The Tiger at Home

Am following up on this. (Rather, to the comments to it.)

The Republican Party is tired. It is in disarray. It has nominated the one man who can win the presidency for it this year, but he is a very flawed candidate himself. And his presidency would do little for the party as a party — it would merely put off certain looming dangers.

What I meant when I said that the Republican Party’s coalition may be nearing the end of its natural life, is that many of the specific policy prescriptions it is pushing are dealing with less salient issues — to take one example, yes, taxes are higher than they ought to be in an ideal liberal democracy, but they are not so high that an election can be won on the issue; the deficit is more of a problem at this point. Given the problems people are experiencing with HMOs, to say nothing of the revolution in the workplace that has us young ‘uns all skipping from one job to another, the health care system does need some restructuring. (A move from job-linked health care to individual portable policies is my preference.)

On the other hand, the general broad-line principles — Lockean liberalism with a dash of social conservatism — are as attractive as ever. The political philosophy outlined in this interview speaks strongly enough to a significant fraction of the American populace that I can see no good reason to move to a sort of David Cameron-like Toryism.

Republicans are not Tories.  [Update:  I should say, rather, that American conservatives are not Tories.]

***

But it doesn’t matter what I think. American political parties gain their strength from the bottom up. (This does pre-date Obama’s presence on the federal scene.) If someone is selling something that others are buying, he or she can win primaries.

And if the time for an idea has come but the leaders have not, popular movements can out-maneuver politicians and get it done all the same, intense opposition from the stakeholders notwithstanding — see taxpayer revolts in California and Massachusetts. Or Ward Connerly’s efforts against racial preferences in California and Michigan.

So we’ll do just fine, even if the Republican Party gets pummeled in November 2008.

Update:

No sooner do I pen this article, but I find corroboration (link at the bottom of that Reason interview) –

Massachusetts must have been a terrifying place in 1995. A relatively recent arrival in the commonwealth myself, I had no idea that the mid-90s was a time when health care was unobtainable. I didn’t know about the washed out bridges and unplowed roads. Nor do I recall seeing bands of feral children roaming the streets from 8:00 am to 3:00 pm due to the lack of public schools.

But a popular ballot initiative to eliminate Massachusetts’s income tax—thus bringing the state budget back to 1995 levels—is being greeted with howls of protest and predictions that the state will degenerate into underfunded chaos. …

The initiative is brutally simple: A 50 percent decrease in the income tax rate effective January 1, 2009, and the rest abolished one year later. That takes the state from its current revenues of about $28 billion down to the $17 billion it had in 1995. …

In 2002, the Committee for Small Government snagged 45 percent of the vote with a similar initiative. “We found we could get a good respectable vote,” says committee chair Carla Howell. The effort got almost no coverage, and every single one of the few editorial pages that took notice of the proposal opposed it, says Howell. …

A statewide survey in April by polling firm Fabrizo McLaughlin found that Massachusetts voters think their government wastes about 41 cents [PDF] for every dollar of revenue. Elimination of the state income tax would reduce the state’s budget by about 40 percent. As the kids used to say in the ’90s: Coincidence? I think not.

Ha. Now there’s the Spirit of ‘76 at work!