There’s no sugar-coating it. It’s been a rough couple of weeks for conservatives.
Like many younger conservatives, I endured tough electoral losses in 2008 and 2012 while residing deep within a liberal bubble (academia and Washington, D.C., respectively), where the onslaught of gloating “I told you so” remarks and gleefully offered post-mortems of conservatism were as plentiful as they were painful.
However, it’s really not as bad for the GOP as it seems. Three important points to remember going forward come to mind.
1) Politics is Cyclical
Back in 2008, the punditry happily announced a new, permanent center-left political alignment in America following the success of President Obama’s nebulous “hope and change” campaign message. James Carville went so far as to predict a 40-year Democratic majority.
Nevertheless, after two years of smugly lecturing Republicans on how they must dismiss their “extremist” elements and moderate (i.e. be more liberal) to survive, pundits watched in horror as the most conservative batch of Republicans in a generation demolished the Democrat House majority in 2010 (almost all were reelected in 2012).
Without any sense of history or irony, the punditry in 2012 is once again trumpeting the existence of a semi-permanent liberal majority, while also finger pointing at Republican extremists for an electoral failure.
Try not to forget what happened the last time the President mistakenly interpreted a narrow electoral mandate to fix the economy as a mandate to pursue a broadly liberal and partisan ideological agenda. Conservatives will have reason to celebrate again in 2014.
2) The GOP has a deep bench
The first four years of Obama’s presidency led to the formation of enormously popular rising stars within the Party. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and former VP nominee Paul Ryan of Wisconsin will be major national political figures for decades.
Who are the current all-stars on the Democrats’ bench? The best they can muster up now are probably Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, Newark, New Jersey Mayor Cory Booker and maybe Massachusetts Senator-elect Elizabeth Warren.
Likewise, the 2009 and 2010 elections led to massive gains by Republicans at the state level (twenty state houses and six governorships flipped from Democrat to Republican control in 2010). That was good news in the short-term, but in the long term, that means Republicans have a major advantage in recruiting viable candidates for more important races in the future. History has shown that former governors often become Senators and former state legislatures often become governors or Congressmen.
3) Americans are still conservative
The 2012 election was not a defeat of conservatism or an endorsement of liberalism.
Given the abysmal state of the economy and the unpopularity of the President’s signature legislative achievements, it’s unsurprising that the Obama campaign avoided almost any substantive defense of the President’s own liberal governing record in 2012.
Instead, the Obama campaign spent several hundred million dollars arguing that Mitt Romney was simply a bad guy, and aggressively courting a handful of key demographic groups in a nauseatingly divisive and dishonest way.
Moreover, the ludicrous campaign focus on items like Bain Capital, a phony “war on women,” and PBS’s Big Bird were nothing more than the same sort of scare tactics Obama demonized in his own 2008 campaign, not a coherent commentary on conservative thinking.
In 2012, for every one American that self-identified as a “liberal,” there were two Americans that self-identified as “conservative.”
It’s a bit premature to be declaring the death of conservatism in the United States.
