South Park Republicans and the Religious Right

In the New York Times this morning, columnist John Tierney argues that the Republican Party is losing the hip, urban, libertarian voting bloc, dubbed "South Park Republicans" after the profane animated television program. Attending a Reason magazine conference, Tierney cites Andrew Sullivan and Reason editor Nick Gillespie, who argues that the culturally libertarian youth vote is as likely to show up for the GOP in this fall's elections as Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) is to join the Village People.

Of interest to those of us who are not libertarians, South Park devotees, or Republican partisans is Tierney's assessment of the strange relationship between the libertarians and religious and social conservatives.

Tierney talks to Trey Parker, co-creator of South Park, a show which regularly sought to demean religious ideas, people, and the Deity Himself. Nonetheless, Parker says there was a time when he, as a Republican, saw the religious right as an ally for libertarian causes.

"The Republicans didn't want to run your life, because Jesus should. That was really part of their thing: less government, more Jesus," Parker says. "Not it's like, how about more government and Jesus."

Comments

[Jendi]

As a South Park devotee, I don't see the show as demeaning religious people or God. It's more of a satire on hypocrisy (liberal and conservative), and the stupid and simplistic ideas that people use to distort religion. They've run several episodes that could be considered pro-life, for instance. The substitute religions of the Baby Boom set (the environment, the self-help movement, Scientology, "tolerance") get skewered way more often.

[Joe Long]

"South Park" does not know how to dodge sanctimoniousness without stumbling (or racing) into blasphemy. I quit watching even before I ditched cable, because it was SO brutally funny I could easily be sucked in when it chose the wrong targets.

It has effectively innoculated a certain set of young folks against a lot of sickly-sweet ideas, though - ideas evangelicals and Republicans most certainly shouldn't be hitching their wagons too. Parker is right about big-government GOP types who want to put their trust in chariots, horses, AND the all-too-casually-invoked name of the Lord their God.

Trey Parker and his ilk are about halfway to an epiphany: they have the "every man a liar" down pat, but "let God be truth" is still beyond their comprehension.

[machs]

Aahhh, what ever happened to the good 'ol relic mongering days? Today we have supreme fear merchants.

[GL]

Bullseye, Joe.

My favorite verse on point is Psalm 146:3:

Put not your trust in princes,
   in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation.

It helps to remember that when George and his GOP pals sell out yet once again. At least I'm not overly disappointed having had low expectations before it happened.

Evangelicals (of which I am one) have placed way to much trust in the GOP and not enough in GOD.

[Ethan Cordray]

I can't help thinking for things like this how much better it would be if we had a real multiparty democracy. I'm twenty-two years old. I have no memories of any time when the Democrats were not pro-abortion, nor when the Republicans were not pro-monopoly. I want my own party. I've been thinking about joining the Christian Democratic Union. Anyone have any opinions about that?

[Stuart Koehl]

>>> can't help thinking for things like this how much better it would be if we had a real multiparty democracy. <<<

What you really mean is you want two broad, consensus-driven coalition parties in which there is no overarching political philosophy. People used to complain that you couldn't tell the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, now they complain that the parties are too ideological and polarizing. It seems the American polity is very hard to please.

[Daniel C.]

Ethan,
It is true that Democrats are the party of abortion, but Republican are "pro-monopoly"? What evidence do you have for that? You may describe Republicans as pro-business, (or party of Mammon, as some have done) but that is a far cry from being "pro-monopoly".

Regarding joining a third party in America: Foolish. Your party will never win anything over City Dog Catcher, and your wasted vote will result in electing the greater evil (presuming you think that the 2 party system is merely a choice of the lesser of two evils). Furthermore, why would any confessing Christian want to America to become a parliamentary political system, which has resulted in the European secularist cesspool?

Remember, politics is the art of the compromise. If you go into it, even as a voter, thinking you are going to get everything you want, then you will always be disappointed.

Ethan, America will never be a parliamentary government, and you will always have a 2 party system. Accept that, and then decide who better works for your interests: Democrats or Republicans.

[Erik N.]

Daniel C. is right. Politics is about compromise. Too many people are looking for the ideal party or ideal candidate. It never arrives. Every vote is a compromise in one way or another. The challenge is deciding what principles are most important in any given race and then making a decision.

I would also challenge the "pro-monopoly" comment. It's simply not true. Republicans are certainly more identified as the party of free trade and capitalism, but it's not as if most Democrats are also opposed. Democrats can be, and often are, also pro-business depending on the context. It's never easy to classify, given the broad nature of the two parties.

