Two articles just out touching on topics in EItheR…

First, check out Matt Continetti’s profile of Jon Tester, who’s running to unseat Sen. Conrad Burns in Montana. Continetti’s quite right that, given the Democrats’ resurgence in the West: “Tester just may end up being the new face of the Democratic party.”

Second, check out the New Jersey Star Ledger, where a columnist proclaims: “Of the hundreds of thousands of words employed in this year’s election campaign, none is more likely to have an impact on post-election politics than Dick Armey’s characterization of Christian evangelicals in the Bush Republican Party as ‘thugs.’”

God bless James Dobson and his band of politico-theologians. Here’s the latest from Focus on the Family:

Don’t Forget to Pray for Election Day
by Wendy Cloyd, assistant editor

The National Day of Prayer Task Force urges all believers to petition God about the outcome of Nov. 7’s races.

The National Day of Prayer (NDP) Task Force is urging all American Christians to pray for the outcome of the upcoming midterm elections.

Jim Weidmann, vice chairman of the NDP Task Force, said the Pray for Election Day campaign is aimed at helping citizens understand their role in the electoral process.

“In a Christian nation, we have the biblical responsibility as well as the patriotic responsibility to cast our vote for those who govern us,” he said. “We want people to spend time praying that those who are elected will align themselves with God’s laws. We also want them to get out and vote so the Christian understanding is captured in the vote.”

The Pray for Election Day Web site is key to the effort. Visitors will discover suggestions on what to pray for — and can even record the fact that they prayed. Event organizers have also earmarked Nov. 5 as a day for all believers to pray and fast for the outcome of all the races on the Nov. 7 ballot.

By going to the polls, believers are taking advantage of the chance to elect men and women who share their beliefs on important issues, Weidmann said.

“It is important to understand the issues with each of the candidates so voters understand where they fall — so they can align themselves with candidates who align with their Christian values and beliefs,” he said. “And then pray obviously that those might be elected.”

You read that right. It is the duty of every Christian to: “petition God about the outcome of Nov. 7’s races.“

Why do I get the distinct feeling God would be annoyed to be “petitioned” about the midterms? Isn’t that a bit like both sides praying to God before a football game?

Then, there’s this nugget:

Some Christians may feel like Congress and President Bush haven’t accomplished much in the way of legislation backed by values voters, but Weidmann said that means it is even more important to be involved in the process — especially with so many states voting on ballot measures on such important topics as protecting one-man, one-woman marriage.

You see, values voters, the fact that the political establishment holds you in contempt and doesn’t deliver one-tenth of what it promises you is just more reason to get out there and vote Republican!

Of course, they can never actually say, “vote Republican.” That would cause some major problems for a “non-partisan” non-profit group. But skating as close to the law as possible while using lots of euphemisms, like “those who align themselves with God’s laws” (as opposed to Democrats, who align themselves with fags and witches) — well, that’s what Jesus would do.

For any number of reasons — all of them quite sound — I never expected to be involved in a three-way with Andrew Sullivan. Yet, that’s just where I find myself in the latest Economist. There, the magazine reviews Sullivan’s book, my own, and Stephen Slivinski’s “Buck Wild,” as part of a “conservatives gone wild” omnibus review.

Here’s a snippet:

Just about everything that could have gone wrong for the Republican Party has done — and then some. The ever-worsening news from Iraq is bad enough. Then, there is a far-reaching bribery scandal and, most recently, that trove of obscene-mails from a Republican congressman to teenage boys working as pages on Capitol Hill. Except for the fact that both parties have conspired for years to rig the voting system in favour of incumbents, the Republicans hope that in next month’s mid-term elections they will get away with merely losing control of the House of Representatives.

The strange thing is that many American conservatives actually want them to lose the House — and even to see the Senate go the same way. The authors reviewed here are among them. Their books try to explain this puzzling state of affairs and to fathom what has gone wrong with one of the most potent political movements America has ever seen.

…

“The Elephant in the Room” is Ryan Sager’s impressive run at the simpler book Mr Sullivan might have confined himself to. Mr Sager, a writer and blogger for the New York Post, also starts by dividing American conservatives into two groups, but in a more straightforward and familiar way. The southern branch is evangelical and socially conservative. The western branch has instincts that in many, though not all, places would be called liberal: it favours limited government, fiscal restraint and personal liberty. The Republicans based their success on an alliance of those two quite dissimilar constituencies. It was an unstable marriage, not to be taken for granted; that was the party’s mistake.

