A Republican Left Turn?

If the Republican Party concedes defeat in the culture war, as a number of commentators on the right and the left argue it should, what what will happen to the conservative coalition? Can hard-line stands on social issues be set aside?

On one side of the intraparty battle stands Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, who has suggested again and again over the past week that party leaders need to reduce the salience of culturally divisive issues. “We don’t have time to divide our party. We’ve got to go back to welcoming anyone who walks through that door,” Priebus told New Mexico Republicans on March 23. “We don’t need to be labeling people, ‘You’re a bad Republican’… Reagan said someone who is 80 percent my friend is not 20 percent my enemy. I want to build this party.”

At a breakfast session with reporters on March 18 in Washington, Priebus defended the decision of Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, whose son is gay, to declare his support for same-sex marriage. “I mean, it’s his decision. It’s his decision,” Priebus told the press.

It’s not a matter of whether I support his decision; I support him doing what he wants to do as an elected person and as an American. If that’s his opinion, then I support him having that opinion.

Chris Cillizza, an insightful Washington Post columnist, argued that Portman’s decision was

the latest in a series of moves that make one thing crystal clear: The political debate on gay marriage is effectively over.

Not everyone in the Republican Party was on board. Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, counterattacked on March 20:

Reince Priebus has decided that the way for his party to win over voters is to parrot the Left’s policies. The grand strategy, which calls for throwing the party’s social conservatives overboard, demands the G.O.P. be more “welcoming” and “inclusive” to people that are actively working against the conservative principles in the Republican platform.

Rush Limbaugh warned that if party leaders abandoned the right’s social agenda, “they are going to cause their base to stay home and throw their hands up in utter frustration.”

Actually, for Republicans, the upside of blunting volatile social issues is far greater than Limbaugh suggests.

The potential gains from a softening of the party’s hard-right stand on social and cultural issues could be huge: a return to full competitiveness and a reversal of a widespread, sharply negative view of the Republican Party. The pollster Andy Kohut, former president of the Pew Center, described the chasm between Republican Party loyalists and the voting public in a March 22 article in the Washington Post, “The Numbers Prove It: The G.O.P. is estranged from America”:

The outsize influence of hard-line elements in the party base is doing to the G.O.P. what supporters of Gene McCarthy and George McGovern did to the Democratic Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s — radicalizing its image and standing in the way of its revitalization.

The party, Kohut warned,

is increasingly dominated by a highly energized bloc of voters with extremely conservative positions on nearly all issues: the size and role of government, foreign policy, social issues, and moral concerns. They stand with the tea party on taxes and spending and with Christian conservatives on key social questions, such as abortion rights and same-sex marriage. These staunch conservatives, who emerged with great force in the Obama era, represent 45 percent of the Republican base. According to our 2011 survey, they are demographically and politically distinct from the national electorate. Ninety-two percent are white. They tend to be male, married, Protestant, well off and at least 50 years old.

Jonathan Haidt, a professor at the Stern School of Business at N.Y.U. and the author of “The Righteous Mind,” wrote in an e-mail to The Times that intraparty Republican divisions go beyond social and cultural issues and that

the left-right divide politically reflects an underlying psychological dimension, related to openness to experience vs. threat sensitivity and preference for order/stability.

In past times

of rising crime, a cold war, rising nuclear war fears, and rising Islamic terrorism, there was a lot to hold together the large conservative coalition.

Now, with diminished external threats, there is much less “to galvanize people with a psychologically conservative disposition.” Instead, Haidt argued, the more intensely felt current threats are economic, and it is

not immediately clear why shrinking the government is the best way to meet those threats. I don’t think the Republicans have found an issue or argument or moral appeal that strongly activates conservative moral sensibilities.

With the apparent decline of external threats, Steve Ansolabehere, a political scientist at Harvard, predicted that the next internal conflict for Republicans would be “over taxes/small government versus defense.” He argued that

the Rand Paul wing of the party will sacrifice defense spending (and is even somewhat hostile toward it) in order to shrink the government. That’s at odds with a more traditional Republican position.

