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Core GOP issues slipping away
November 20, 2001 BY JOHN O'SULLIVAN
As President Bush sweeps the Taliban to defeat on the plains and hills of Afghanistan, he is finding the Demo- cratic Party a more formidable opponent at home. Last week's elections in Virginia and New Jersey showed modest but clear gains for the Democrats--and suggested that the GOP's appeal to voters is fading rapidly. It is not hard to explain why. Republican core issues are, in the jargon of pollsters, less salient than in the past. Voters favor tax cuts less fiercely when the top marginal tax rate hovers around forty percent than when it was at its pre-Reagan rate of 70 percent. And school choice appeals mainly to the non-Republican parents of children trapped in inner-city "sink schools"--not to suburban parents basically satisfied with local schools and fearful of deprived children arriving with vouchers to demand entry. On top of that, however, the war on terrorism seems to be fostering a political climate helpful to Democrat partisans of big government. Government has, after all, been putting its best faces forward. Its most visible agents since Sept. 11 have been firefighters, police and rescuers rather than the IRS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the National Endowment for the Arts. And as in earlier wars, the sense of emergency has paved the way for centralization of decision-making. Congress has just passed by lopsided majorities an essentially Democratic bill placing airport security in the hands of the federal government--and Bush happily signed it. There is, of course, no logic underlying this renaissance of big government. Federalizing airport security itself offers no guarantee of improvement; the feds were in charge of border security before Sept. 11--and terrorists went in and out of the United States like yo-yos. A better approach would be to lay down strict rules for private airport security providers--decent wages, tough screening of applicants, rigorous training--and give the feds regulatory oversight of them. There are certain specific and well-defined tasks that Washington should either perform (or perform better than before) in order to defeat terrorism. But expanding big government in all directions to do so, as columnist Mark Steyn points out, is like hiring people first to rescue someone trapped in a burning building and then to rush him to the theater to watch a transgendered performance artist subsidized by the NEA. It makes no sense. Whatever the reality, though, the zeitgeist seems to have decided that for the moment, big government is back. And that hampers a party skeptical of government, such as the GOP, and helps the Democrats as a party sympathetic to extending federal power. What should theoretically give hope to Republicans, however, is that this Democrat advantage applies only to economic, administrative and welfare questions. Sept. 11 also has raised less tangible but powerful questions of patriotism and national sentiment on which the GOP enjoys a natural advantage. It has made an unashamed patriotism respectable again; it has aroused widespread public anxiety over uncontrolled immigration and lax border security; it has drawn attention to the existence of immigrants and de-assimilated native-born Americans who either reject allegiance to the United States outright or grant it only on highly qualified terms; it has discredited multiculturalism and official bilingualism as eroding America's common culture, and it has created a popular appetite for policies that would restore the nation's unity and sense of common destiny. As the multiculturalist party the Demo- crats are ill-placed to respond to this public mood. Making national unity a high priority would fracture Democratic Party unity as the ethnic pressure groups such as La Raza rushed to defend illegal immigration and official bilingualism. As the Americanist party, however, the GOP would be expressing its deepest instincts by introducing measures to reverse the balkanization of America. For instance, the Republicans in Congress could reform the INS to establish a new Bureau of Americanization that would encourage immigrants to identify fully with their new country, as John Fonte of the Hudson Institute has argued. Or the White House might support the campaign of millionaire Ron Unz to replace the failed system of bilingual education with an "English immersion" program that genuinely equips young people with the tools needed for success in the American economy. Or Bush, matching his appeals to Americans not to discriminate against Muslims, might ask Islamic leaders to include the Pledge of Allegiance in their prayer services in mosques. Or immigration policy could be reformed not only to restore border security but also to grant preference to those would-be immigrants--irrespective of race or national origin--who share the language, culture and free philosophical assumptions of America. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, these and similar proposals would win massive support among voters while embarrassing and dividing the Democrats. They have only one drawback: The Bush administration has publicly committed itself on the other side of the debate. It has reaffirmed its decision to grant an amnesty to illegal Mexican immigrants; it has quadrupled spending on bilingual education, and it has in general adopted a political pose supporting multiculturalism--notably at the last GOP convention. Before Sept. 11, this looked opportunistic; today, it looks suicidal.
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