Reason Magazine - Staff

Wise Up, Stupid Party

pbasham@cato.org (Patrick Basham) — Fri, 27 May 2005 00:00:00 EDT

"It seems a barren thing this Conservatism—an unhappy crossbreed, the mule of politics that engenders nothing." British statesman Benjamin Disraeli's nineteenth-century description rings eerily true following the British Conservative party's third straight defeat in this month's elections. The irony is that the Conservatives are without influence at a time when the fusion of free market economics and individual freedom should be putting them in the catbird seat.

Latter-day Conservatives have made every effort to conform to John Stuart Mill's categorization of them as "the stupidest party." It's a generation since Margaret Thatcher poured revitalizing ideological juice into the Conservative bottle; since then, the party has wandered intellectually naked across the political landscape. The Conservative party can only become relevant again if it becomes a party of ideas.

The good news is that the Tories can do this fairly easily—by returning to their principles and filling an intellectual vacuum in contemporary UK politics. An ineffectual, tax-and-spend Labour government was reelected by default. For many voters, there was no alternative. Despite the Conservative party's 200-year history of reinvention (usually after losing office), most British voters, with good reason, consider the party out of touch.

The bad news is that, in their post-election positioning, the Tories have shown a passion for bickering but only sporadic interest in ideology. Conservatives don't need a tedious set of detailed policies, but they do need a serious, radical manifesto that speaks to a grown-up electorate. Above all, Conservatives need to pen a philosophically coherent narrative that explains the connection between economic and social freedom. It's time for the party to embrace the spirit of liberty in the British body politic.

Consider economic policy. Following 66 tax increases and a one-third rise in government spending (in real terms), the Conservatives responded with fiscal me-tooism: promises of targeted, trivial tax cutting and spending that would have increased at a slightly slower rate than Labour's. Britons are grossly overtaxed and overregulated, yet the party's miserable goal is to replace Labour as the manager of a bloated welfare state.

The problem isn't that the Conservatives had a secret agenda to shrink the welfare state. The problem is that they did not. This Big-Government Conservatism concedes wide swaths of ideological ground, from spending to taxation, from health care to education. Yet, for all the squishiness, the party still attracts just one in three voters.

By holding onto their principles, by sticking up for public service consumers rather than government functionaries, the Tories can only improve their chances. No more "Bush Lite," government-first solutions. Britain needs to subject its public services to radical market-based reform—ending Labour's regulatory death grip on the private sector, defending competition and deregulation that reward risk-taking and wealth creation, and empowering patients and parents through large-scale, not piecemeal, restructuring of the health care system.

In the contest between personal responsibility and government paternalism, Conservatives should back the anti-nanny state. Stop appeasing the finger-wagging social engineers, the food fascists, and the anti-smoking, anti-gambling zealots who seek to micromanage every facet of life. Conservatives should treat voters as grown-ups. Opposing Labour's innate illiberalism will enable the Conservatives to plant their flag upon vacant, yet fertile, classical liberal territory. The Tories are fortunate that, unlike America's Republicans, they are unencumbered by the religious right.

With Conservative party leader Michael Howard heading for the exit, the prospects for a renewal in the party are mixed. David Davis, the current front-runner to replace Howard, has come on strong by opposing plans for a national ID card, laying out a law-and-order platform that speaks as much about habeas corpus and presumption of innocence as it does about getting tough on crime, and starting a new trend toward pols identifying themselves as "low-tax Tories." (The implication that there can be any other kind of Tory is a dismal comment on the party's ideological bankruptcy.) But even Davis' ID card comments seem to focus more on budgetary and technical concerns than on the essential right not to be under perpetual government scrutiny. Still, it's a hopeful sign that the Tories are at least asserting individual liberty as a core belief of the party.

The Conservatives can choose to govern based upon the principles of freedom and liberty, or they can choose to sustain the political establishment's cozy consensus, thereby continuing their descent into political irrelevance. The right choice will serve both their partisan and the national interest.