[James A. Altena]

Whether a third party could succeed in America or not (and historically, it has not), I think the criticism directed at Ethan in the last two posts is unfair. He is not asking for "two broad, consensus-driven coalition parties in which there is no overarching political philosophy," but for something pretty radical by American historical standards -- a party that is actually based on a Christian rather than a secular moral philosophy, and formulates positions and policies accordingly.

The Christian hope of the last generation was that the Republican Party might be re-shaped into something far nearer to that goal; so far that effort has failed, alas. Even if the Republican Party is not reducible to the "party of monopoly," it is not one that, excepting for the Christian minority in it, could be mistaken for one that cares much for equity (as distinct from leftist egalitarianism) for the small business, the small farmer, or the ordinary blue collar laborer.

I'm with my good friend GL as well as Ethan on this one. And I'll bet that G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis would be with us as well.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>Whether a third party could succeed in America or not (and historically, it has not), I think the criticism directed at Ethan in the last two posts is unfair. He is not asking for "two broad, consensus-driven coalition parties in which there is no overarching political philosophy," but for something pretty radical by American historical standards -- a party that is actually based on a Christian rather than a secular moral philosophy, and formulates positions and policies accordingly.<<<

When did we ever actually have one of these in this country?

[Bobby Winters]

Amen for what James Altena said!! I am now a local level democrat in the only democratic part of a two party state. (Here in Kansas the two parties are the Republicans and the Radical Republicans.) The local democrats are all social conservatives like myself.

[Christopher]

"It is true that Democrats are the party of abortion, but Republican are "pro-monopoly"? What evidence do you have for that? You may describe Republicans as pro-business, (or party of Mammon, as some have done) but that is a far cry from being "pro-monopoly".

I used to think the "big business" talk against Republicans was all talk, but not anymore. I think the best description of Republicans is "big-business libertarians". I am stretching libertarian here because if it suits them, these libertarians are all for taxes and big government. For example, the continuation of the agricultural subsidies. The Prescriptions Drug giveaway is all big business, because it is part of the plan to socialize ALL medicine. Why? big-business does not want to pay for it any more and socialization does not hurt them - it is a burden on individual taxpayers. There really just "libertarian" morally and selectively when they want less government to do xyz.

I see no reasons for conservatives (and here I mean true conservatives in the Burke/Kirk vain) to continue to vote for Republicans at all. As important as the Judiciary is, we are simply compromising the other two branches to "save" the third IMO...

[Juli]

Three words:

Instant runoff voting.

[Ruby on Rails]

Politics is about compromise but it's not about giving up what you believe in just to make yourself feel good.

[Ethan Cordray]

Stuart, I'm afraid I would in fact prefer a true multiparty, non-binary system. There's nothing in the founding documents of the country that would preclude that. Two broad, consensus-driven parties would certainly be an improvement on the present arrangement, though (but it's hard to see how they would resist the proces of ideologization simply due to their binary adversarial relationship).

It's true that my position on the feasability and desirability of a multiparty American governmental system is pretty radical by this country's historical standards. Still, I'm afraid I can't help but sneer at the suggestion that "America will never be a parliamentary government, and you will always have a 2 party system." One might as well have said prior to 1917 that Russia would always be an tsarist empire, or prior to 1866 that Japan would always be a Shogunate, or prior to 1775 that America would always a bunch of British colonies.

The point is, while I think it highly unlikely that a multiparty system could evolve slowly through the function of our current governmental processes, massive crises in national affairs lead to massive shifts in governmental arrangements. I fully expect such a crisis to occur within the next few decades, and I doubt that our current two-party system will endure it. I would rather our government shift into a coalition-oriented multi-party form than into a single-party autocracy.

So there's my structural desire. In lieu of such a change, I would like to see the evolution of a major political party based explicitly on Christian rather than modernist moral philosophy. This may be equally improbable. AS Stuart points out, we have never had such a party in this country before. In fact, the main reason why I desire a multiparty system is that it would allow that kind of a party to develop even in a society like ours that is no longer majorly Christian.

[GL]

It is true that Democrats are the party of abortion, but Republican are "pro-monopoly"? What evidence do you have for that?

