THE GOP NEEDS A MOVE TO THE RIGHT
ETHER ZONE PUTS THEIR PRINCIPLES TO PRACTICE
By: W. James Antle III
Ether Zone’s recent endorsement of Reps. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) and Tom Tancredo (R-CO) as an alternative to President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney presents sympathetic conservatives with an opportunity to reflect on the best way to put their principles into practice.
A Paul/Tancredo ticket is purely hypothetical at this point, but the platform such a combination would represent surely is not. Ron Paul is often a lonely advocate of that forgotten doctrine of enumerated powers, Congress’ most reliable vote for enforcing the Constitution and against continued expansions of the federal government. His free-market credentials are not limited to votes for modest tax-cut packages; he advocates a gold standard and rails against the Federal Reserve. Tom Tancredo for his part is a leading immigration reformer. He tirelessly advocates more secure borders, enforcement of existing immigration laws and retooling these laws to reduce immigration - all issues that send most politicians fleeing in terror.
Taken together, Paul and Tancredo balance libertarian anti-statism with a rejection of open-borders mania. This mix translates into support for national sovereignty, constitutional government, private property and the rule of law. What is the best vehicle for conservatives to take these values and implement them as policy? In the context of Paul/Tancredo, Ether Zone favors a challenge to Bush/Cheney in the Republican primaries and, should that fail, a subsequent third-party campaign. The relevant strategic question is which course would be more effective. Is it better for conservatives to work within the Republican Party or bolt for a purer alternative?
The arguments against the GOP as an effective means of advancing authentically conservative policies are familiar, especially to constitutionalists. Republicans like Paul and Tancredo are the exception rather than the rule. Republicans not only tolerate but support party members with voting records scarcely distinguishable from the Democrats’. Government continues to grow even when Republicans control the White House, Congress and now both. Even Ronald Reagan failed to implement conservative reforms as drastic in scope as Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Individual third parties and independent candidates have purer, less compromised platforms.
Yet there is a case to be made for working to move the GOP in a more conservative direction. For better or worse, the Republican Party is already the political home of the vast majority of the nation’s conservatives. Its constituencies contain the voters who are at the very least open to persuasion to conservative ideas. Dislodging them from the Republican coalition has proved a formidable task for third parties and attempts to break the two-party duopoly have been quixotic.
While third parties can mount effective educational campaigns and can at times win enough support to force a major party closer in their direction, overall they win few votes and exercise little influence over the direction of public policy. If even those who agree with or are open to conservative ideas will ignore third parties on the right, perhaps our efforts would be better spent winning Republican primaries and then going on to win these voters in the general elections.
There are organizations dedicated to forming a more principled GOP. The Club for Growth is actively targeting big-government liberal Republicans for defeat by tax-cutting conservative candidates in the primaries. The Republican Liberty Caucus, of which Congressman Paul is a past chairman, seeks to bring consistency to the party’s support for smaller government and individual freedom. Arlen Specter and John McCain are both likely to face well-established conservative primary challengers in 2004. The Republican grassroots is conservative and, if properly mobilized, can defeat the party bosses and improve the party’s corps of elected officials.
Right-of-center Republican refugees can’t even agree on a single third party to bolt to. There is the Reform Party, the Constitution Party, the America First Party and the Libertarian Party each vying for their support and all preferred by some. When Tom Ambrose proposed in WorldNet Daily that the Libertarian and Constitution parties merge, members of both protested. There is similar rivalry between Constitution and Reform, Constitution and America First and so forth. A small third party faces long enough odds; failure to unite within a single party makes these obstacles insurmountable.
Third party advocates argue that money and power enable Republican leaders to sabotage conservative efforts to take over the party. While this is true in particular cases, it does not have to be true across the board and likely would prove false in the face of a determined, well-organized campaign relying on grassroots Republican activists. Moreover anything that Republicans can do to conservative challengers within the party, they can do to an even greater extent to third-party challengers - from restricting ballot access to gaining huge advantages in fundraising and media exposure. Frustrating and ineffective as the GOP may be, it offers more opportunity to accomplish something, as opposed to merely making a statement, than any fledgling third-party movement. Any movement strong enough to build a successful third party is easily strong enough to take over the political party most of its supporters and allies already belong to and identify with.
Ron Paul is a classic example of this. He served in Congress challenging the federal Leviathan as a Republican from 1977 to 1985. After an unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate seat Phil Gramm won in 1984, he left Congress and thereafter the GOP. He was nominated by the Libertarian Party for president in 1988 and did not receive a fraction of the media coverage - or the votes- that was bestowed upon the major candidates. In 1992, Paul addressed the U.S. Taxpayers’ Party (as the Constitution Party was then called). But in 1996, he returned to the Republican Party and was elected to Congress. If he had run instead as a Libertarian or Constitution candidate, he would likely have come in third and been an also-ran as he was in 1988. Instead, he is a member of the U.S House of Representatives. In which party was Paul more effective?
Howard Phillips was one of the nation’s leading conservative activists, on a par with Paul Weyrich and Phyllis Schlafly, as late as the Reagan years. He ran for a U.S. Senate seat in the 1978 Massachusetts Republican primary and nearly defeated a sitting senator. His Conservative Caucus worked out of Sen. Jesse Helms’ offices. He helped promote Jerry Falwell and the early religious right. Today, Phillips continues to do good work but he is not as major a figure as he used to be. In each of his three U.S. Taxpayer/Constitution Party presidential bids he has won less than 200,00 votes nationwide. He was not even on the ballot in Massachusetts in 2000. Which party was Phillips more effective in?
Running for the Republican presidential nomination, Patrick Buchanan twice gave the establishment a scare in New Hampshire. He competed credibly against the first President Bush and Sen. Bob Dole. David Frum listed him alongside Rush Limbaugh and Robert Bartley among the most important conservatives in post-Reagan America. He left the GOP to run as the Reform candidate in 2000 and won fewer than half a million votes or about 0.4 percent of the total (down from more than 8 percent when Ross Perot was the nominee four years earlier), a showing worthy of an unknown Libertarian candidate. Buchanan is still an influential conservative journalist, but politically which party was he more effective in?
Or consider the example of Rick Jore. A staunchly conservative Montana state legislator, he won elections as a Republican in 1994, 1996 and 1998. He switched from the GOP to the Constitution Party in 2000. He ended up losing that election by just 54 votes - yet it was a race he almost certainly would have won if he had stayed a Republican. In which party was Jore more effective?
The list goes on. I have voted for third party candidates - Reform, Constitution, Libertarian and other - in the past and will do so again in the future. This option should remain available rather than be replaced with reflexive support for the Republicans. But as an overall strategy, working within the Republican Party is likely to be most effective. It may not be easy and it is certainly frustrating. But the chances of success are best.
Rather than more conservative also-rans, we need more Republicans in Congress like Paul and Tancredo.
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