched bureaucracy types. I don’t think the Reform Conservatives’ lacking a dogmatic hostility to government action in economic affairs is going to repel the types of libertarian-inclined young persons that conservatives need to worry about most.
Still, I suspect the biggest need is to get our libertarians to become less enthusiastic about what the right sort of Court could do, and more appreciative of democratic consent, federalism, and their own close commonalities with originalism.
One way to meet them half-way is to back a constitutionalism that is more dynamic and democratic than “conservative” in the usual sense of the word. A more dynamic and democratic constitutionalism would revere the Founders as innovators, compromisers, and disaster-preventers, diminishing, but not ditching, the current conservative tendency to revere them as the setters of a permanent fundamental law. The truths of the Declaration’s opening are truths, and thus permanent; but the specific provisions of the Constitution are another kettle of fish—we should demand originalist interpretation of them at all times, but allow and encourage the public to change them more often.
That means, for one, backing what I’ve called the “Responsibility Amendment,” an amendment of Article V that would make other amendments easier to pass, which would diminish the ideological pressure upon the Court to provide the means of constitutional development, including the kind of development sold as “restoration” by certain libertarians. Other measures which might initially appear to be dangerous constitutional innovations, but which in fact are designed to maintain the Constitution would similarly be explored by this more dynamic and democratic constitutional conservatism.
The pitch here would seek to get less-dogmatic libertarians to see that their case for a more “classically liberal” constitutional order would be more powerful to the extent it got the American populace solidly behind it. The point is not to give the people a veto over judicial review, but to seek out key amendment-grounded or similarly authoritative moments for the people’s endorsement of the overall direction of constitutional development. No development in a more classical liberal direction is sustainable anyhow if the public cannot be convinced to endorse it more often than not.
Or consider same-sex marriage. Let’s say an orginalist Court does return the SSM question to the states. If the responsibility amendment were also in effect, a temporary and single issue liberal/libertarian alliance could be created to try to make SSM a new constitutional right, thus overruling the Court. Winning approval in 33 state legislatures, instead of the 38 you must under the current 3/4 requirement, might be possible if current trends of increasing public approval for SSM continue. So libertarian and other unhappy GOP voters could momentarily dissent from the party’s line on SSM with some hope of effectiveness, and would feel less tempted to bolt entirely. And note, most of social conservatives’ biggest worries about what a pro-SSM court decision inevitably brings about in other areas of law would vanish if a constitutional right to SSM comes via amendment instead. Hey, I’d ask my reps to vote against such an amendment, but regardless of the outcome, I think the actual instance of a vote would be a healthy thing for all sides.
Federalism. Amendments. Originalism. Democratic Say. These are the tools of American peace-makers today.
The Beautiful Vision
If things turn out really well, what happens is that the threats from liberal-tarianism, and from economic radicalism both fade into the background, and reformed New Democrats, determined to support the Constitution, and to honor the American political tradition in a more balanced way, emerge as the main competitor to the Grand Old Party. Politics continues, human nature being what it is, and so Americans still remain divided, probably most of all on abortion and economic policy, likely also on the shape of federalism and local power, and periodically very divided about wars, but the divisions are manageable, often peaceable, and no longer seem like they might sunder our nation. Yes, this vision only comes about through political fighting, a readjustment of constitutional thinking, and various government and party reforms, but some kind of revival within Christianity, and perhaps within Judaism also, is necessary for its realization.
The Bottom Line
Wild enough prognostication for ya? There’s more to come! But the take-away is this: the bad news is that what we conservatives get even if our 2016 and 2020 dreams come true is merely the avoidance of a number of really bad developments, and decent odds that a liberal-tarian dominance replaces our marginal one in the medium-term. So our work would only be beginning. Still, even if the “Hour of the Liberal-tarians” arrives, driving the likes of Rod Dreher into ever deeper levels of philosophy-informed monkish disgust, the republic will abide so long as that hour proves sustainable. Considering some of our other options, liberal-tarians would be decent-enough lesser-evil stewards of America; whatever disastrous entrenchment of a radical left their leadership might be blamed for in the long run, they would not themselves lead us into late republican times.