Essay in Focus: America's Right - All at sea

The essay on which this review if based originally appeared in Prospect Magazine. You can read the original article here.

The consensus has been established: the Republican field for 2012 is a shambles. Romney is too opportunistic, Pawlenty too dull, Palin and Bachman too extreme, Huntsman a nobody in polling terms and some of the party’s biggest hitters not even candidates. In this article, Adam Haslett follows one of the darlings of the Republican’s social-conservative faction, Mike Huckabbe, on a Freedom Cruise and diagnoses the American right as “all at sea” when it comes to taking on Obama in 2012.

The first thing that stands out in this article is that the Republican field is poorer without Huckabee’s presence. Many of Huckabee’s views will be unpalatable; however his frankness on the economy (even before Obama became President) and his passion for social issues makes his candidacy interesting, if nothing else. And such comments as “we’ve become a party of such fractured purity. It’s all or nothing, now or never. It’s not whether the government functions, it’s whether the government is ideologically pure” are too incisive a diagnosis of some of the underlying problems with today’s Republican Party not to be heard.

Shining through this article is that the uneasy yet strong Republican alliance of libertarians and evangelical Christians is changing into one of swinging cutters (envisaging a core America as perfect at the founding father’s constitutional conception) and those who recognise that budgets must be cut, but the full legitimacy of the federal government maintained. This is a dangerously internalised debate for the Republican Party to have at a time when it must focus on the country and not itself. But more importantly, the debate appears to be being won by the Tea Party alliance of evangelical Christians and big cutters within the party. If this is the group that dominates the primaries and comes to define the Republican Party, it risks being turned into a joke in the eyes of the American moderates who decide elections.

Instead, the Republican Party ought to define themselves by moderate cuts in the national interest - preserving the American state by cutting rather than decimating it. All must be framed in the national interest, and they must portray the democrats, as the Conservatives did in the UK their Labour opposition, as deficit deniers out-of-touch with economic and fiscal realities. The Tea Party will still vote for them –they will have nowhere else to turn in most states – but so will many moderates who recognise the need to cut to preserve. On its current course, the USS Republican is all at sea and sinking.