Moderate Republicans have been back in focus over the past week in the Senate debate over the current stimulus bill. Three senators in particular, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, have thrown their support behind a less sweeping economic package. In doing so, they have bucked the remainder of the GOP, earning brickbats and calumnies galore from hard-line conservatives. The senators from Maine face no real threat; given that New England has been traditionally inhospitable to right-wingers, the only threat Collins and Snowe might face in the future comes in a general election from Democrats, not from the GOP. Specter may face a serious challenge in 2010 in the Republican primary, but it’s unlikely a true social conservative can win statewide in Pennsylvania again; Rick Santorum was (thankfully) the last of his kind in that region of America.
I don’t write a great deal about politics on this blog. But I am heartened by the significant role that Snowe and Collins in particular have played in this current congressional drama. As regular readers know, I re-registered as a Republican a little over a year ago. I did so not because my politics have shifted to the right (they haven’t), but because I’ve become increasingly satisfied with the core values of the Democratic party leadership today. The Democratic party doesn’t need me — but quixotically enough, I think the GOP does need folks like me.
Students of political history know that the term “progressive Republican” only recently became an oxymoron. Indeed, for much of the twentieth century, it was Republicans who took the lead on environmental and women’s issues. The Roosevelt Democratic coalition of the 1930s to the 1960s, relying as it did on trade unionists, Catholics, Jews, and Southern whites, was frequently more socially conservative and less interested in environmental protection than the GOP. Family planning tended to be an issue that garnered more Republican than Democratic support, largely because Democratic leaders saw anti-contraception Catholics as so vital to electoral victory. Similarly, unions tend to be interested in jobs; massive construction projects create those jobs. Environmentalists tend to oppose major construction projects, and thus the interests of working class trade unionists and traditional conservationists were diametrically opposed.
Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins are moderates, but certainly not liberals. There were liberal Republicans within living memory, however, and they are the sort whose legacy I want to restore. The last Republican mayor of San Francisco, the great George Christopher, was famous for his progressive policies — and for being the very first politician, anywhere in the country, to actively court gay and lesbian voters. Christopher predated the slain George Moscone and Harvey Milk by a decade and a half, and he represented the GOP as it existed in many corners of this country in the middle of the last century: fiscally responsible, socially progressive, environmentally concerned. I’m a George Christopher Republican.
Other great liberal Republicans include the splendid Millicent Fenwick and the still-feisty Pete McCloskey. Like Christopher, these two were committed to balanced budgets, social toleration, and reverent stewardship of our natural resources. While in congress, they were to the left of many Democrats on family planning and environmental issues, but they remained ardent Republicans.
The number of moderate-to-liberal Republicans left in elected office has dwindled to a handful. The rise of the religious right in the GOP since the late 1970s, and the willlingness of the Democratic party to move towards green and feminist political ideals, has meant that liberal Republicans have had a hard time hanging on. Hard-line conservatives have done a good job of purging the GOP of both its left-wing and, increasingly, its center. And though Catholic voters and unionists remain strong Democratic party supporters, those voters are also increasingly receptive to pro-choice, pro-environment policies. With the climate in the GOP so hostile, and the climate in the Democratic party ever more receptive, there is very little reason for those who hold genuinely liberal views to continue to struggle on as Republicans.
I’m a member of the Republicans for Environmental Protection and Republicans for Choice. I give money to both and support both even as I continue to vote for Democrats in the general elections. My goal is to be part of growing that “faithful remnant” of progressive voices in the GOP so that some bright and happy day we might have two parties that take seriously women’s sovereignty over their own flesh, and two parties that take seriously our responsibility to the earth and to all of its creatures. And though they are far from perfect, I’ve been toasting the likes of Collins and Snowe all week. It’s nice to see some “old-line” Republicans holding the balance of power, and delicious to watch the right-wingers who have hijacked the party forced to acknowledge the enduring power of the moderates. It’s their party too. And mine.
Other liberal Republicans within living memory:
Jacob Javits (Senator from N.Y.)
Nelson Rockefeller (the pre-1970 version)
Thomas Dewey
Edward Brooke (Senator from Mass.)
Lowell Weicker
Claiborne Pell
Yes, some good names there! And Charles Mathias, Christopher Shays, William Weld, Christie Todd Whitman — all on the moderate-to-liberal side of the ledger.
Don’t you ever wonder how liberal the USA would be if the South had won the civil war, and the Confederate States of America weren’t part of the union? Think of who would be left! We’d be infinitely more progressive…
It’s bizarre to think that in 1948, the two candidates (Truman and Dewey) actually competed to be more liberal.
The last person who actually won the presidency by being a liberal was Johnson in 1964, in the shadow of the JFK assassination. (I don’t count Obama; he ran as a centrist.)
Don’t you ever wonder how liberal the USA would be if the South had won the civil war, and the Confederate States of America weren’t part of the union? Think of who would be left! We’d be infinitely more progressive…
I’m actually not sure of this.
Without the South, you don’t get the army amendments (so no federalization of the Bill of Rights); you don’t get the anti-racist movement, since racism is much more hidden (it’s in a different country–there are almost no blacks in the North); and you get a culture much more influenced by materialism and Social Darwinism.
