The Republicans: Into the Wilderness
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The Economist has written a very interesting article on The Republicans’ struggle to find a new self-identity in the face of the election defeat and the results of some fairly disastrous policies from the last eight years. This excerpt caught my attention:
Doubts now exist about the make-up of the party. The broad Republican coalition made sense in the Reagan era, and was held together in part by the threat of communism. Stitching together religious moralists, low-tax business types, leave-me-alone libertarians and “national greatness” conservatives is now much harder to do. Nor is any of the groupings, alone, large enough to form a solid base for the party as a whole.
Speaking in developmental, or integral terms, the Republican party, probably since Nixon, has inhabited a “mythic-rational” structure of consciousness (”blue-orange,” using Spiral Dynamics classifications). Broadly speaking, it is composed of the ethnocentrics who subscribe to a “mythic-membership” view of the world, and rationalists who embody “Classical Liberal” (as opposed to today’s modern Liberal) notions of the truth and virtues of autonomy, objectivity, efficiency, and power.
We see the mythic end embodied by the religious moralists and the national greatness conservatives. These are people who can only identify with other people of similar beliefs, identities, and moral outlooks. Their view of identity is also relatively “undifferentiated”: they can’t see a huge difference in nationality, religion, race, or culture. To be a good American is to be a good Christian, is to be white, is to love God, baseball, and mom’s apple pie.
The “rational” end is embodied by the low-tax business types and the leave-me-alone libertarians. Both groups place a premium on autonomy, minimal government oversight and regulation, and a strong faith in the rightness of the free market and non-hierarchical democratic ideals. To be a good American is to exercise your rights and freedoms by working hard, exploiting opportunities as they arise, and keeping your nose out of other peoples’ business.
We can see, broadly, the significant and conflicting ways these forces have influenced the Bush administration over the last eight years. With a Democratic government now in power, it will be interesting to see how they reconcile these policies and their outcomes with their own values. I have always maintained that whereas the Republican “center of gravity” is mythic-rational, the Democratic one is rational-aperspectival: they are composed of Classical Liberals and modern ones. The modern liberal is primarily concerned with equality — by race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, age, class, culture, religion, etc. — and the application of power such that it eliminates harmful socio-political constructions. As such, modern Democrats have been intrinsically disadvantaged: they are more diverse, more difficult to unify, and have to consider more perspectives, more interests, and cater to more interest groups, than the Republicans.
(In addition, they must still demonstrate certain “mythic” traits: love of God, country, and the military, forming a somewhat schizophrenic approach to politics and governance. I recently read, I believe in Der Spiegel, that the Russians prefer Republican leaders because they are easier to predict; Democratic behaviors fall along a wider spectrum: mythic, rational, and aperspectival.)
The conditions for the unification of mythic and rational Republicans (and their sub-groups) appear to have collapsed, at least for the time being. The efficiency, discipline, and ruthlessness of Obama’s Democratic team (along with the obvious social and economic conditions) has given them an upper hand. The Economist roughly classified the Republicans into four groups; how would you classify the various types of Democrats? How many groups will Obama and Pelosi have to hold together?
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