Well, I don't know Daniel, how about the fact that antitrust enforcement under Bush is pretty much nonexistent. The Justice Department was winning the Microsoft antitrust case, but decided to settle shortly after Bush took office for a remedy much less severe than it likely could have achieved in court and which did little to stop Microsoft's anticompetitive behavior. And before you lecture me on capitalism, I will point out that Microsoft is a government created monopoly if ever there was one. By extending copyright protection to software in the early 1980s, the government created a situation where one competitor would come to dominate the desktop operating system market. The government didn't decide who would win, but guaranteed that one company would largely dominate because of networking effects and shifting costs. What party was in the White House in the early 1980s? And note also that the copyright laws we have today are much more in favor of big business than the first copyright act was, or for that matter any copyright act which existed before 1976, when the act was last totally revised. What party was in charge of the White House in 1976? Can we detect a pattern here?

[YaknYeti]

>> Regarding joining a third party in America: Foolish. Your party will never win anything over City Dog Catcher, and your wasted vote will result in electing the greater evil (presuming you think that the 2 party system is merely a choice of the lesser of two evils). <<

Daniel C., I've heard this logic before, and while I understand the dynamic, I wonder if it drives the wrong result. If I always vote for the lesser of two evils, I think it likely that the lesser will start taking my vote for granted. If, by 2020, I have voted and argued enough times for a GOOD 3rd party candidate, maybe the people in power will start paying attention and start courting my vote again. As it is, I think we've lost integrity in the political system, and I don't know how else we might bring it back.

I agree that, with the importance of money in most campaigns, it's unlikely for a 3rd party candidate to ever raise enough to compete. But why not try? As it is, I feel more like I'm voting against the evil of two lessers, as someone joked about the last election.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>Well, I don't know Daniel, how about the fact that antitrust enforcement under Bush is pretty much nonexistent.<<<

Ask any competent economist, and he will tell you that anti-trust legislation has little to do with preventing monopolies, and moreover, that not all monopolies are bad. Those resulting from pure market forces can, in fact, be quite good for consumers. On the other hand, government monopolies or monopolies maintained through market-deforming regulations, are almost always and inherently bad.

>>>And before you lecture me on capitalism, I will point out that Microsoft is a government created monopoly if ever there was one. By extending copyright protection to software in the early 1980s, the government created a situation where one competitor would come to dominate the desktop operating system market. <<<

That's a reach. Moreover, you ignore the fact that some degree of operating system standardization as well as bundling is an inevitable requirement for creating viable large networks across platforms. Much as I loathe Microsoft (I'm writing this on a Mac G5, I have four other Macs in my house including a 17" MacBook Pro, and have owned nothing but Macs since 1984), I recognize that much of what has happened in personal computing would not be possible without Microsoft. There is no evidence that anti-trust suits against Microsoft have helped the consumer, nor is there any evidence that extended copyright protection made and protects Microsoft's monopoly. On the contrary, the market position of Microsoft was largely built on the failures of its competitors to produce or market competitive products. By the same token, Microsoft's market share is constantly under pressure and has been eroding due to the emergence of newer operating systems and applications that ameliorate Microsoft's weaknesses and provide consumers with what they want. If anything does prop up Microsoft, it isn't government regulation, but the conservatism of government IT managers, who have decided, in the face of all evidence, that they want monocultural operating environments based on Windows. Even there, we see open architecture alternatives like LINUX eating into the Microsoft market (which has already lost the server market and will shortly see the end of its dominance in laptops.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>I used to think the "big business" talk against Republicans was all talk, but not anymore. <<<

I suggest that you look at the fundraising bases of the two parties before accepting the stereotype of Republicans and Democrats. Which party relies more on large donor contributions? Which one gets more of its donations in amounts of less than $200? The results will surprise you.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>Stuart, I'm afraid I would in fact prefer a true multiparty, non-binary system. <<<

Anyone who has experienced the reality of this would disagree with you. Ask any Israeli, Italian or German. The last Presidential election we had which could truly be called multi-party was the election of 1860. Make of that what you will. The last really viable third party presidential candidates were Strom Thurmond and Henry Wallace. If that doesn't scare you, you either don't understand what I am saying or have icewater in your veins.

