One of the legacies of the George W. Bush administration is an escalation in partisanship in politics. Jokes about Congress used to be based on the premise that everyone compromises or nothing gets done — and the compromise leaves everyone wanting more. Now, it seems that one side, liberals or conservatives, gets what they want and the other side is left seething. After September 11, the President had a carte blanche to carry out whatever he wanted. By continually using it to further the conservative agenda with hardliner stances, he angered liberals year after year. This is unfortunate because there’s actually quite a bit of middle ground that liberals and conservatives agree on and with concessions everyone gets something. No brainer, this was commonly seen in legislation in previous decades and often discussed in political science classrooms.
How Evangelical are you?
What has developed from the Bush administration, however, is the rise of a new kind of conservative majority in the Republican party: the evangelical. This is not to say that evangelicals did not exist prior to the Bush administration nor that they were not active (they were important in getting him elected though). What has happened, though, is that the Christian right/Christian coalition has gotten a louder voice and taken a bigger role in politics. And, unfortunately, as history shows us with the crusades, Spanish inquisition, Salem witch-hunts, jihad, and so on, there is no compromising with religion. It is, by definition, an absolute that cannot be argued. This translates to political stances that cannot be budged. You can’t argue with infallibility.
Case in point, a favorite example of mine from my doctorate program: Imagine you put abortion to a national referendum. And rather than this being simply an up or down vote, you examined the percentages of whether people voted for or against it. Hypothetically, if 30% of people vote for abortion and 70% against, then you could make abortion legal for 2 days out of the week and illegal the other 5 days of the week. While this thought experiment does have some flaws, you can apply this example to many issues to determine whether compromise actually “works” for you on many issues. For evangelicals, there is no compromise.
Things didn’t always use to be this way.
Nolan Chart
Over the years, if you look at the Republican party compared to the Democratic party, their main fights have really been over economic issues — and there’s always negotiations and compromise when you involve money. Slavery, gender equality, the African-American civil movement, voting rights, ADA, and the like have been fairly bipartisan in support … and in resistance. You can find people from either party both united for and united against these issues. And over the history of the country, the parties have traded taking the lead role (though that may have partly been due to Realignment) in advocating for these issues. Nowadays, there is clear legislated morality being advocated from the Republican party … and some Republicans themselves are turned off by it.
Most “real” Republicans today are, in my opinion, really libertarians. And I don’t mean libertarian in the Libertarian party sense (those guys can get pretty extreme) but rather in the classical political definition of a libertarian. They believe in a laissez-faire market with private solutions to public problems (sound familiar?). For example, the cap-and-trade approach to environmental regulation rather than mandating certain technologies or other implementations. They want a minimum of meddling in their economic affairs … and in their social affairs, too. The majority of Republicans are only moderately conservative and have little or no leaning against gay marriage, don’t ask/don’t tell, abortion, capital punishment, and the like. These are also like the Reagan Republicans that independents/moderates and moderate liberals could make progress with legislatively.
The Republicans who are ruining the party (literally & figuratively) for everyone else are the evangelicals. Most of my Republican friends cannot stand Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, and other figureheads who base political decisions on the bible. Maybe they are not religious but they certainly pander to the religious right.
The Tea Party has made a point of tapping into the religious movement for support and fundraising. Personally, I have never thought religion should have a place in politics. There is a conflict of interest when your religious salvation is commingled with political movements. When a religious official who speaks to you about god during a sermon concludes with a speech on political advocacy, there is a certain amount of inherited divine endorsement (and thus credibility) to what has been said. Linking such things is wrong.
In one notable example, the former pastor of the East Waynesville Baptist Church in Waynesville, North Carolina “told the congregation that anyone who planned to vote for Democratic Sen. John Kerry should either leave the church or repent.” The church later expelled nine members who had voted for Kerry and refused to repent, which led to criticism on the national level.
The Christian right creates artificial political battles over social issues that cannot be truly won by either side. It undermines our efforts to create progress in this county. Negotiations with wholly inflexible positions are bound to fail. Moreover, the introduction of social issues in the conversations of other legislation (e.g. abortion coverage in healthcare) create additional hurdles in an already lengthy and complex legislative process. By not being able to offer concessions to get what is most important to their side, they risk getting nothing at all (causing widespread anger) or everything (angering the other side). Such an all-or-nothing approach explains why, barely a year after the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was passed, the Christian right is still vowing to repeal it — and why as soon as Obama was elected, his transition advisers compiled a list of 200 Bush administrative actions and executive orders to consider rolling back.
This isn’t how government should function. Government should be finding the middle ground for everyone and moving forward based on what is best for the country. The effect of the Christian right in creating extreme legislation or extreme advocacy in repealing legislation means that we spend more time swinging the pendulum left and right than walking forward.
Our separation of church and state has come a long way … but it certainly still has a long way to go.