How Many Votes Has the Pope?

pbasham@cato.org (Patrick Basham) — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 00:00:00 EDT

George W. Bush was the first sitting president to attend a papal funeral. President Carter sent his mother to Pope John Paul I's 1978 funeral. Such symbolic change speaks volumes about the evolution in Catholic America's voting habits over the past quarter-century and about Pope John Paul II's role in that conversion.

John Paul II's influence is particularly striking considering Catholic America's checkered political past. In 1928, Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith suffered electorally for his Catholicism. Many non-Catholic voters assumed that, once in the Oval Office, Smith's loyalty to the Constitution would take a back seat to his loyalty to Rome. John F. Kennedy was narrowly elected president in 1960 on the back of 83 percent of all Catholic votes cast -- votes that overwhelmed residual non-Catholic fear of papal influence within the White House.

Catholic voting habits began to shift less than a generation ago. Through the 1960s, Catholics formed one of the most reliable Democratic voting blocs. However, by 1972, cultural upheaval produced then-uncommon Catholic support for a Republican presidential candidate, Richard Nixon. The trend away from the Democrats has largely continued for three decades.

Pope John Paul II exerted considerable direct and indirect influence upon this electoral shift. This reflected, in part, his sky-high favorability rating among American Catholics, ratings that consistently hovered around 90 percent. The pope also continued a tradition, dating to the 1930s, whereby the Catholic Church sought to influence U.S. government policy and political debate, a development reinforced by the Second Vatican Council of the early-to-mid-1960s.

Until fairly recently, the Catholic Church, principally through the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, sought greater government involvement in the economy and higher government spending on social programs. Although he shared the NCCB's antipathy to the free market, John Paul II also played a significant role in converting many conservative Catholics into reliable Republican voters.

Inspired by the pope's political assertiveness, American Catholic leaders became increasingly active on social issues. Church leaders utilized the political communications tools at their disposal, namely the hundreds of Catholic publications and diocesan newsletters (with combined circulation in the tens of millions), in tandem with concerted congressional lobbying campaigns, and the tacit endorsement of individual parishes being mobilized for conservative political purposes.

During the 2004 presidential campaign, the NCCB published a pro-life guide to the election that drew heavily upon John Paul II's writings. Some Church leaders asserted that Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) should be denied communion because he is pro-choice. Whereas JFK was viewed in some quarters as too Catholic, Kerry was deemed insufficiently Catholic on issues critical to conservatives.

This sea change demonstrated that the contemporary Catholic vote is now the most important swing vote in American politics. In the modern era, Catholics are the bellwether voters: as go Catholics, so goes the nation. Since 1972, they have always cast their votes for the popular vote winner.

Hence, the Republican Party's "Catholic Strategy." Bush strategist Karl Rove identified the Catholic vote as central to his long-term plan to convert swathes of traditional Democratic voters, thereby transforming the Republicans into the majority party. Throughout the 2004 campaign, Rove maintained that, if Bush won the Catholic vote, he would be reelected. Rove was right.

Rove sought to turn out several million additional Catholic voters. Last year, Catholic turnout was 63 percent, up from 57 percent four years earlier, and constituted more than one-in-four voters nationwide, voters disproportionately distributed in key battleground states such as Ohio and Florida. Bush, a Methodist, impressively won 52 percent of the Catholic vote versus 47 percent for John Kerry, only the third Catholic to win a major party's presidential nomination. Only one Democrat since 1952 (Walter Mondale in 1984) had previously lost the Catholic vote by such a margin.

Bush's lead among religiously active Catholics grew from nine points in 2000 to 13 points in 2004. Among white, non-Hispanic Catholics (one in five voters), Bush went from a seven point lead in 2000 to a 13 point lead four years later. Among Hispanic Catholics, the Democratic candidate's lead shrank from 32 to 19 points. Bush won 54 percent of Catholic votes in Ohio and 57 percent of Catholic votes in Florida.

However, the American population is trending toward less religious observance, not more, and liberals attend church far less frequently than conservatives. Given this reality, how did the Republican campaign successfully bring the pope into electoral play?