[GL]

Stuart,

We are now in my field of specialty. I teach and write about Cyberlaw and have been quoted at length by the United States Supreme Court. Whether it is good or bad is debatable, but it is irrefutable that the current copyright laws combined with networking effects and shifting costs all but guaranteed a winner-take-all race for dominance in the desktop OS market. I have used Macs and still use Linux, but the fact is that Microsoft has dominated the desktop OS market with more than 90% of all such desktop computers running its OSes. It is also indisputable that Microsoft used it government created monopoly (technically monopolies do not have to control 100% of a market) to bully computer manufacturers to not ship with the Netscape browser. That was the finding of the trial court in the antitrust case and Microsoft did not seriously challenge that part of the findings. Why would they do that since Netscape was at the time giving away their browser? Because Netscape provided a vehicle for programmers to write programs that would run on more than one OS without the necessity of porting, severely impairing Microsofts networking effect and shifting cost advantages. Microsoft bullied computer manufacturers who had no choice but to play ball with it as most users wanted Windows with the obvious intent of destroying Netscape. I could catalog a whole slew of other anticompetitive conduct by Microsoft in which it abused its copyright-created monopoly, but, again, this is a blog on faith, not cyberlaw. I could go into more detail, but it would bore readers of this blog and require a post rivaling the length of many of your own.

[Stuart Koehl]

If you had pointed more towards Microsoft's attempt to create a proprietary version of Java, I might have been inclined to agree. However, whatever the shape of the market today, it is poised to change radically, and that is completely out of the control of Federal regulators.

[GL]

Java is indeed another example. There are several other less well known examples. Stuart is correct that Microsoft's monopoly is constantly under threat from some new innovation and so it is vulnerable. That is why I believe it is so aggressive when it senses a threat. Google is the latest threat as it is seen by MS as offering a platform for moving application software off the desktop and onto Internet-accessible servers. One day, MS will lose its monopoly. But until it does, the government should make sure it doesn't abuse a position for which it is largely responsible by the dunderheaded extension of copyright protection to software.

Back to my point, however, copyright law is one area where Republicans have favored big businesses over start ups. To be honest, Democrats are not much better in this regard.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>One day, MS will lose its monopoly. But until it does, the government should make sure it doesn't abuse a position for which it is largely responsible by the dunderheaded extension of copyright protection to software.<<<

Some dunderheaded software engineers may disagree with you on that.

[GL]

I am sure they do, its their pockets after all. (Though many software engineers agree with me and are part of the open source movement, including Linus Torvalds and Tim Berners-Lee.) But according the the Copyright and Patent Clause of the Constitution, lining the pockets of software engineers was not the purpose of copyright and patent protection. Providing incentives was a means to an end and I believe (and many others do likewise) that we have allowed the means to become the end to the detriment of the constitutionally mandated end.

I certainly favor intellectual property protection for software, but I believe that using copyright is pouring new wine into old wineskins. But we digress.

[Tony Esolen]

Ethan,

We usually agree, but I'm not with you on this one. I wish the Republicans were not the noodles they are, but I'm not going to get my wish anytime soon, and it's not entirely the fault of the Republicans themselves. We have a foolish and selfish populace. There's not much you can do with them. If I spoke in my town about real school reform, I'd get two votes for School Councilman, my own and my wife's. So to get elected School Councilman, you have to be a noodle. You have to say dumb noodly things like, "I am in favor of putting a computer on every desk," and "We need to purchase cutting-edge programs in literacy" and "We need after-school activities to enhance our children's physical health." Ah, for a great big acetylene torch.

I support the electoral college precisely because it effectively prevents the splintering of parties. The four-party system of Canada (Tory, Liberal, NDP, Parti Quebecois) may seem more democratic, but in reality what happens is that the honchos of the plurality party cut deals with the honchos of the swing parties in order to form a majority government. It invites corruption. Just think of the constant chaos known as Italy. If it weren't for the wise Italian custom of ignoring the law anyway, the country would have fallen apart long ago......

[James A. Altena]

Stuart,

I never said that such a Christianity-based major party existed in American history. That's why it would be so radical. The fact that we haven't had one doesn't mean that we shouldn't have one.

As for monopolies not being all bad for the free market -- well, by defintion once you have a monopoly, you have an effective end to market competition, and hence to the market itself. (This is of course different from from the economies of scale that large corporations and conglomerates have provided, that have provided a higly increased standard of living for most people, though at considerable social costs in other ways.)

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>I never said that such a Christianity-based major party existed in American history. That's why it would be so radical. The fact that we haven't had one doesn't mean that we shouldn't have one.<<<

Soi radical, in fact, that it would never work. Have you ever read a book called "A Revolutionary People at War" by Charles Royster? It looks at the religious underpinnings of the American Revolution and how religious fervor was a major motivator within the Continental Army. I'm also going through Kevin Phillips' "The Cousins Wars", which expands on the theme of how religious sectarianism shaped the Anglo-American culture (and continues to this day). Phillips makes a very profound observation: that the American colonists (and by extension the founders) were extremely leery of state religion, not because of the influence religion would have on the state and its policies, but because of the effect the state would have on the free exercise of religion (something we see more today under the secularists than we might in the past under Congregationalists or Anglicans). That is something to be considered.