Robert Y. Shapiro, a political scientist at Columbia who has studied left-right divisions and polarization, is actually optimistic about prospects for conservatism. In an e-mail, he wrote:

The right has been weakened on gay rights and now gay marriage, and it looks like immigration. Also interestingly there are fissures on defense spending since defense cuts have been accepted by some conservatives in the sequester as a needed part of budget cutting and holding the Democrats’ feet to the fire on that. But conservatism may not weaken by much since it looks like it can and has regrouped on economic and social welfare spending, taxes, and the budget deficit. Economic and anti-regulation conservatism has hardly weakened.

And on the cultural/values issues, abortion is as strong a rallying issue as ever (public opinion has not shifted left on this, even among younger cohorts in contrast to other issues), and they are just more cautious regarding what they say about contraception. Conservatives would look as much as ever for opportunities on prayer in schools and support for religious group endeavors. Conservatives have held together on guns even after recent events. And with regard to racial and racial justice issues, watch the Supreme Court on voting rights and affirmative action. Conservatives have not been weakened any further on these issues.

Grover Norquist, one of the leading architects, organizers and cheerleaders of what he calls the “leave us alone” coalition, is bubbling with enthusiasm.

Norquist told me in a phone interview that he thinks policies initiated by Republicans at the state and local levels, by breaking the link that joins individuals and families to government, are laying the groundwork for a continuing expansion of the conservative electorate.

Nearly two million children are now home-schooled, Norquist said, and their families have rejected government-run public schools and decided that they can do a better job on their own. Some eight million men and women have concealed-carry handgun permits, with the result that they feel “more self-assured, more independent, not as worried police will draw chalk marks around their body” and certainly less inclined, according to Norquist, to support a pro-gun-control Democratic Party. Along similar lines, Norquist notes, the number of poor students receiving vouchers to attend private schools is rising steadily as the passage of state right-to-work laws is gutting dues-paying membership in public employee unions, a financial mainstay of the Democratic Party.

“I’m reasonably confident that at the state level we are creating more people who want to be part of the ‘leave us alone coalition,’ ” Norquist said. He predicts that within the next decade, Republicans will take control of the Senate and regain the White House.

Craig Shirley, a conservative activist and the author of two books about the Reagan revolution, is convinced that self-proclaimed conservatives have undermined their own cause by attempting to use the federal government to address social issues.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, he said, should never have pushed for enactment of the Defense of Marriage Act: “it was wrong, it was the federalization of social policy.”

The Republican Party has begun to move to the left on social and cultural issues, as well as on immigration. Despite the warnings of mass defections of white evangelical and born-again Christians, these shifts will not be as costly as some people, both inside and outside the party, claim.

The fact is that on pretty much every noncultural issue – government spending, taxes, the regulatory state and national defense – the Christian right holds orthodox Republican views virtually identical to those of mainstream Republicans. Its members are unlikely to bolt the party.

Take a look at this Pew Center chart, Figure 1.

The constituency most convinced that “government regulation of business usually does more harm than good,” a core tenet of the modern Republican Party, is white evangelical Christians:

Or, take Figure 2. The Christian right tops everyone in its conviction that “the best way to ensure peace is through military strength.”

Finally, just about everyone (see Figure 3) says they are patriotic, but who tops the list?

In other words, the Republican Party can afford to marginalize Tony Perkins and other Christian right leaders because evangelical social conservatives, who make up more than a third of the Republican electorate, are not going to vote Democratic. Nor are they going to join an exodus to a third party. Rush Limbaugh to the contrary, they won’t stay home either.

Minimal losses among these voters could be made up for by slight gains among other constituencies like young voters, minorities and single white women.

Withdrawing full-throated support for the religious right (for example, by altering the anti-abortion plank of the 2012 Republican Party platform, which called for a constitutional amendment banning abortion without exception for victims of rape or incest or to save the life of the mother) may be a gamble – and may cost the party donors — but at the moment the Republican Party holds a losing hand.