As president, Bush adroitly employed networking, symbolism, and substance to maximum effect. Upon inauguration, Bush began regular networking meetings with a conservative Catholic advisory group and his campaign later benefited from the support of well-funded conservative Catholic political action committees. Symbolically, Bush gave the 2001 commencement speech at the University of Notre Dame. As president, Bush never ceased to court the pope, meeting with him several times, liberally quoting his words, and awarding him the Medal of Freedom.

Substantively, Bush emphasized the issues upon which Pope John Paul II and he agreed, going so far as to borrow the pope's "culture of life" sound bite to refer broadly to socially conservative positions on abortion, euthanasia, and marriage. Of course, the pope and the president disagreed vehemently on Iraq, the death penalty, and many aspects of economic policy. John Paul II once argued that "savage capitalism" is little better than "savage Marxism."

Bush astutely chose to ignore such serious cleavages, emphasizing the pope's socially conservative side. Conservative Catholic leaders were emboldened by the pope's lead on social issues and, in turn, they encouraged traditionalist Catholics to support Bush and fellow socially conservative Republicans.

In June 2004, Bush dashed off to the Vatican to meet John Paul II to exhort the pope to encourage American bishops to criticize Kerry's stance on various Catholic-sensitive social issues. At that meeting, the pope told Bush, "I follow with great appreciation your commitment to the promotion of moral values in American society, particularly with regard to respect for life and family." The Bush campaign subsequently placed the pope's picture on its campaign website under the headline "Catholics for Bush." The Republican National Committee web site contained entire sections tailored to conservative Catholic voters.

Over four years, the Bush campaign built a nationwide network of more than 50,000 precinct level Catholic "team leaders" who introduced fellow church going Catholics to the Republican Party. Catholic outreach operations included direct mail sent to parish registry lists, literature tables outside church sanctuaries, and email lists that publicized the Republican Party's pro-life position.

But does Republican electoral success confirm that the more pivotal Catholic voter is becoming a more socially conservative voter? No, it does not. In fact, traditional Catholics are not gaining in numbers. Regular church going, traditionalist Catholics remain a minority. Nevertheless, they are the Catholics most receptive to papal (and presidential) influence. For example, 60 percent of conservative Catholics believe in papal infallibility. The secret to conservative Catholics' electoral influence is that, in addition to being disproportionately located in the electorally critical rural and suburban Midwest, they have become far more politically active on their high priority issues.

The president and the pope's mutual emphasis upon social issues emboldened these Catholics to abandon voting habits based upon traditional bread-and-butter issues and, instead, to base voting more upon social concerns. Consequently, traditionalists increasingly perceive moral conservatism to be the political instrument of their faith. By contrast, liberal Catholics remain largely Democratic in their voting habits but suffer electorally as they are not nearly as politically organized or mobilized.

In terms of party identification, the unambiguous trend is for Catholics to identify less with the Democrats and more with the Republicans. In 1960, 82 percent of Catholics identified themselves as Democrats. Twenty years later, only 46 percent identified with the Democrats. In the mid-1980s, Democrats led Republicans among white Catholics by 7 points in party identification; by the mid-1990s, the gap had largely disappeared.

In addition to responding to both papal and presidential political marketing campaigns, Catholics are drifting towards the Republicans for sociological reasons. Catholics become more Republican as they become better educated, wealthier, and more suburban. Interestingly, the Republicans have experienced the steadiest Catholic vote gains among younger Americans, particularly males, who are most attracted to the Republican rhetoric espousing fiscal conservatism.

John Paul II's political influence extended beyond Catholic America. This reflects in no small measure a steady decline in anti-Catholic bigotry. Opinion polls reveal that evangelicals viewed Pope John Paul II more favorably than either the Rev. Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson. It also reflects conservative evangelicals' newfound willingness to ally themselves with conservative Catholics on social issues. In recent years, leading conservative religious leaders heaped praise upon the pope's role in and influence in the abortion and gay marriage debates.

The forthcoming selection of a new pope will reverberate throughout American politics on issues such as abortion, euthanasia, gay rights, the faith-based initiative, judicial nominations, and stem cell research. Ominously, perhaps, for the Republicans, the electoral deal between Catholic America and the Republican party is only partially sealed. A new pope could potentially unravel this socially conservative coalition.

