ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, July 1, 1996 TAG: 9607020003
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ART POSKOCIL
THERE HAS been a lot of discussion recently about the Republican Party's "problem" with the uncompromising demand of its Christian-right constituency that the party's platform maintain an unequivocal and unqualified anti-abortion stance.
Their "problem" of course is that a sizeable majority of Americans are and remain pro-choice. Moreover, although most advocates of women's choice are not single-issue voters, in sharp contrast to their pro-life counterparts, they nevertheless care enough about this issue for it to considerably influence their voting decisions.
And that, in a nutshell, is the real problem for the GOP on this issue.
It would not be a problem, clearly, if Republican legislators were by and large ideologically committed to a pro-life position. But that is not the case, as is evident by the history of flip-flops on the issue by a number of prominent Republicans, and by the obvious reluctance of many others to oppose abortion in cases where a pregnancy results from rape or incest. Clearly, if one views abortion as the murder of an unborn person, no such reluctance is warranted.
Nor would there be a problem if the GOP were confident that, on the whole, it stood to gain votes by backing a total ban on abortions. Surely, the Republicans have wooed the Christian right not because of shared causes, but because of that group's tendency to bloc-vote on single issues. However, the idea in supporting such constituencies is that, even though the cause taken up may not be generally popular, more votes are to be gained than lost by espousing it. In the case of abortion rights, perhaps not. Hence, the problem.
So how did the Republicans get themselves into such a pickle? Ask Dr. Frankenstein! They have, indeed, created a monster they cannot control, but it is not limited to the now powerfully organized and politically regimented Christian right. In a greater sense, the GOP bears much of the responsibility for turning the entire electorate into a monster: a shallow, cynical, image-consuming beast that has about as much capacity to deal with politics at the level of a Lincoln-Douglas debate as a hyperactive 6-year-old might bring to the solution of a complex chess problem.
To really understand what the Republican Party has brought upon itself and the nation, and why, it is necessary to recognize that, as a political party, it has for some time represented the pecuniary interests of only a fairly small segment of wealthier Americans. Yet, in elections, it has to compete head-on with Democrats whose platform has historically represented the real economic and social interests of a sizeable majority of Americans.
In a two-party system, how to compete when your real constituency is a distinct minority of eligible voters? First, do whatever you can to minimize the number of actual voters from the ranks of those who are less likely to support you. Second, assiduously woo one-issue voting blocs whenever practicable - that is, as long as your actual constituency is not seriously compromised economically. Third, obfuscate, obfuscate, obfuscate.
For instance, try to sell ordinary citizens (your own wealthy constituency already knows better) the idea that one should vote for the person rather than for the party. (Of course, if the person is Oliver North, this rule does not hold, as Virginians, most notably Sen. John Warner, have learned.)
The GOP has capitalized on each of these three strategies. Even as voter turnouts continue their long decline towards levels of participation that threaten to imperil the perceived legitimacy of the electoral process, most Republican legislators persist in resisting or seeking to water down such measures as the Motor Voter Law, which they invariably (and correctly) see as threatening to their relative vote counts.
With respect to their often shameless courtship of one-issue voting groups, the GOP has found that there are generally a lot more votes to be won than lost through this device. What, after all, does such support cost? Simply proclaim, in coded language where necessary, that you hate or fear whatever or whomever your targeted constituency hates or fears, that you are committed to whatever beliefs or values they revere, that you too treasure and will defend whatever they perceive as a threatened right.
You might have to push for a silly law here or there, or vote against something you know would be good; but that is not a lot to pay, especially when most other voters have come to shrug off such actions as practical politics.
Thus, most Republicans and a good many Democrats stand far to the right of their own constituencies on issues such as gun control, and yet pay little for it in lost votes.
However, through its support of such single-issue voting blocs as the NRA and the Christian right, the GOP has encouraged their increasing development and efficiency as political forces, and has in turn itself been forced to advocate ever more extreme positions to placate the demands of these constituencies.
That the Christian right has become politically powerful, and a dangerous threat to personal freedom and to free inquiry in research and education, is clear to many; but that this monster is, politically, largely a product of a GOP strategy of whoring for votes may be less obvious.
Despite their best efforts to expand their voter base, Republicans have nevertheless spent most of the past half-century as the minority party in the Congress.
Their response to chronic minority status, in addition to those already discussed, has been to run against government itself, to portray public office as an inherently corrupting career that turns long-term incumbents into grasping, insensitive freeloaders at the public trough, a club of insiders contemptuous of the very people they have been elected to represent.
This strategy has contributed mightily to a dramatic and continuing decline of citizen trust (and as already mentioned, of voter participation) not only in government, but in every related American institution.
Over this same 50-year period, television has materially abetted the GOP's efforts to turn politics into a shallow contest of image management, and to gradually reshape the electorate into a largely atomized mass who view the political process as a collection of individual contests. To such voters, interest-group politics appears boring, tawdry and unheroic. Television, as our now dominant medium, has turned us into entertainment-seeking spectacle watchers, for whom personalities, not issues or ideas, dominate.
This, in turn, magnifies the effectiveness of those voters who, like the Christian right, still practice disciplined interest-group politics; and of course it inherently advances the obfuscatory interests of the GOP, whose politics disserve the real interests of most Americans.
As we know, the GOP has so successfully made its point that to be "in" is to be "out" that, for the first time in the lifetime of most Americans, we have a Republican Congress. And there's the rub, perhaps. Not only are Republicans now inherently suspect as the party in power, but they have frightened and alienated many voters through their drunk-with-success boorishness during the first year or so of their ascendancy.
From the chortling thugishness of Newt Gingrich to the disingenuous simpering of George Allen, Republicans exhibited an arrogant confidence that no shading, no subterfuge was any longer required of them. They set out to kill public broadcasting, to drastically reduce support for education and the arts, to reduce the tax "burden" of the rich, to turn their backs on environmental protection, to pull safety nets away from the growing population of poor Americans.
In Virginia, Gov. Allen brazenly attempted to cut educational and social funding, and with respect to consumer and environmental protections, he put undisguised foxes in every henhouse. Who did he place in charge of environmental protection but a protege of tree-hugger-hater James Watt! Who now protects the state's consumers from the excesses of unscrupulous used-car dealers? The dealers themselves! Etc.
However, in their hubris the Republicans overestimated the TV lobotomization of the American people, and thus they have been forced to deal with strong resistance to many of their initiatives. Thus, many GOP legislators have begun to draw back in stupefaction from Gingrich and from the freshmen-led faction that has dominated the party since the 1994 elections, and which itself appears heedless of public reaction to its behavior.
Back then, many in both parties questioned the continuing viability of the Democratic Party. But now the Republicans have suffered not only a dramatic waning of public support for many of their proposed initiatives, but also one embarrassment after another from the excesses, personal as well as political, of their once vaunted freshman class.
Now, too, they are forced to ever-greater extremes to placate their Christian right and bazooka rights contingents, and it is the GOP that appears to be coming apart at the seams. Yes, the Republicans have a problem, but they can only wish that it were merely the party's platform stand on abortion.
Art Poskocil is an associate professor of sociology at Hollins College.
LENGTH: Long : 151 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: Bob Newman/Newsdayby CNB