The Republicans’ conquest of the South, wresting southern social conservatives from the Democratic Party, was the great political breakthrough — and consolidating that support has lately been the party’s principal aim. The southern branch was given what it wanted, which sharpened its appetite for more, and the party kept on giving. The frugal westerners were neglected and marginalised. The result was big-government conservatism — and a failing marriage. Whether the alliance can still be saved is unclear. Mr Sager is hopeful and has some suggestions. The story of the impending break-up is excellent material, and the author tells it well.

…

Soon the party will find out whether it matters that these authors — intelligent conservatives, natural Republican supporters — are in one way or another rooting for the other side. A drubbing is richly deserved, to be sure. For the sake of the ideas that Republicans used to champion, and for the sake of the party itself, a drubbing might indeed be the best thing.

Needless to say, I agree with the review’s drift. And as for 2006 … yep. We’ll see.

So, the America’s Future Foundation panel I did last week is now up in their archives. You can download (mp3) a Podcast of it, and there are some pictures of us sexy panelists and the very good-looking audience.

Again, the question we were thrown was: “Election 2006: Do Republicans Deserve to Lose?”

I was on the most extreme “yes” side of the question. Andy Roth of the Club for Growth was my less-extreme ally. And Robert Bluey, of Human Events, and Jonathan Collegio, press secretary for the National Republican Congressional Committee, argued the opposite. It was a lively debate, with some good questions from the audience.

I must say that while I have no issue with National Review panning my book — just so long as they spell my name right, as they say — I find the lack of intellectual rigor brought to the review absolutely appalling.

And given that the only quote from the book is actually from the press release that my publicist wrote — not even the book flap! — and the author spends the bulk of the review rehashing her own 2001 book, I have to ask seriously whether she even cracked the spine.

Anyway, onto the substance of the review, such as it is…

I guess the central thing I find shocking is that a reviewer from National Review — from whence the very concept of “fusionism” originated — seems to believe that fusionism “does not offer anything to social conservatives.”

In fact, the entire review is premised on the idea that I have somehow proposed that the GOP should “throw religious conservatives under the bus to win elections.”

Wow. Where to begin.

Perhaps by noting that social/religious conservatives are already locked into an increasingly dysfunctional relationship with the GOP, where they feel like they get thrown under the bus during every odd-numbered year and exploited every even-numbered one. I spend a chapter on the problem in the book, coming to the conclusion that the Religious Right has come to expect too much from politics (a view shared by not a few Evangelical leaders and activists I’ve talked to).

More to the point, however, I never say the GOP should abandon social-conservative voters. Such a move would lead to utter (and obvious) political disaster. Rather, I argue that social conservatives and libertarians should seek common ground — more specifically, that social conservatives should come back to an older understanding of the danger of government power. Instead of seeking power to affect social change by means of the government and via the GOP, I argue, they should realize that it’s always dangerous to give the government more power. They should, in other words, return to the fusionist bargain, which held that libertarian, small-government means can achieve traditionalist, social-conservative ends.

Morse actually seems to believe something similar, that Republicans should, as she puts it, “offer libertarian arguments for social-conservative positions.” This is, of course, a classic fusionist idea: You can’t have small-government without a virtuous society (something the founding fathers understood intuitively). The “libertarian” corollary, of course, is that big government — particularly the welfare state — works directly against a virtuous society.

So, we have a reviewer making an essentially fusionist argument but arguing that fusionism offers nothing to social conservatives. Now, it may be that Morse doesn’t believe the libertarian corollary of fusionism — that she believes big government is compatible with, perhaps even central to, a virtuous society (so long as it’s Republican/conservative big government). But, frankly, I can make neither heads nor tails as to what she believes in that respect.

Morse is half-right that social conservatives deserve little blame for the Medicare prescription-drug bill, NCLB, the farm bill, etc. Indeed, I don’t finger them as the primary culprit on this score (the primary culprit on this score would be simply the GOP “establishment,” from Rove to Hastert on down, who have consistently chosen the path of political expediency). At the same time, though, I think it’s undeniable that social conservatives have become unduly comfortable putting up with Bush-style big-government conservatism; these betrayals of conservative principle have consistently generated little protest from the GOP’s Religious Right base.

