What is the point of the Republican Party anymore?
6th January 2023
Matt Purple at the Spectator.
Political parties in America have been many things over the years, from manifestations of regional interests to adjuncts of labor unions to glorified protest movements. Yet in modern times they’ve also been about ideas, vehicles for philosophies like liberalism and progressivism if you’re a Democrat and conservatism and nationalism if you’re a Republican. That’s not to say these isms don’t overlap with other factors like geography and class; they often do. But today’s parties are expected to have some substance to them, policies that amount to a coherent ideological whole.
For the GOP, this has meant the old fusionist blend of traditionalists and libertarians, Christian values and small government. And so it’s fair to ask how the party has performed on both these fronts. For the traditionalists, they’ve lost the battles over gay marriage, marijuana legalization, and prurient content on TV and in video games. The country is rapidly secularizing, while Christian churches are facing a crisis of attendance and resources. For the libertarians, the government is bigger than ever, the bureaucracy more intrusive than ever, the security state more autonomous than ever, and the national debt higher than ever.