Have you ever really wanted to say something, but held back because you didn't want to alienate a group of people who were members of a club you belonged to? Well, if we're going to be practical about the future of the Republican Party, it's time to state the obvious. I often wish conservatives would just acknowledge how far the country has been dragged to the right over the last forty years.
When I was growing up, there was a term, "Rockefeller Republicanism" that defined a politician as being fiscally conservative, but socially liberal. I'm sad to say we're now an endangered species because even today's so-called moderate Republicans are far more conservative than they were back in the Seventies and Eighties, and conservatives much more extreme. The final straw was the emergence of the Tea Party, many of whom regard negotiating mutual agreements as akin to treason. Thus, a critical consequence of this shift is that "compromise" has become an expletive in the GOP vocabulary.
Based on some of his views and policies, an iconic conservative president such as Ronald Reagan, wouldn't even qualify as a "true" Republican today. Although he slashed taxes during his first year in office, he raised them in '82, '83, '84 and '86. He gave amnesty to 2.7 million undocumented immigrants. The national debt soared from $700 billion to $3 trillion. He backed gun control. He would become the first president to host an openly gay couple overnight at the White House. Most of all, Reagan was willing to sit down and talk to the other side and even though a lot of times, he didn't end up doing what the Democrats wanted, he at least listened and that gave him a lot of credibility.
Peter Wehner, a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, has served in the last three Republican administrations. In Conservatives in Name Only, he challenges the hostile obstinacy that currently defines the right wing and asserts that today's archconservative stance of confrontation, rhetoric and brinkmanship not only does the country a great disservice; it is actually a false representation of true conservatism. The final straw was the emergence of the Tea Party, many of whom regard compromise as treason.
"Conservatism, for starters, is rooted in human experience. It appreciates the complexity of human society. It believes in a givenness to human nature and in enduring principles, yet it has the capacity to apply those principles to changing circumstances. And because it isn't a rigid ideology, it leaves itself open to self-examination and self-correction. Authentic conservatism has a high regard for things empirical, for facts that can lead us to better apprehend the truth."
In Rescuing Compromise, Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and author of Government's End: Why Washington Stopped Working says that compromise is actually based on the document that functions as the supreme law in this country, the Constitution of the United States.
"The Constitution forces compromise not merely between the branches, levels and institutions of government, but also within each of them, and within each of the parties that populate them... At the end of the day, the Madisonian framework asks not that participants like compromising but that they do it--and, above all, that they recognize the legitimacy of the system that makes them do it. It asks them to acknowledge that compromise-forcing constitutional structure is principled and admirable, even if some particular compromises are not."
The two-party system has always had the partisan and the opinionated, but there was also a basic modicum of duty. Certain things had to get done. You also had a much different composition in Congress. In 1980, 60 senators were considered people that would vote both ways. You had socially conservative Democrats and fiscally liberal Republicans. So you could get people on different bills to vote across the aisle and provide a quorum to get things done because there was a common understanding that compromise was the guiding principle of our political system.
CNN Chief Congressional Correspondent, Dana Bash, correlates the gridlock in Washington to the changed demographics of the Senate, whose newer members were not a part of the culture of negotiate and compromise that was accepted procedure in previous generations of legislators. In The Death of Horse-Trading On the Hill, Bash points out that in the 2015 Congress, more than 40 Senators have only served since 2011 and a record 52 are former members of the House, who are not deeply ingrained in the Senate's long history of cooperation and conciliation.
"It's not just that the extreme wings of both parties are emboldened," Bash says. "It is also about experience -- or lack thereof, in that art of legislating -- knowing what it means to give a little to get a little."
As someone who deals with a severe physical handicap, I know the only way for me to survive and thrive in the world is to look for options when faced with obstacles. So when I focus on a political problem, it's always with the intention of finding a place to start agreeing, resolving and advancing. And while they may not garner the headlines or dominate the polls, there are still many GOP supporters who are issue-oriented, invite conversation, respect differences of opinion, believe in negotiation and put sound policy before partisanship. But in the face of the party's shift to the Right, we've become a Silent Minority, and we must speak up to make our voices heard over the blusterous din of extremism.
It's still too early in the race to know who will emerge from the pack to win the GOP nomination for President. But come January of 2017, if there is a Republican in the White House, I hope he's comfortable being caught in a compromising position.