Lessons Not Learned

In the wake of the deal that averted the"fiscal cliff," it seems that Republican voters are increasingly disgusted with thier party.  This news as reported by pollster Scott Rasmussen should not make them feel any better

So, according to Politico, the Washington team is gearing up a new effort to protect incumbents and limit the ability of Republican voters to successfully challenge establishment candidates. 

That makes sense to those whose sole goal is winning a majority in Congress rather than changing the course of government policy. Seen from the outside, though, it sounds like the professional politicians are saying that the only way to win is to pick more candidates like the insiders. Hearing that message, the reaction of many Republican and conservative voters is, "Why bother?"

What a more responsible party would do:

Mature party leaders would spend a lot more time listening to Republican voters rather than further insulating themselves from those voters. They would try to understand why just 37 percent of Republicans nationwide believe the economy is fair. They would give serious thought to why just half of GOP voters have a favorable opinion of House Speaker John Boehner, the highest-ranking elected Republican in the nation. They would acknowledge that government spending in America has gone up in every year since 1954 regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats are in charge. 

Then mature party leaders would chart a realistic course to address these concerns and share those plans with the voters. To succeed, this course would have to include some painful medicine for the establishment, such as giving up corporate welfare programs that benefit their friends and allies. It also would require helping Republican voters identify primary candidates who challenge the establishment but could be effective on the campaign trail. 

This is a much tougher course to follow; one that would benefit the party and the nation. Unfortunately, by seeking to protect the insiders from the voters, all indications are that most establishment Republicans would rather blame the voters and keep their perks.

I know this whole listen-to-your-constituency-thing is insane, but it might be just crazy enough to work...

Instead of changing the rules to further insulate themselves against those they perceive to be stupid country bumpkins, Republicans should listen and ponder what Abraham Lincoln had to say about the role of public opinion in a republic such as ours:

With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently he who moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.

In an essay in the Fall issue of the Claremont Review of Books that is truly a must-read, William Voegli expands on Lincoln's exhortation:

Abraham Lincoln's carefully chosen word "molds" suggests that this paramount duty of democratic statesmanship is quite different from disdaining public sentiment and working to render it governmentally inconsequential, the ambition of the incipient tyrant. It is also the road not taken by the self-marginalizing activist content merely to denounce public sentiment when he believes it's mistaken, preferring the satisfactions of moral purity to the messier, murkier work of making a difference. Molding public sentiment is, finally, different from simple acquiescence, letting it take whatever shape it will. This firm but shrewd defiance is especially important when the public is prepared to embrace a wicked or destructive course. Americans in the 1850s, it appeared to Lincoln, were moving toward accepting the indefinite expansion and permanent existence of slavery, a prospect he believed would be a practical and moral catastrophe.

This is statesmanship:  the combination of principle and practice, or the use of prudence to forward the first principles of the regime in changing circumstances.  Since the the discovery of philosophy, and thereby political philosophy, politics in the highest sense has been about the use of persuasion by those who share in the faculty of reason to debate in the public arena the best means to achieve the ends which are set by nature.

Rather than taking this path, Republicans insiders have chosen a different path -- one that indicates they have learned nothing about why they lost in 2012.  This does not inspire confidence going forward.