Another thing that needs to be considered is the history of European Christian Democratic parties, ostensibly founded to promote Christian values, and the direction in which these have gone since their original foundation in the late 1940s. Given the broad spectrum of Christian beliefs and opinions regard the Gospel and how it is to be implemented, there are likely to be very few issues on which such an American Christian party could be founded. The only unifying issue I can find in the past is rampant anti-Catholicism, the one thing shared by Federalist, Anti-Federalist, Democrat, Whig, Republican, Know-Nothing, Free Soilers and the whole shebang of 19th century political parties. That's not a positive basis for a united front.

[Ethan Cordray]

Stuart, you forgot anti-Freemasonry. There's another possible historical basis for you!

You and Tony make good points against multiparty systems. Maybe they would be a worse deal. I made that proposal not because I'm some sort of true believer in the parliamentary coalition model, but because it struck me as a way to deconcentrate American governmental power. My strongest political loyalties are to the idea of distributism, of devolving power to the most local, small-scale level possible.

Let's have an example, which I've stolen from Spike Lee's film about Hurricane Katrina last night. Louisiana, and New Orleans in particular, have some of the worst school systems in the country. The federal "No Child Left Behind" program is a massive piece of trash legislation that has done and will do nothing to help that. On the other hand, if the government were to devolve power to the state, specifically by allowing Louisiana to collect revenue from their offshore oil platforms, the state would have loads of moneyto try to fix their own problems. Now, the state might no do much better then the Feds; even discounting the snafu that is Louisiana politics (when I lived down there, my district went for David Duke in the governor's race), the state level may also be too high to be able to pursue good educational policy. More power ought to be devolved to individual districts, which know what their individual problems are and can take the local action necessary to fix them.

As to the question of the monopolistic tendencies of the Republicans, I'll let GL speak about cyberlaw, but I'd like to mention that Tyson Chicken and the other monstrous agricorporations of the Missouri Farm Bureau never take much time in deciding which party's candidates to endorse.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>On the other hand, if the government were to devolve power to the state, specifically by allowing Louisiana to collect revenue from their offshore oil platforms, the state would have loads of moneyto try to fix their own problems. <<<

Or, given the history of Louisiana, blow on graft, corruption and one hell of a party. Laissez les bontemps roullez!

[James A. Altena]

Stuart,

I would never consider or call a party based on anti-Catholicism one that is genuinely Christian (whatever it may pretend to be). This is a red herring on your part.

Perhaps the type of Christian party I suggest would indeed be too "radical" in worldly terms to "work." But then, so was the Cross. We are to be in the world, but not of it. Our calling is to be faithful, not to "succeed" in worldly terms.

It is true that political conservatives are sometimes so foolishly rigid as to settle for no loaf rather than half a loaf, and thereby allow evil to flourish more greatly, lest they risk compromising their principles (which are often rules confused with being principles.) But if and when we err in the other direction, and start putting pragmatic considerations of worldly success ahead of principles, we sell our souls. Even if the effort would not succeed in worldly terms of assuming political power, it might well succeed in spiritual ones by presenting an effective witness to truth, thereby saving more souls and cultivating greater charity among its participants.

In any case, I'd rather try to follow Christ faithfully here and "fail" in worldly terms than not try at all.

[GL]

We have the parties we, as a nation as a whole, deserve. Washington opposed any parties, but, of course, they formed when he was president, with both parties looking for their leadership from among the two factions of his own cabinet. While the parties changed through the years, with the Federalists and Whigs dying, only to have their component parts absorbed, in part, by the Democrats and reconstituted, in part, by the Republicans, and with periodic migration of interests between the parties, we have always gravitated toward only two parties of any substance because of the design of our founders. I agree with Tony and Stuart that this situation is, on the whole, best.

I really don't believe that the party system is the overarching problem within our government in any event. The biggest problem within the government is overreaching by the federal courts. Our government was specifically designed to foster compromise, which means that no one is entirely happy with the results, but no one is run rough shod over. The courts have short-circuited that process so that their are more definite winners and losers. That is exactly what the founders were trying to avoid.