But, to close, let me go back to this question of whether fusionism (or my proposal for a renewed fusionism) offers anything to social conservatives. I think it does:

It doesn’t offer a federal marriage amendment (though, I’d note, neither has the current GOP succeeded in securing one); but it does say marriage laws should be set by the states — some of which will liberalize, while others are free to remain conservative.

It doesn’t offer abstinence education in every school; but it does offer school choice and wide latitude for home schooling.

It doesn’t offer a federal ban on abortion; but it does provide that these decisions would better be made by the states.

Yes, as a libertarian I profoundly disagree with many social-conservative positions, and I’d like to see my fellow Republicans move in my direction. But I also accept the critique that libertarians give short shrift to the issue of social stability, and thus I agree with Morse that “social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, and libertarians need to take each other’s issues seriously enough to start talking to each other.”

Fusionism encompasses both sides of this equation — that’s why I wrote a friggin’ book about it.

What Morse is talking about is the exact “discussion” I’m trying to start. But if all National Review can see when someone criticizes the modern GOP or the Bush legacy is some caricature of a libertarian foaming at the mouth, wanting to spit on our religious-conservative allies, well, I’m not the one coming to the table empty-handed.

You doubt religious voters are unmotivated this year? Well, the GOP’s Evangelical wing — a.k.a. Dr. James Dobson’s Focus on the Family — certainly seems worried.

Thus, they’ve sent out this email alert: “The High Cost of Indifference: If polls are to be believed, there is a feeling among some values voters that Election Day is no big deal. They couldn’t be more wrong.”

In it, FOTF warns that a “liberal” takeover of Congress could spell doom on:

* Judges

* The federal Marriage Protection Amendment

* The state gay-marriage bans

* Kids being taught about condoms in public schools (heaven forbid — literally)

* Tax-payer-funded abortions in military hospitals overseas

* Stem-cell research

According to the article:

“If you don’t show up, you have done precisely what the liberals want you to do,” Don Wildmon, chairman of the American Family Association, told CitizenLink. “They will have succeeded magnificently if we, as values voters, come to the place of saying, ‘Well, it’s not worth it. I’m not even going to go vote.’ They will have won.”

You heard ’em folks. If the Republicans lose, the terrorists — er, liberals — will have won. Do what Jesus would do: Vote Republican.

Dick Armey: “When it comes to James Dobson, my personal experience has been that the man is most interested in political power.”

In the midst of this big fight with Evangelical leader Dr. James Dobson, Dick Armey has released a truly remarkable letter. In it, he outlines the personal reasons behind his characterization of Dobson as a “bully,” and he also offers a stunningly coherent outline of just where the Religious Right has gone wrong in recent years. I got this via email — and I don’t see it up on the Freedom Works site yet — so I want to take the step of reproducing it in full (bold added):

Christians and Big Government
Why faith requires freedom

There was a day when social conservatives were united with economic conservatives in the belief that small, limited government was not only good for our economy and the prosperity of American families, but essential to protect traditional family values. We all fought for a limited federal government — a government that had the decency to respect the American people by staying out of their lives. Small government meant that all Christians could practice their faith as they saw fit. Big government violates those rights by meddling in our lives, misusing our hard-earned money, and dictating cultural norms to us. We were and are rightly outraged when government imposes wrong-headed values through its monopoly of schools, government-funded “art,” and taxpayer funded “family planning.”

As a united conservative movement, we win when we defend traditional values against big government pretensions to impose its brand of “morality” on the American people. We lose when we attempt to use government power to impose our values on others.

I am a devout Christian. I am a so-called “values voter.” As a member of Congress and as Majority Leader, I believe I faithfully served our values. One of my proudest moments in Congress was beating the Democrats’ attempts to meddle in the affairs of families that had chosen to opt out of secular government education by home-schooling their children. I took on the entire political establishment, but we only won because thousands of Christian home-schoolers demanded that Congress keep its nose out of their decision to raise and educate their children as they saw fit.

