Faith is Road Back for GOP

Five weeks after the election and we're still seeing essays like this one warning the Repubican Party against embracing social conservatism at the risk eternal banishment from political power:

I’ve noted several times how the religious right has become an anchor which is making it hard for the Republican Party to move on from their recent defeats and revise their positions to ones which voters outside of the deep south might accept. In the past when political parties have suffered defeats they have recovered as new ideas took hold. I’m not sure if this is possible for the Republicans. At present they have lost too many voters to win without the religious right and the religious right appears unwilling to moderate their views ....

Maybe over time enough people in the religious right will moderate their views to the point where people like [James] Dobson lose their influence. Otherwise I see no choice for the GOP other than to bite the bullet and separate itself from the religious right and be willing to endure a period as a minority party while they attempt to rebuild. s long as they are tied to the current views of the religious right the Republican Party will have a tough time surviving as a meaningful party of the 21st century.

I've been thinking about the GOP's road back all month, and since reading folks like Ross Douthat (God bless him) will drive you crazy with mind-numbing policy-wonkishness, I'm more prone to map out a comeback in terms of basic ideology and values. Besides, beyond tax policy, deregulation, and peace through strength, what do Republicans really have that's all their own? Why, social conservatism, of course, and they'd be entirely brainless - not to mention morally bankrupt - to let it go.

Not only that, there's a culture war going on, and the left's agenda to drive religion and decency from the public sphere is much worse than reading conservative policy papers. Take Michelle Goldberg, for example, and her smear of Newt Gingrich:

I've been reporting for a long time on the central role of the religious fundamentalism and sacralized nationalism in the Republican Party--that's how I've ended up on the kind of calling lists used by groups like the National Committee for Faith and Family. Still, I'd have expected some attempt to modulate the message of perpetual kulturkampf in the wake of the election results, the public disaffection of so many prominent conservative intellectuals, and the cascading economic disasters threatening millions of Americans. Perhaps, though, people like Gingrich can't imagine any other way. And so, with the defeat of Republican moderates rendering the rump GOP more right-wing than ever, he apparently sees a path to power in challenging Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee for leadership of the Elmer Gantry wing of his beaten party. Maybe he's clueless about the future of Republicanism, but if he's right about it, it's hard to see what kind of future Republicanism has.

I mean really, first of all, does anyone outside of the nihilist left use meaningless jumbo phrases like "sacralized nationalism"? What's up with that?

Maybe that's just more inside lefty-lingo to delegitimize people who think human life is more important than "convenience" and that sometimes making decisions requires not only agreeing that something is wrong, but in fact embracing the opposite, that which is morally right and eternally just.

Yep, that's what this is all about. I just can't get it out of my head that if the GOP does what all the secular ayatollahs want, well, we'd be handing them the greatest inauguration present since Franklin Roosevelt was sworn in on a New Deal platform. I mean, let's just give away the store, you know, the game's just not it worth anymore. Those few traditionalists still left after The Lightworker takes office can move up to a cabin in Colorado or some other former red state and just wait it out until the collectivist state withers away.

Seriously, of all the proposals for the GOP comeback, Richard Land's was best: "Stay Faithful to Core Values." The number one plank on the agenda is to promote life, that is, conservatives must stay true to the preservation and promotion of life, from birth to natural death; and that requires refusing to cut corners with moral equivalence and acceptable talk of abortion, gay marriage and the capitulation to Islamist evil whose terror rose once again in Mumbai, and whose plague of violence we'll see in the months and years ahead unless America stands tall in our heritage of exceptionalism and greatness of right.

There are no shortcuts, and all this talk of "sacralized nationalism" and the need for Republican "moderation" is, frankly, insulting it its combination of electoral hubris and sheer stupidity. Of course, the Democrats haven't even taken power in D.C. yet, and Obama's Chicago model of machine corruption is already promising to make traditional moral values the hottest game in town.