The reason the parties have compromised morals (or are amoral) is because the electorate have compromised morals (or are amoral). Any Christian party would, if it were true to Christian morality, always be a very small, niche party with no real power. To look for a party solution is to put your trust in princes. If you want real reform, pray for reform of the people of the United States and do your part to carry out the Great Commission. That's what Christian did for the first three centuries of our faith, resulting, in the end, in a Christian Rome. But it took three centuries and a lot of persecution before it happened. We want results now. Until the heart of the electorate changes, you can expect no changes in the amorality of our parties, whether there are two or twenty-two.

[James A. Altena]

Dear GL,

I agree with much of your post. The suggestion for a possible Christian party is not based on a belief that a "party solution" is possible in that sense. Probably an explicitly Christian party is viable only in nations where one church body is or was officially established by the state. (All the historical ones that come immediately to my mind have been in Roman Catholic areas -- Italy, Bavaria, etc.)

But sometimes small praties, while never attaining governmental power, have exerted infuence out of proportion to their numbers. The Populist Party in the late 19th c. never picked up more than a small fraction of the vote in federal elections, but the pressure the movement exerted led to both major parties in effect stealing many of the movement's ideas and thunder. The endeavor of trying to found a non-sectarian party firmly based on orthodox Christina moral values is, I think, at least worth exploring. The Free Soil and Progressive parties also were not without political legs in this regard.

We must also be wary of identifying a two-party system with the two existing parties. Before the current Republican Party there was the Whig Party, and the Republicans where not simply renamed Whigs but a major new political party forged by factions from both the Whigs and Democrats that found a new cohesive political philosophy on key social and economic issues. If we simply identify the two-party system with the two currently eixsting parties, we allow ourselves to be held effectively hostage, as has happened to the black electorate in this country with the Republicans before 1932 and the Democrats thereafter.

While overall I prefer our governmental system to a parliamentary one, one must also distinguish between two different parliamentary models. The British system (passed down to the Commonwealth nations) is very different from the French system that has been propagated elsewhere (Italy, Israel, Russia, etc.) and it is unfair to the former simply to lump the two together.

For anyone here not aware of the difference, a quick over-simplified explanaton --

In the British system, voters elect candidates from districts, much as they do in the US; the difference is that they do not vote for the executive branch separately, so that the party that wins a parliamentary majority forms the government. This generally resuls in a two- or three-party system and stability comparable to that in the US.

In the French system, voters vote for a party rather than a specific candidate. Each party is then alloted its proportion of the popular vote in the parliament; the party rather than the voters choose who sits in parliament (from a pre-existing slate of candidates). If no single party has an absolute majority a coalition government must be cobbled together by negotiatons between two or more parties that involve all sorts of compromises and pork-trading.

The French system is more "democratic" than the British in that every party and viewpoint gets actual representation. The problem is that it makes government virtually unworkable in practice (Italy and Israel beings prime examples) because dozens of small splinter factions can and do hold a coalition government hostage by demanding concessions to their particular agendas as the price for not bringing the government down in a "no confidence" vote. It's a horrible system. (No wonder -- the French invented it.)

The Germans have managed to make a modified French system work much better by establsihing a 5% minimum threshhold at the federal and state levels for parties to obtain parliamentary representation, although that is now showing signs of instability as well.

[Joe Long]

Two tangential comments:

-I think there was a time when BOTH major parties in the United States were unabashedly Christian parties, parties which disagreed on political issues but derived their positions on those issues from Christian sensibilities. In fact considering how politics sullies everything, I don't think it would be especially easy to find more Christian political parties in world history, than our nation's major nineteenth-century factions. (Cromwell's Roundheads were either much more - or much less - Christian than, say, Andrew Jackson's Democrats, but I am not sure they would count as a "political party" in our sense.)

-Could that situation be restored? Doubtful. A Christian civilization can give rise to Christian parties; a beleaguered Christian subculture may not even be able to manage a third-party showing - in fact I think it would do more harm than good if it did. But American third-party voters will always have the Will Rogers advantage. Rogers said he always preferred for the "other guy's candidate" to win. "It's a lot more fun spending the next four years criticizing, than making excuses."

Anyway, soon I can go back to pretending to myself that the GOP is more coherent and conservative, since they seem so determined to sabotage their majority.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>I think there was a time when BOTH major parties in the United States were unabashedly Christian parties, parties which disagreed on political issues but derived their positions on those issues from Christian sensibilities.<<<

It would be more accurate to say that the parties reflected the unabashedly Christian outlook of the populace in general. The cultural and political elites, even when more skeptical than the population in general, recognixed the utility of Christianity both in maintaining moral order and in delivering essential services.