I am also a free market economist by training, and I believe that economic freedom is vitally important in the defense of the American family. Big issues like retirement security, tax reform, school choice and spending restraint will determine whether or not families will be dependent and subservient to government. Who owns your retirement? Who decides how you provide for your family’s future. Can you leave your estate to your grandchildren, or is it the government’s? Will the government socially engineer your life through the tax code? Will liberal education bureaucrats determine your child’s education? These are all issues that used to matter to the political leadership of Christian conservative voters.

And while for most in the Christian conservative movement these issues still resonate, the same cannot be said for some of our Washington, D.C.-based religious leaders. Right after I had left Congress and joined FreedomWorks, we found ourselves embroiled in a major tax fight in Alabama. Oddly, an old friend, Bob Riley, had been elected governor only to immediately reverse course, cut a deal with the teachers union, and advocate a massive tax increase to prop up the failing government school system. It was “what Jesus would do,” he said. I took personal offense to that, as did many of the voters who had just worked so hard to elect him Governor. Our activists had joined forces with local Christian conservatives, including the Alabama Christian Coalition, to fight both bad policy and a sense of personal betrayal.

We were blindsided when the national leadership of the Christian Coalition endorsed the Governor’s proposed tax increase, joining forces with liberal interests in the state that had actively worked against our values for a generation. In the end we won, thanks in no small part to the fact that members of the local Christian Coalition chapter parted ways with the national organization and stood with Alabama FreedomWorks, the Alabama Policy Institute, local taxpayer organizations, and a host of other small government advocates all united in the effort to stop a big government tax-hike scheme.

Today, the national Christian Coalition has joined forces with MoveOn.org in another government grab of private property dealing specifically with ownership of the Internet. They are wrong on the specifics of the issue, and they are wrong to associate with and comfort radical liberals who have demonstrated nothing but disdain for conservative values. Armey’s Axiom: Make a deal with the Devil, and you are the junior partner.

Another Armey’s Axiom says that if it is about power, you lose. And unfortunately when it comes to James Dobson, my personal experience has been that the man is most interested in political power.

As Majority Leader, I remember vividly a meeting with the House leadership where Dobson scolded us for having failed to “deliver” for Christian conservatives, that we owed our majority to him, and that he had the power to take our jobs back. This offended me, and I told him so.

In a later meeting Dobson and a colleague came into my office to lobby against a trade bill, asking me to stop the legislation from going to the House floor. They were wrong on the issue, and I told them no. Would you at least postpone the vote, they asked? We have a direct mail fundraising letter about to go out to our membership, they said.

I wondered then if their opposition to the bill was driven less by their moral compass and more by the need to rile their membership and increase revenue. I wondered then, if these self-appointed Christian leaders, like many politicians, had come to Washington to do good, but had instead done well for themselves.

Dobson later ran an orchestrated campaign against me in my race to retain the Majority Leader post, telling my colleagues that I was not a good Christian. I prefer to leave that decision to Lord God Almighty on Judgment Day.

Maybe you can understand why I have recently been quoted referring to this person as a “bully.”

And it continues today, as Focus on the Family deliberately perpetuates the lie that I am a consultant to the ACLU. I have never had any relationship with the ACLU and oppose most of that organization’s work. The ACLU has twisted “civil liberty” to mean something quite the opposite.

Nowhere was it more wrong, with more disastrous policy ends, than in the Terri Schiavo intervention. While her case was heartbreaking, our Founders created a government built on checks and balances, not a nation run by an arbitrary and imperial Congress. Congress cannot simply override our entire state and federal legal system to intervene in one person’s situation. It was truly a chilling act.

Imagine the precedent-setting nature of such an action when a different House of Representatives, one with “Speaker Nancy Pelosi” wielding the gavel, holds power.

Freedom works. Freedom is a gift from God Almighty, and we have a responsibility to protect it. Christians face a temptation to power when we are fortunate enough to have a majority of support in Congress. But government can never advance a faith that is freely given, and it is corrosive to even try. Just look at Europe, where decades of nanny-state activism— including taxpayer support for churches and for religious political parties— have severely eroded the faith. In America today, too many of our Christian leaders fail to recognize the temptation to power and the danger it holds for our society and our faith.

