November 16, 2005
It's the Values, Voters
By Maggie
Gallagher
Just a year ago, Democrats were pulling out their hair. As the
Pew poll reported in its most recent "political typology" analysis,
"Coming out of the 2004 elections, the American political landscape
decidedly favored the Republican Party."
Now President Bush's tanking poll numbers are stimulating a new
sense of possibility: Politics seems up for grabs in a new way.
For the first time in recent memory, a strong economy does not
seem to be lifting an incumbent president's political fortunes.
What does the future hold? The key election may be the Dover,
Pa., school board election, in which all eight school board members
who had voted to include a brief mention of "intelligent design"
lost.
I doubt this political rejection was fundamentally ideological.
Overwhelming majorities of Americans say they support teaching
creationism alongside of evolution in public schools. (In the
Pew poll, even a narrow majority of liberals favored teaching
creationism alongside of evolution in public schools). It's a
typically American live-and-let-live response that drives scientists,
The New York Times, the courts, certain Democratic elites
and George Will stark raving mad.
The Dover election loss reveals the limits of symbolic politics.
Say the words "intelligent design" in public school, and hordes
of New York Times reporters and ACLU lawyers will descend,
stimulating angry confrontations between erstwhile friendly neighbors.
As a values issue, most Pennsylvanians are likely content with
a small nod to intelligent design in their public schools. But
as a practical matter, a small symbol like that is not worth upsetting
the principal aim of schools: educating the kids.
"I think the people of Dover are tired of the attention over such
a minuscule thing, and they want a change," one former board member,
Lonny Langione, told the Times. "A lot of the people I
talked to were upset because the school board came to using taxpayer
money to advance their own agenda."
The GOP faces a political crisis for a variety of reasons, but
one looming problem is that so many of its coalition voters are
in fact "values voters" drawn to the GOP for largely symbolic
reasons. In the Pew poll, social conservatives (including the
less affluent "pro-government conservatives") outnumber the pro-business,
low-tax "Enterprisers" in the GOP base by a margin of 2-to-1.
Yet so far, few GOP political or intellectual leaders have even
tried to translate values concerns into an agenda that also serves
voters' interests, the usual basis of a stable governing majority.
Tax cuts used to serve this unifying purpose, but Republicans
got so good at cutting the taxes of the middle class that the
issue no longer packs the same widespread punch.
In the Weekly Standard essay "The Party of Sam's Club:
Isn't It Time the Republicans Did Something for Their Voters?"
Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam make a serious attempt at translating
values into interests.
A "pro-family" economic agenda would begin with the recognition
of a frequent left-wing talking point -- that over the past few
decades, returns to capital have escalated while returns to labor
have declined, and that the result has been increasing economic
insecurity for members of the working and middle classes, they
write.
Douthat and Salam suggest two practical solutions: new financial
supports for parents (a la increasing the child tax credit) plus
the equivalent of a "veteran's benefit" providing scholarship
money for moms home with their kids. They also urge the GOP to
address widespread health insecurity. Among all the political
typologies in the Pew poll, only the "Enterprisers" (10 percent
of registered voters) oppose government-guaranteed health insurance.
Easier said than done, of course. But it's an important insight:
Values pack a punch at the polls (ask John Kerry). Over time,
merely symbolic values alone won't substitute for an agenda that
makes a difference in voters' lives.
Copyright
2005 Maggie Gallagher