What has changed today is the outlook of the elite. If I may harken back to Christopher Lasch's hypothesis, the elite today are essentially socialistic in economic policies and antinomian in moral outlook. Christiantiy no longer serves their interests in either sphere. Economically, Christianity's empahsis on delivering charitable services competes against the desired state monopoly on cradle-to-grave entitlements (by which, of course, votes are bought); morally, the Church stands in direct opposition to the nihilism of post modernism (which in turngives unbridled license to the state to make, break or reorganize society through the excersise of raw political power).

To the extent that one can say there has ever been an overtly "Christian" society, it would have to be the late Roman Empire from Theodosius the Great to Justinian, in that the state acknowledged as its primary purpose the defense and spread of the true Christian faith even as it remained separate and distinct from the Church with regard to the development and promulgation of doctrine. While extremely stratified economically and politically, this culture also acknowledged the ontological equality of all Christians from Emperor or patriarch down to the lowest monk or peasant. There was even a sort of popular democracy after a fashion, through the color factions of the Hippodrome. But I doubt you can call these political parties, nor would their interests and proposed policies be called Christian.

>>>(Cromwell's Roundheads were either much more - or much less - Christian than, say, Andrew Jackson's Democrats, but I am not sure they would count as a "political party" in our sense.)<<<

Good time to pick up on my recommendation to read "The Cousins Wars", by Kevin Phillips.

[Stuart Koehl]

Jody Bottum, writing at First Things today:

August 31, 2006

Joseph Bottum writes:

Even after Ross Douthat’s post and mine, there may be more to unravel from the new Pew poll on the political parties and religion.

I wrote, as though it were perfectly self-evident, “We cannot—we should not—have a party so strongly identified with opposition to religious believers.” And a Europeanized friend emailed to call me on my over-easy assumption: “Why shouldn’t we have one party that is friendly to religion and one unfriendly? That is the pattern in most developed countries, and surely, as the Republican party increasingly takes on the attributes of a European-style Christian Democratic party, it is logical that their opponents take the other position.”

The attribution of cause here is a little one-sided, as though the poor liberals were forced into their un- and anti-religious positions entirely by the conservatives’ donning of the religious mantle. Even the good Democrat Amy Sullivan blames some of this on the way the Democratic party has behaved. Still, my friend’s general point is a good one: The First World pattern has been a Social Democratic party versus a Christian Democratic party, an anti-religious party versus a religious party, and if politics in the United States is starting to match that pattern, why is this surprising or undesirable?

My first answer was that the idea makes my skin crawl—which is just another way of saying I had been assuming that American exceptionalism lets us sidestep this whole wars-of-religion, Westphalia, philosophes, French Revolution, last-king-strangled-with-the-guts-of-the-last-priest European thing.

In a way, I still think that my original assumption is the answer. A developed argument about American exceptionalism and the nature of the American Founding would take us a long way toward understanding why we don’t want religion to be pushed from the shared mainstream over to one side’s shore.

Both parties are contributing to this change; the very drift of contemporary politics is toward it. But I think we ought to resist it strongly. Amy Sullivan writes, “It’s past time to hire a national party staffer to focus on Catholic outreach and strategy. Alas, the Democratic National Committee has been looking for a year to fill such a position, with no results.” To which Ross Douthat rightly adds, “Ouch.” It’s so important, I’d leave First Things to take that job—except for one little problem: abortion.

This is hardly a new analysis. Ramesh Ponnuru, in particular, has been consistently good with his analysis of the ways in which support for Roe v. Wade traps the Democrats. Abortion is the motor, and since 1973 it has driven us toward this European result.

Can it be resisted? There are, of course, pro-abort Republicans and pro-life Democrats, but they don’t really look like a solution. I mean, a presidential race between Rudy Giuliani and Bob Casey Jr. might be interesting, but it would hardly transform the shape of American politics—precisely because they both seem like outliers. Somehow, we have to break the identification of the sides on abortion with the sides on religion, and I’m not sure how to do that without one side or the other surrendering on abortion.

The missing piece in all this kind of discussion is the collapse of the Protestant mainline, which opened up a hole in our public life. Catholics and evangelicals were sucked in to fill the vacuum, but it’s not yet clear that they can do the work the old Protestants did in securing American exceptionalism. Certainly, they can’t do it until we return to the assumption that religion is the American mainstream.

