“I was a Democrat most of my adult life. I didn’t leave my party, and we’re not suggesting you leave yours. I am telling you that what I felt was that the leadership of the Democratic Party had left me and millions of patriotic Democrats in this country who believed in freedom.”
- Ronald Regan in a speech describing his move from being a Democrat to a Republican.
In the 1980s Ronald Reagan championed “freedom” as a reason for Democrats to become, and support, Republicans. Now the political pendulum has swung the other way. The Republican Party leadership, with a lock on federal power for five years, has dramatically failed to preserve American liberty. Their failure is why many Republicans have or will move from their current leadership to either a reformed Republicanism, or to the Democratic Party. In response to Democratic failures, Ronald Reagan successfully convinced America that he would restore its “freedom” - “just another word for nothing left to lose.” The “Reagan Revolution” message of deregulation and small ‘leave you alone’ government moved blue-collar “Reagan Democrats” to the Republican Party. The change set the stage for a Republican majority, realized in congress in 1994.
We are now ready for the opposite revolution because Republicans have been abandoned by their party leadership. The issue is their failure to preserve American liberty, a word referring to freedom from the arbitrary use of power, whether it comes from the religious right, neoconservative visions of grandeur in Iraq and Middle East or from the failures of crony capitalism, most recently with leaving tens of thousands of American citizens abandoned in a lawless state following Hurricane Katrina.
In yesterday’s New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman quoted Janadas Devan, a Straits Times (Singapore) columnist, trying to explain the difference between Republicans of old and today’s GOP,
“Janadas Devan, a Straits Times columnist, tried to explain to his Asian readers how the U.S. is changing. ‘Today’s conservatives,’ he wrote, ‘differ in one crucial aspect from yesterday’s conservatives: the latter believed in small government, but believed, too, that a country ought to pay for all the government that it needed.’
‘The former believe in no government, and therefore conclude that there is no need for a country to pay for even the government that it does have. … [But] it is not only government that doesn’t show up when government is starved of resources and leached of all its meaning. Community doesn’t show up either, sacrifice doesn’t show up, pulling together doesn’t show up, ‘we’re all in this together’ doesn’t show up.’”
While Republican strategists once talked about making government small enough to drown it in a bathtub, after Hurricane Katrina burst the levees, people now understand better about drowning, and the need for effective government to prevent it. This is the end of the George W. Bush revolution to completely destroy government effectiveness. It remains to be seen what, and who, will replace it - and whether one or more Democrats can and will answer the call.
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