Letters

From the May 1996 issue

GOP Gone Wrong

Virginia Postrel's editorial "Bloc Busters " (February) was most insightful. I too have watched as the Republican Party's focus has been diverted from a less government/more freedom agenda to one dominated by cultural/social issues. I wonder, however, how much of this can be ascribed to a weakness within the party leadership as she suggests.

While the catering to the Christian right by Republican presidential hopefuls, driven to some degree by Buchanan, Dornan, and Keyes, is seen as a necessity within the various campaign organizations, I agree that the grassroots voters are not so single-minded. In fact, even Ralph Reed has stated many times that the people represented under the umbrella of the Christian right are united by issues far more diverse than just cultural. As Postrel noted, they too pay taxes, struggle with regulations, and want the government to leave them alone.

Republicans are just lousy salesmen for their policies. The Democrats have years of experience polishing their one-liners and sound bites of demagoguery.

I feel the Democrats have successfully steered the discussion toward the social issues where they feel most comfortable attacking the conservative agenda. They know from the results of the '94 elections that if the public and media concentrate on the broad philosophical argument of the size and scope of government and its role in our lives, the average voter will side with the conservative/libertarian proponents. This has forced Republican members of Congress to devote too much time defending themselves and left precious little for advancing the ideas of free markets, less government, and less taxes.

Donald Holtzinger
Walnutport, PA

Postrel's February editorial is spot on: Republicans fail when they talk incessantly about "culture" and stray from the goal of radically reducing government. This is true because the case for cutting government is much stronger than the case for using government to encourage good values, and because Republicans who were elected to reduce government will be removed from office if voters perceive them to be insincere (the George Bush syndrome).

You are right, too, about opportunistic conservative intellectuals like Bill Bennett and the editors of The Weekly Standard. (That anti-Internet cartoon on the cover really rubbed me the wrong way with its gratuitous Luddism. I had thought that only thuggish leftists use the word smash the way it is used there.)

Indeed, there are many disappointing similarities between conservative intellectuals and liberal ones. Both groups largely consist of people who make their livings by manipulating words. I think that what mainly bothers them about Internet newsgroups is that the Net allows ordinary people with shared interests to communicate directly with each other, bypassing journalistic interlocutors. High-priced middlemen always accuse the competition of being evil.

Both groups also comprise people who probably don't have to worry about government regulating or taxing or punishing them out of business; about their land being confiscated; about legal nightmares imposed at whim by unaccountable government functionaries; about vague, overreaching laws written by arrogant legislative staffers who don't have a clue about real-world consequences of their favored policies. Both conservative and liberal intellectuals tend to be out of touch with the realities of most Americans' lives.

Instead, conservative intellectuals focus on the budget deficit, sex in movies, the horrors of the Internet, inadequate prayer opportunities in public schools, etc. None of those issues is anywhere near as important as, for example, the FBI's murder of unpopular religious people, or the fact that government takes almost half of our income.

I believe that many Americans would agree with me on this point, that while they may be religious, and are profoundly concerned about cultural problems, most citizens are essentially libertarian in political outlook. And it is precisely libertarians and not conservatives who have been vindicated politically by the success of Republicans' "get government off our backs" approach. This political approach, rather than well-intentioned governmental intrusiveness, is most likely to create conditions favorable to cultural renewal. One hopes Republicans, too, will soon realize this.

Jonathan Gewirtz

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