[Ethan Cordray]

"Or, given the history of Louisiana, blow on graft, corruption and one hell of a party. Laissez les bontemps roullez!"

He he, it's so true! Duke's opponent in the governor race I referred to was serving out the remainder of his first term from a jail cell for gambling with public funds. Glad I moved away from there.

I know that cultural change must come before the development of good government. But it seems to me that certain governmental structures are more quickly responsive to cultural shifts than others (generally, this is because they are more democratic). Given the decline in participation we've been seeing in our current system over the last few decades, I'm not so sure that either of the national parties are very responsive to the will of the people anymore. That's why I hope for (at least) a major realignment soon.

[Peter Gardner]

Regarding single member districts versus proportional representation --

With single member districts, every party is either a winner or a loser, and only one can be a winner, so there's a push to the center. With proportional representation, every party can get some of their policies implemented, so there's a push away from the center. But if you're neither a centrist nor an extremist, neither system is good.

I propose that somewhere, perhaps a state or a small country, try triple member districts, which perhaps might mitigate the adversarial relationship between the major parties without devolving into kiloparty chaos.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>I'm not so sure that either of the national parties are very responsive to the will of the people anymore. That's why I hope for (at least) a major realignment soon.<<<

However, that realignment, which is already in progress, will be ideological in nature. See the article by Jody Bottum that I posted.

Now, I have my doubts about how well that will play out in the American constitutional system, which was deliberately created to ensure that nothing gets done without building a broad coalition. The last time we had a realignment like this on ideological grounds was the 1850s, and nothing good came of that. Now, as then, we see the nation polatizing not just on ideological grounds, but also on sectional grounds. Then, of course, the sections were pretty homogeneous, being comprised of continguous states, North and South (with a small border overlap). Now, we see division of the South, the Plains, and the Rocky Mountains into a more conservative, traditional stronghold, while the Atlantic coast from Maryland to Maine, the West Coast, and the Rust Belt are progressive bastions.

With the Democratic base increasingly limited to upper class intellectual communities, the old urban inner core, and dying industrial centers, it's ability to muster the seats needed to govern nationally appears more doubtful.

Demography is also on the side of the Republicans. Recent analyses of political affiliations show that any group of 100 self-identified Republicans is likely to have about 201 children, while a similar group of 100 self-identified Democrats has only 146 children. Moreover, other studies have shown that only children or children with only one sibling are significantly less likely to have more than two children themselves.

Ideas have consequences, and the idea that one should not breed has very significant consequences for the long term viability of political parties whose members hold it in large numbers.

[James A. Altena]

Dear Peter,

The "triple representation" idea was in fact used by the Illinois state legislature for a number of years. (It was abolished in favor of single-representative districts shortly after I moved to Chicago in 1980.) It didn't work. In an effort to prevent gerrymandering and other tactics that would result in all three representatives coming from a single party (which would make the triple representation needless, even ridiculous) the law stated that no more than two representatives from a single district could be members of the same party. That of course also made the system meaningless, since:

a) it meant that people couldn't really elect the pepresentatives they wanted (since they should be free to elect all three from the same party if they so desire), and

b) in a two-party system it meant simply that the two parties colluded in a spoils system of "that one is your two-rep district and this one is mine" with a token representative from the minority party in each district to help divvy up public largesse.

Illinois voters recognized this shell game for the colossal patronage system that it was and abolished it. (Despite the wisdom of late great Chicago alderman Paddy Bauler, who went to the hoosegow for his larcenous ways: "Chicago ain't ready for reform.")

As a curious historical footnote, one such minority party representative was Bernie Epton -- the exceedingly obscure Republican who in 1983 was suddenly catapulted into the catbird seat as the last (and unsuccessful) "great white hope" of white voters desperate to keep Harold Washington from becoming the city's first black mayor, after the latter scored a narrow upset victory in the Democratic primary over "Crazy" Jane Byrne and Richard M. Daley (current mayor and son of "boss" Richard J. Daley, who uttered one of my favorite hilarious political quotes of all time to the press during the 1968 Democratic Convention riots: "Gentlemen, let's get one thing straight. The police are not here to create disorder; the police are here to preserve disorder." That is almost matched by the late former police chief and mayor of Philadelphia, Frank J. Rizzo, on his tough law-and-order stance: "I'm gonna make Attila the Hun look like a faggot.")