Hugo,
I don’t think that allowing the secession of the South would have liberalized the north. Lincoln was right to say that the country could not survive divided in two. Sooner or later, pro-slavery ideologues would have made the argument that the United States had to be united, for economic and cultural reasons, and that if it couldn’t be united on the Union’s terms then it would have to be united on the Confederacy’s. And the law of ‘Dred Scott’ would be locked into place from Massachusetts to California. In crushing the threat to the Confederacy, the free states were fighting a war of self-defence, destroying a very real ideological threat to their very reason for being.
It’s nice that you want there to be more Rockefeller Republicans, but personally I wish there were more Sargent Shriver Democrats.
But without the South, we don’t get Jimmy Carter. That would be a shame, seriously.
More flippantly — no Dukes of Hazzard!!! Nooooo!!!
I think you’re overly-optimistic, Hugo. The GOP, as it currently stands, is little more than a sock puppet for the religious right, and most Republicans seem pretty happy with that arrangement. Not the more fertile ground for…anything, actually, but certainly not reform. Especially not coming from a “Communist/Marxist/Socialist/Secular Humanist Worldview Thinker,” as Worldview Weekend would call you.
In Pennsylvania, down is up and day is night. PA currently has a pro-choice Republican and a pro-life Democrat in the U.S. Senate, though the latter doesn’t appear as committed to the rights of the unborn as was his father, who was once governor. Spector, for his part, routinely crosses the aisle. Don’t be surprised if Santorum makes a comeback; he’s wildly popular in some circles and lost mostly because it was a Dem tidal force in 2006. Charles Schumer thought Casey would be a good one to run against Santorum because Casey has a few social conservative views. I don’t think a Barbara Boxer type, for example, would have defeated Rick.
Schism, I’m familiar with the crowd at Worldview Weekend. I am all for big tents, but am not sure I want to be in the same space with that group. We worship the same God, and that we read the same Scripture and call out the same Name while coming to such radically different conclusions about His call to us… well, it’s one big fat mystery.
I was kidding about the secession. I just note that the hard right wing in this country is more or less down to the deep South and a few redoubts in the Mountain West. (And the Dems just picked up a seat in flippin’ Idaho and now dominate Colorado, so the latter region hangs by a thread.) If the GOP runs out all of its centrists and moderates, demography dictates a long stay in the minority. Good luck with getting the Tom Coburns and Jim DeMints of the world elected in swing states.
Hugo,
You’re a brave guy, being a liberal Republican in this day and age.
Tell me — why are you not a Democrat? Just askin’.
Capt, I thought I was clear: I want to change the GOP back to what it was, and that requires change from within. The California Democratic Party has, generally speaking, the right views on choice and the environment and so forth. The GOP needs to move towards the sensible center, and with my donations to organizations like REP and my letter-writing, I can play a small part in making that happen!
O.K., Hugo, it just seems that your position is strange. You approve of the Democrats but are a Republican because you have some kind of loyalty to the Republican Party? Or you want there to be essentially two Democratic parties?
No, I’m sympathetic to some Republican ideas about economics, and I’ve always had a sympathy for Second Amendment issues. I think there’s a place for authentically liberal voices: free markets, free minds, free ideas, freedom to marry, freedom for the caged animals, you get the idea.
And I have a special antipathy for teachers’ unions (not all, but the CTA and the NEA), having been a member against my will for far too long. On a tiny handful of principles, I’m sympathetic to traditional Republican ideas….
Look, under Clinton in the 1990s we had two right-wing parties: the center-right Democrats, headed by WJC, and the far-right Republicans of Newt Gingrich et al. Why not have a progressive left Democratic party with statist/socialist leanings, and a GOP along the lines of the German Free Democrats, with classically liberal views on markets and sexuality and strong green views on the environment? And thus marginalize those who want to use the power of the state to build a latter-day Calvinist Geneva.
//there are almost no blacks in the North//
Really? Almost none? In which part of the north, North Dakota?
Nav–I’m talking in an alternative history.
In 1860, there are almost no blacks in the North (that’s in real history).
If the North and the South become separate countries, then black from the South can’t emigrate to the North easily–so in 1960, there are still almost no blacks in the North (in alt-history).
I’m NOT saying that in real history this is the case.
O.K, Hugo, I get it. Thanks for responding in the middle of your diaper-changing!
“I want to change the GOP back to what it was, and that requires change from within.”
Then you’ll have to change the Democrat Party to everything IT was way back when, which many believe is the direct antithesis of what it is now. Many have left the DP, only to explain, “I didn’t leave IT so much as it left ME.”
The Democratic Party used to be the party of the KKK, George Wallace, Bull Connor. They decided to do the right thing in the 1960′s, and in the process lost the white South. The Republicans, formerly the party of Lincoln, became the haven for white racism, actively courting it for the next 40 years. It’s no accident that David Duke (the Grand Wizard) became a Republican. The Republican Party worked very hard to get him and people like him.
I’m glad the DP is not what it was.
CaptCrisis,
The Democratic Party of Sargent Shriver and people like him was also the party that respected unborn human life. And now Mr. Schwyzer, not content with having a thoroughgoing pro-choicer in the presidency, wants to change the other party so that it too becomes beholden to the culture of death. It strikes me as just a bit much.