Notes From D.R. | Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene

If John McCain wins the November election, the most aggrieved group in America could well be—Republicans!

The right just seems to get more and more disgruntled with the GOP nominee: his recent climate-change speech inspired much griping and groaning from the major conservative websites. Comment sections and message boards on prominent pro-Republican blogs are filled with denunciations of McCain from “movement conservatives” who insist that they cannot vote for a “RINO” like the Arizona senator.

It seems that some conservatives deliberately desire McCain’s defeat at the hands of Barack Obama, either as a means of “teaching the GOP a lesson” or in the hopes that a conservative hero will rise to challenge Obama in 2012. This thinking is shortsighted; if Obama demonstrates a minimum level of competence during his first term, he will likely be re-elected four years from now.

McCain’s “maverick” act is hard to swallow—but conservatives may have to get used to that bitter taste. McCain represents something that is unpleasant but inevitable: the return of the GOP to the pre-1980, “country-club” era.

Let’s face it, conservatives never really seized control of the GOP apparatus; if they had, Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater would not have been the only true-red conservatives nominated by the party over the last fifty years. The Republican Party has always been run by moderates uncomfortable with social conservatism: McCain, like George H. W. Bush twenty years ago, is the party’s ideal candidate.

Reagan was an outstanding President, but from a political standpoint, he was a fluke, an anomaly, a happy accident. By all rights, Bush the Elder should have been the GOP’s nominee in 1980. Reagan had the skills and the strength to beat Bush in the ’80 primaries, but no conservative has pulled off a similar feat in the years since.

Conservatives are angry at McCain because, at bottom, he heralds the end of the Reagan Revolution. Reagan conservatives believed that the Gipper’s 1980 victory was the beginning of legitimate, lasting change in American politics. McCain’s candidacy shatters that belief. Had Reagan conservatives truly revolutionized American politics, McCain would not have come within ten thousand feet of the GOP nomination.

McCain never liked Reagan conservatives. His political vision was formed in the pre-1980 era, and he clearly wants to return to that era. In his mind, it was a more civil, cordial day, a day in which things got done in Washington to benefit the American people.

McCain’s not the only one who holds fast to this belief. If Colin Powell had won the White House as a Republican in 1996, he would have also sought to dismantle the Reagan Revolution. Powell, like McCain, has made no secret of his contempt for movement conservatives, and his myopic belief that things were somehow better before Reagan and the right temporarily assumed power.

The end of the Reagan era is indeed distressing—but at some point, it was going to end. McCain is merely hastening history. Somewhere along the line, the Republican Party was going to revert to its original, moderate form. McCain’s nomination signifies the party returning to its natural shape.

Perhaps this political rewind will help the party compete in the future. We are informed by national polls that the GOP is hated by voters under the age of 35. These voters have been taught to hate the Reagan-era GOP, to see the party as an entity that supports homophobia, sexism, bigotry, contempt for the environment, and other such social maladies. If these younger voters maintain their hatred for all things Republican as they age, the GOP could be out of business thirty to forty years from now.

McCain clearly feels it’s necessary to re-brand the GOP as a home of “tolerance” and “moderation.”  Rightly or wrongly, he believes that Americans have turned against conservatism, and that a less “ideological” approach will keep the GOP politically vibrant for years to come. McCain’s logic is suspect, to be sure, but the party’s power brokers obviously embrace his view.

Conservatives will not be happy if McCain wins. However, they can at least take comfort in the fact that a McCain victory will discredit liberalism as well. After all, for nearly three decades liberals have argued that the GOP is controlled by ultraconservative evangelicals and ignorant reactionaries. If McCain—who is neither a right-wing fundamentalist nor a John Birch Society-type—becomes the country’s next Republican President, the left’s anti-GOP arguments will immediately become null and void. How can conservatives not be happy when “progressives” are forced to shut up?