And so America’s Christian conservative movement is confronted with this divide: small government advocates who want to practice their faith independent of heavy-handed government versus big government sympathizers who want to impose their version of “righteousness” on others through the hammer of law.

We must avoid the temptation to use the power of government to perfect our society and its citizens. That is the same urge that drives the Left and the socialists, and I can assure you that every program or power we give government today in the name of our values can be turned against us when the day comes where a majority of Congress is hostile to us.

Instead, we need to limit the sphere of government and create civil space where private institutions, individual responsibility and religious faith can flourish. By reducing the size of the welfare state, we increase the importance of the works of Christian charities and our church communities. By reducing the tax burden on families, we make it easier for Christian households to tithe or for young mothers to stay home to raise their children. The same is true for retirement security based on ownership. Reducing the ever-growing reach of the federal government means local communities, and more important, parents, are free to establish the standards and values for the education of their children.

Consider the welfare reform we passed in 1996. By reducing bureaucracy and dependency and emphasizing work and responsibility, we changed conditions for an entire segment of our society. Since welfare reform passed, teen pregnancy, welfare caseloads, and the number of abortions in America have all declined. That is the kind of policy change that values voters need to support, and it is the result of limiting government’s power over our lives.

Our movement must avoid the temptations of power and those who would twist the good intentions of Christian voters to support policies that undermine freedom and grow government. Freedom is what gives America its unique place in the world, and protecting and expanding our freedom is what creates the space necessary to keep our faith strong and growing.

Sincerely,
Dick Armey
Chairman
FreedomWorks

The section I’ve highlighted in bold is particularly interesting. This is a guy who’s read his Frank Meyer.

Here are two quotes from Meyer’s “In Defense of Freedom”:

“No act to the degree that it is coerced can partake of virtue — or of vice.”

“If the state is endowed with the power to enforce virtue, the men who hold that power will enforce their own concepts as virtuous.”

Armey is right, of course. The Religious Right is divided from the Republican Party, but it is also divided against itself. Some still see the wisdom in Meyer’s words — to say nothing of those of the founders. Some, like Dobson and his cohort, are just here to do well — not to do good.

Armey can fight this fight because he no longer has to deal with these people on a regular basis or depend on them for reelection. How many in Congress feel the exact same way but stay quiet?

This dysfunctional relationship can work sometimes, but it will always be subject to flare ups. I think this year is definitely a flare-up year.

UPDATE: Freedom Works has posted the letter here.

George Will’s column today, on the Foley mess, cites The Elephant in the Room:

The problem with claiming to have cornered the market on virtue is that people will get snippy when they spot vice in your ranks. This is one awkward aspect of what is supposed to have been the happy fusion between, but which involves unresolved tensions between, two flavors of conservatism — Western and Southern.

The former is largely libertarian, holding that pruning big government will allow civil society — and virtues nourished by it and by the responsibilities of freedom — to flourish. The Southern, essentially religious, strand of conservatism is explained by Ryan Sager in his new book, “The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians, and the Battle to Control the Republican Party”:

“Whereas conservative Christian parents once thought it was inappropriate for public schools to teach their kids about sex, now they want the schools to preach abstinence to children. Whereas conservative Christians used to be unhappy with evolution being taught in public schools, now they want Intelligent Design taught instead (or at least in addition). Whereas conservative Christians used to want the federal government to leave them alone, now they demand that more and more federal funds be directed to local churches and religious groups through Bush’s faith-based initiatives program.”

To a Republican Party increasingly defined by the ascendancy of the religious right, the Foley episode is doubly deadly.

I’m actually not sure this is entirely correct. It’s certainly true that some voters, particularly toward the center — voters who vote on emotion — will be swayed against the GOP by such hypocrisy. But I think many social conservatives are quite reconciled to expecting sleaze from politicians on a personal level, but still voting for good “Christian conservatives.”

Over at Cato Unbound, Markos Moulitsas is making the case for libertarians to vote Democratic. I’ll weigh in a bit later.

I’m pretty skeptical of the Kos conception of a libertarian Democrat — it seems pretty light on the libertarian and pretty heavy on the Democrat. But, as I get into in my book, something along these lines is taking shape in the West. Now’s the time for Republicans to start taking the threat seriously.