Samuel Huntington, R.I.P.

There are two articles worth reading today, by Faoud Ajami and Jonah Goldberg, on the death of political scientist Samuel Huntington. Attacked as a nativist mossback by people who probably didn't read him, Huntington was a profound realist. His central insight is that culture trumps economics as a source both of national identity and world conflict. Culture includes religion and everything else that forms a nation's deepest sense of self. His thesis is being proven today, for the umpteenth time, in Gaza. Our trials in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with the disaster that grew out of Palestinian elections, confirm his skepticism about American ambitions to remake the world in its own democratic image. Huntington believed in an America something like the City on a Hill cited by Ronald Reagan -- a country true to its cultural roots and political traditions, serving as a beacon to the world. Republicans could do worse than return to that idea as a core tenet of their foreign and domestic policy.

God and Liberty

Randall Hoven in American Thinker makes a persuasive case that libertarians and the religious right really can share space in the Republican tent. His argument skates past at least one tough issue -- see below -- but it's a useful counterweight to the divisive talk on both sides. In that category I put Mike Huckabee's sniping at libertarian "faux-cons" and Kathleen Parker's claim that "the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP" is the party's real problem. Inquisitors like Huckabee and Parker need to understand that 1) the GOP's wouldn't have a coherent idea on economics (or much else) without its strong classic-liberal tradition and 2) that it couldn't elect more than a few sewer district board members without the support of religious conservatives. Without its intellectual commitment to liberty, it would be just a confused copy of the Democratic Party -- which in many ways it became in the era of "compassionate conservatism." Without its social-conservative energy, it would be relegated to the political margins, more or less where the Libertarian Party is today.

Hoven is basically asking libertarians to recognize that the agenda of the so-called “religious right” is generally in synch with their own desire for liberty and limited government. Historically, religious conservatives -- especially those "dissenting" Protestants, such as Baptists, in sects not favored by establishment -- have wanted little more than freedom to practice their religion publicly and freedom from the entanglement of churches and state power. Deep down, I think that history still matters, though evangelicals certainly have a higher political profile than in the old days. They may want to influence the culture, and they don't want all barriers to vulgarity and obscenity removed from the public square. But they also tend to distrust government, which they (rightly) see as a force that secularists -- especially secularist judges -- will use as much as they can to push religion into the shadows. They also believe, with reason, that private charity delivered through their churches beats the welfare state when it comes to getting real help to those most in need. As F.A. Hayek has noted, this limited view of the state, though not religious in itself, nevertheless has been favored by political leaders of strong religious convictions. Limitless government, from the French Revolution to the Soviet Union, has always been preferred by those who are hostile to religion.


Religious conservatives do try to influence public policy through the electoral process, but so does everyone else. And if they can win in a fair democratic vote on one of their core issues, like gay marriage, that means they have most of the people on their side. More importantly, if they lose in a fair democratic contest on something like gay marriage, the kind of judges they favor would not seek to reverse that vote and impose a gay-marriage ban over the objections of the people. Conservative judges don’t think that way.


Another issue dear to religious conservatives is that of public-square religion, like crosses or Christmas trees on public property or “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. Here they also tend to have majorities on their side, or at least only a small minority finds itself so offended that it cares to protest. Since a majority has no problem with “under God,” the question then is whether any minority’s rights are being infringed. To many liberals, simply being reminded that you’re in a minority – a non-believer in a religious society, for instance – somehow deprives you of a civil right. A few judges go this route, but most of us would agree that there is no “right” of a religious minority not to be reminded of majority views.


To sum up the big-tent case: Secular libertarians and religious conservatives may have sharply different world views, but they have a similar preference for limited government. So what explains the political gulf between them? Why does Sarah Palin, for instance, inspire such different reactions among religious-right conservatives and classic-liberal intellectuals? Cultural divisions could have something to do with it. GOP elites and the rank and file come from different worlds. In so many ways, Alaska is very far from Manhattan.

But on at least one major issue (and there may be others), the more secular conservatives have legitimate reason to distrust the religious right. It's about public education. It centers on the teaching of evolution and the desire of religious right either to downplay Darwinian science or "balance" it with the teaching of creationism as an acceptable alternate view.


Polls suggest that the public's attitude toward this theologically loaded issue is complex. One 2008 Gallup survey says 60% Republicans believe that God created humans in their present from 10,000 years ago, while only 38% of Democrats and 40% of independents agreed. But a 2007 USA Today suggests that a majority of Americans actually see both creationism and evolution as likely explanations for life on Earth. And 64% of the respondents in a 2005 Pew poll said they were open to the idea of teaching both views, even though only 42% were strict creationists themselves. But if the public is fuzzy on the validity of evolutionary theory, scientists are not. Creationism is religious doctrine, not science. Ditto for "intelligent design." Injecting either into school curriculum as "science" is wrong for at least two reasons that offend the classic-liberal conscience: It entangles religion and state and teaches factual error. As long as the religious right seeks to inject creationism into science curricula, it can expect resistance from those on the right who value reason and science along with liberty.

Original Sins

What's in the Republican DNA? Ask a liberal that question and you'll get a litany of dark elements: Racism, nativism, red-baiting, anti-intellectualism and fear. Frank Rich recently served up this dish to his New York Times readers, who were no doubt ready to believe every word of it. In Rich's view, the GOP "is now more representative of 20th-century South Africa during apartheid than 21st-century America." Neil Gabler in the Los Angeles Times traces the party's dominant conservative strain not to principled libertarians such as Barry Goldwater but to Joe McCarthy, the 20th century's leading practitioner of what historian Richard Hofstadter called "the paranoid style in American politics." Both men, in their way, were nurturing the old libel that Republicans can win national elections only by appealing to the baser instincts of American voters. If John McCain somehow had won, that would quickly have become the standard theory to explain his victory.

It's never smart to tune out your critics, especially the more thoughtful ones such as Gabler. But the fact is that gaining and holding power in a two-party system demands considerable nose-holding. You don't get a majority on your side by setting out lofty principles and waiting for the voters to applaud. Instead, you need to patch together majorities by appealing to people and places that can have quite different interests, views of the world and views of each other. Until the 1960s, the Democratic Party held power by keeping Northern liberals and whites from the segregated South under one tent. As late as 1964, the most stubborn resistance to racial equality under the law came from within the Democratic Party. The Landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended the Jim Crow era in the South, would not have passed without the support of Senate Republicans and their leader Everett Dirksen, who worked with liberal Democrats to break the Southern Democrats' filibuster and bring the bill to the vote. It was Richard Russell, a Democrat from Georgia, who said, "We will resist to the bitter end any measure or any movement which would have a tendency to bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races in our (Southern) states."

Little-told stories such as these are good to remember when Democrats start talking about GOP Original Sin. The Democratic Party has other history it would rather live down, such as its confused response to Soviet aggression and its post-Vietnam defeatism. Southern whites did migrate to the Republican Party as the party turned to the right in 1964. But it took much more than the so-called "Southern strategy" to explain Richard Nixon's landslide win over George McGovern in 1972, when McGovern won only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. Then, as in other years of decisive Republican victories (1980, 1988 and 2004), the Democratic candidate was seen as weak or vacillating and the Republican won on a platform (and perception) of strength. A tradition of upholding American interests with a second-to-none defense has been part of Republican DNA at least as far back as Teddy Roosevelt. If Barack Obama finds a way to reestablish the Democratic Party in the voters' mind as a party of strength, the Republicans are in big trouble for the long term. But if he's not so inclined, or if he's stymied by the left wing of his party, then the GOP may come back sooner than its critics would ever have dreamed. And race won't have anything to do with it.