Some conservative Republicans await the white smoke above the Vatican, signifying the successful conclusion of the papal conclave, with equal trepidation to many liberal Catholics. A more theologically liberal pontiff -- or one as conservative but less politically interventionist, or simply less charismatic than John Paul II -- may provide an opportunity for the Democrats to regain some lost ground. Conversely, many on the Karl Rove wing of the Republican Party pray nightly for a conservative Latin American pope to encourage further Hispanic defections, or at least a reliably conservative choice.

In assessing Pope John Paul II's impact upon American politics, one is struck by the contrast between his influences in different parts of the world. He clearly helped to advance the cause of political and economic liberty in Eastern Europe. However, his political contribution within the American context advanced those who advocate a greater role for the state in shepherding individuals all the way through their private lives.

Some 175 years ago, Catholics comprised less than 5 percent of our nation's population. At the time, the political sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville presciently noted Catholicism's propensity to flourish on American soil. Today, there are more than 65 million Catholics in the United States, totaling 23 percent of the nation's population.

That President Bush may owe his current position to the growth and growing influence of Catholic America demonstrates the strength of modern American pluralism and traditionalism's continuing resonance among an important segment of the American electorate, a traditionalism that Pope John Paul II both visibly embodied and assiduously nurtured.

A Long View of Short Careers

pbasham@cato.org (Patrick Basham) — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 00:00:00 EST

There's nothing like the first weeks of a new Congress to demonstrate how conservatives embrace political tradition with all the air in their lungs. Each has his or her favorite quote from Edmund Burke or Russell Kirk bemoaning political change for change's sake. If only we could go back to the good old days, sounds the familiar conservative refrain, when our elected officials both had modest policy ambitions and kept their public word.

Unfortunately, too few conservative officeholders uphold the political traditions they claim to carry around like sacred tablets, such as the traditional view that politics is not a career. The recent death of Tillie Fowler, former Republican congresswoman from Florida, is a reminder of the gulf between conservative rhetoric and record.

Fowler was elected to Congress in 1992 after promising to serve no more than four terms in Washington. Elected with a large majority of the vote, she was subsequently reelected three times without opposition.

In 1998, Fowler was elected vice chairwoman of the House Republican Conference. By 2000, she had climbed to the No. 5 position in the House Republican leadership. At a time when she was the most powerful woman in Congress, Fowler kept her eight year-old promise to her constituents and chose not to seek a fifth term.

Since Fowler's first election victory, several dozen legislators have entered the halls of Congress promising to leave office voluntarily after three terms in the House of Representatives. They include Matt Salmon of Arizona, Bob Schaffer of Colorado, and Mark Sanford of South Carolina. Collectively, they are known as the self-limiters, who came to Washington not for a government career but to contribute to national policymaking before returning, like Tillie Fowler, to their former lives and (usually private sector) jobs.

In doing so, self-limiters uphold an important, if largely ignored, political tradition. Those who wrote our Constitution were confident that sufficient safeguards, such as a tradition of voluntary retirements, were in place to forestall careerism. Hence, they chose not to include a term limits provision in the new Constitution. At the federal level, a tradition of voluntary retirement after only one or two terms in the House lasted until nearly the end of the 19th century.

Congressional tenure became important when the introduction of the seniority principle for congressional committee membership changed the dynamics of obtaining leadership positions. Consequently, between 1860 and 1920 House members' average tenure increased from four to eight years, and it has continued to rise ever since.

As the Framers suspected, the self-limiters' collective experience suggests that self-limitation helps to discipline a politician's legislative behavior. In practice, self-limiters exercise greater independence than their non-limited peers and appear less fearful of incurring the wrath of either party power brokers or special interest groups.

Over the past decade, many self-limiters stood out as the most fiscally conservative congressmen. They have been some of the most outspoken advocates for reform of flawed government programs such as Social Security and Medicare. It is increasingly clear that voluntary term limits contribute to a decline in political parochialism. In practice, this serves to reduce the growth in the size and scope of government. One hopes that more of the self-limiters' avowedly conservative colleagues will follow their lead.