I expect the next president to be a Democrat. As a conservative, I expect to be unhappy with that result. But I also expect to be unhappy if the next president is a Republican. That’s how disconsolate I am about the current situation.
But I really am excited about what comes next, after the smashing the GOP’s going to get next fall. Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see that the Democrats, even if they win resoundingly, will be able to claim an ideological mandate. They will have won because they are not Republicans. Fine — being Not A Republican makes a lot of political sense, given how badly the Republicans have governed these last years. Still, I believe the country is a few more election cycles away from making the shift into the Next Big Idea that will inaugurate a new era of US politics, as Reaganism and the New Deal both did for decades.
And that’s why I’m excited about whatever is coming next for conservatives after 2008. Leadership of the movement, and of the Republican Party, will be up for grabs. For conservative Christians like me, we have a real opportunity to shake up the party and our own movement. I was talking yesterday to a Catholic conservative friend who shares the traditionalist conservative beliefs that I espouse (you could call him “crunchy” and he might wince, but we see eye to eye). He told me that he recently delivered a speech about the future of American politics to an audience at a conservative college. The older conservatives there thought he was full of it, but the younger ones wanted to know more about his ideas. This is the exact same reaction I always get whenever I speak to conservative audiences, especially religious ones, that span the generations. I believe there will be a real openness among religious conservatives, at least the under-40 crowd, to rethinking how we can and should bring our faith to the political world.
One last thing: not long after I wrote my original “Crunchy Con” article for National Review, I got an e-mail from a reader in a major Protestant seminary. He thanked me for the article, and was excited to learn about the traditionalist conservative case for environmental concern, for embracing a “small is beautiful” ethic, for resisting consumerism, and so forth. He said that the week before, Jim Wallis, who is now my Bnet colleague, had been out to give a talk to the seminarians. The seminarian told me that Bro. Jim had them all … until he said that they should all be Democrats. The seminarian said, “But we really are conservatives. We’re not liberals.” The point was that these sems really are social/moral/religious conservatives, who believe in traditional marriage and the sanctity of unborn life … but they also embrace environmentalism (on their own terms), want to do more to ease economic inequality, want to stand against the culture of consumption, and other things more typically associated with the left.
We’re going to have some interesting times ahead of us. Though I can’t foresee voting Democratic in 2008, at least not in the presidential race, I really do hope that Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee, because if he’s the president, I believe the door will be open to a new era in US domestic politics. If Hillary’s the president, forget it — we’ll all be singing another verse of the same old song. The Dems and the Repubs will see to that.