“The Republican Party is dead as a doornail. The sooner conservatives admit it the sooner we can get about the serious business of restoring this free republic.”
Very true. I say all true conservatives - both politicans and rank and file - move in unison to the Constitution Party. They will soon become a force to be rekoned with.
Nah.
Some things need to be said here, now that this specific political party name has come up.
Yes, there are a lot of good things which could be said about the Constitution Party's platform and core philosophy. I don't dispute that.
Furthermore, anyone on Free Republic who has been listening to the discussion I've been having about Christian politics over on the Orthodox Presbyterian and United Reformed listserves knows what I think about Christian politics, and specifically, why I believe the so-called “Radical Two Kingdoms” theology is dangerous. (I've been surprised to find how many FReepers are members of Calvinist churches and are paying attention to what I write in church-related forums, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised considering the influence of the PCA in Southern politics.) If I could somehow redesign the American political landscape from the ground up, we could do a lot worse than having a political party based on adherence to strict construction of the Constitution and drawing both secular and Christian support based on shared political concepts with which both secular and Christian conservatives agree.
Furthermore, as I've said repeatedly, I believe Abraham Kuyper’s role in the Anti-Revolutionary Party in the Netherlands is probably the best example in modern politics of an explicitly Christian political party gaining control of the political, cultural and ecclesiastical life of a modern nation and turning it around. The Netherlands was headed into the same cesspool as the rest of Europe at the beginning of the 1800s, and several related Dutch Christian movements, of which the Anti-Revolutionary Party was one major manifestation, managed to not only turn the country around but for a good period of time in the late 1800s and early 1900s made the Netherlands known as the “Bible Belt” of Europe.
For those who don't know that history, the short version is that Kuyper led the second of two major secessions from the Dutch state church and before the fight was over, he'd not only become Prime Minister of the Netherlands as head of a Christian political party but also had created a Christian daily newspaper, a Christian university, a Christian school movement, and a whole host of other Christian organizations that radically transformed the culture of the country.
Here's the main problem with applying that precedent to the Constitution Party: single-member winner-take-all voting districts.
Not only do we have the oldest written constitution still in use in the world, the United States political system predates that of virtually every other system in the industrialized world except for that of Britain. The American system dates back to when American political divisions were largely regional rather than ideological, and even the ideological disputes were largely framed regionally.
Today we have liberals and conservatives living together in most neighborhoods and only the most radically conservative and radically liberal states have overwhelming ideological majorities. That's led to a situation in which the division between our two political parties are so close that in many races a 60 percent majority is considered a landslide.
That's quite different from the assumption of the Founding Fathers, namely, that the regional interests of relatively internally unified Southern and Northern states needed to be balanced off against each other. Even within states for most of the 1700s and 1800s, most political disputes were geographically-based disputes between counties and regions of a state settled by different immigrant ethnic groups, or urban neighborhoods inhabited by different ethnic or socioeconimic groups, or urban-rural disputes, or socioeconomic disputes such as mercantile, industrial and agricultural interests which were also based on regionalism.
In that context, single-member districts make a lot of sense. Balancing regional interests off against each other at the federal, state, and local level is the best way to have people's views be represented effectively so long as the primary political divisions are based on (or at least reflected in) geography.
That simply is not the case today in most of modern America, and much of the industrialized world has taken into account sociological changes in modifying their political systems. Many nations have proportional representation based on ideology; sometimes people even vote for a political party rather than a candidate; the party posts a list of candidates and the top people on that list get elected, with the number depending on how many votes that slate receives in the national, provincial or regional elections.
(Yes, there are close parallels to how the Republican Party elects its delegates in some state primaries. Proportional representation is something we use to a very limited extent in our own political system, but not for the general election.)
The result is even today in the Netherlsnds, for example, despite the country's radical liberalism, the nation still has a number of conservative Christians elected to national, provincial and local government as representatives of several different secular and Christian conservative political parties, generally in rough proportion to their percentage in the population. The same could be said with regard to socially and politically conservative Jews in Israel, and religious and political minorities in other European nations.
The problem in the United States is that in most state and local elections (West Virginia's multimember districts being an important exception) the only thing that counts is having enough votes to get to 50 percent of the voters, or in some cases not even an absolute majority is needed and all a candidate needs is to get the largest number of votes.
That's what's happening now with Mitt Romney, who can't get close to a 50 percent majority in most states but is “winning” primaries and caucuses because he's able to get more votes than more conservative candidates who are divided among themselves.
Anyone who wants to advocate for the Constitution Party has to do one of two things: first, look at and learn from the history of the collapse of the Whig Party and its replacement by the Republican Party in a pre-existing two-party system, or second, actively and aggressively work to change the American electoral system from single-member districts to either multimember districts or proportional representation.
Either of those endeavors would be a massive process.
The second would require formal amendments to state constitutions, a process which takes years in most cases, and quite likely would require amending the federal constitution since I suspect the Supreme Court would end up hearing a challenge if some state somewhere decided to try to have statewise proportional representation elections for its congressmen.
The first is technically easier but practically almost as difficult. It could theoretically happen if well-known Republicans were to follow Sen. Joe Lieberman's lead by getting elected as independents or members of the Constitution Party and becoming a major third-party force at the state as well as federal levels, but that is almost as difficult as amending state constitutions.
If we as conservatives are going to talk third-party, recognize that we need to count the cost. That cost is very steep, and while some argue it could be a good idea long-term, for the short- and medium-term, it could easily get President Obama re-elected, turn the House of Representatives back over to the control of the Democratic Party, and cost numerous Republican senators their seats.
Given how bad the short-term consequences would be, I still believe the solution is what conservatives have been working to do for a generation, namely, taking over the Republican Party at the local and state levels. I do not believe that is impossible, and a good case can be made that the Republican Party of 2012 is much better than it was two, three or four decades ago.
Conservatives have a tendency to demand all the loaf or nothing. The liberals are wrong about many things, but a long-term strategy of slowly taking over the Democratic Party certainly has worked. Some of their methods cannot be used by conservatives, but others are entirely appropriate, and among them is the virtue of thinking long-term and making short-term compromises for long-term victories.