A New Pro-Family Agenda?/Maggie Gallagher

This week's column:

IT'S THE VALUES, VOTERS

Just a year ago, Democrats were pulling out their hair. As the Pew poll reported in its most recent "political typology" analysis, "Coming out of the 2004 elections, the American political landscape decidedly favored the Republican Party."
Now President Bush's tanking poll numbers are stimulating a new sense of possibility: Politics seems up for grabs in a new way. For the first time in recent memory, a strong economy does not seem to be lifting an incumbent president's political fortunes.

What does the future hold? The key election may be the Dover, Pa., school board election, in which all eight school board members who had voted to include a brief mention of "intelligent design" lost.

I doubt this political rejection was fundamentally ideological. Overwhelming majorities of Americans say they support teaching creationism alongside of evolution in public schools. (In the Pew poll, even a narrow majority of liberals favored teaching creationism alongside of evolution in public schools). It's a typically American live-and-let-live response that drives scientists, The New York Times, the courts, certain Democratic elites and George Will stark raving mad.

The Dover election loss reveals the limits of symbolic politics. Say the words "intelligent design" in public school, and hordes of New York Times reporters and ACLU lawyers will descend, stimulating angry confrontations between erstwhile friendly neighbors. As a values issue, most Pennsylvanians are likely content with a small nod to intelligent design in their public schools. But as a practical matter, a small symbol like that is not worth upsetting the principal aim of schools: educating the kids.

"I think the people of Dover are tired of the attention over such a minuscule thing, and they want a change," one former board member, Lonny Langione, told the Times. "A lot of the people I talked to were upset because the school board came to using taxpayer money to advance their own agenda."

The GOP faces a political crisis for a variety of reasons, but one looming problem is that so many of its coalition voters are in fact "values voters" drawn to the GOP for largely symbolic reasons. In the Pew poll, social conservatives (including the less affluent "pro-government conservatives") outnumber the pro-business, low-tax "Enterprisers" in the GOP base by a margin of 2-to-1.

Yet so far, few GOP political or intellectual leaders have even tried to translate values concerns into an agenda that also serves voters' interests, the usual basis of a stable governing majority. Tax cuts used to serve this unifying purpose, but Republicans got so good at cutting the taxes of the middle class that the issue no longer packs the same widespread punch.

In the Weekly Standard essay "The Party of Sam's Club: Isn't It Time the Republicans Did Something for Their Voters?" Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam make a serious attempt at translating values into interests.

"A "pro-family" economic agenda would begin with the recognition of a frequent left-wing talking point -- that over the past few decades, returns to capital have escalated while returns to labor have declined, and that the result has been increasing economic insecurity for members of the working and middle classes," they write.

Douthat and Salam suggest two practical solutions: new financial supports for parents (a la increasing the child tax credit) plus the equivalent of a "veteran's benefit" providing scholarship money for moms home with their kids. They also urge the GOP to address widespread health insecurity. Among all the political typologies in the Pew poll, only the "Enterprisers" (10 percent of registered voters) oppose government-guaranteed health insurance.

Easier said than done, of course. But it's an important insight: Values pack a punch at the polls (ask John Kerry). Over time, merely symbolic values alone won't substitute for an agenda that makes a difference in voters' lives.
posted by maggie at 12:36 PM | link

1 Comments:

At 11/16/2005 5:10 PM,  Mark B. said...

'"A "pro-family" economic agenda would begin with the recognition of a frequent left-wing talking point -- that over the past few decades, returns to capital have escalated while returns to labor have declined, and that the result has been increasing economic insecurity for members of the working and middle classes," they write.'

This of course couldn't be more right. The trouble is that it renders the rest of the argument moot. It's irrelevant that the social conservative voters in the GOP base outnumber the economic conservatives, because the GOP isn't run for the benefit of its voters, it's run for the benefit of its backers - largely corporations and the super-rich. An increasing share of GDP going to capital and increasing insecurity for workers aren't some unfortunate side-effects that the GOP needs to mitigate to continue achieving its goals, they _are_ the goals as far as the backers are concerned. It's good to see that Maggie realizes that the GOP's concessions to social conservatives are mostly symbolic. Now all she needs is to wake up to the fact that this is not actually negotiable. The GOP will either find some new symbols to press people's buttons, or it will find new ways to pretend to be supporting the lower and middle classes, or (most likely) it will spend a generation in the wilderness, but it's not in the business of doing anything substantive. Why, if the government was allowed to be helpful, people might start to like the idea, and that would never do.

 

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