{"id":595,"date":"2021-04-10T17:16:38","date_gmt":"2021-04-10T21:16:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/potlatchga.com\/?p=595"},"modified":"2021-04-10T17:44:28","modified_gmt":"2021-04-10T21:44:28","slug":"peggy-noonans-column-america-needs-the-gop-and-it-needs-helpwall-street-journal-april-10-2021","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/potlatchga.com\/?p=595","title":{"rendered":"Peggy Noonan’s Column, “America Needs the GOP, and it Needs Help,”Wall Street Journal, April 10, 2021"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been out of pocket the last few days visiting friends down in Florida. Now that I am back at my desk, I find that the Potlatch site is down, probably for maintenance and tweaking. With luck it should be up and running soon. In the interim, I was delighted to read Peggy Noonan’s column in the Journal’s<\/em> weekend edition. I agree with every word and have printed it for those of you who don’t subscribe or read the Journal<\/em> often. It strikes me as something an “adult in the room would write” during the present “dark ages” we are experiencing in politics. No poisonous partisanship nor ideological nonsense, just plain old American pragmatism.<\/p>\n

The Republican Party is at a low point, but the two-party system is too vital to abandon.<\/h2>\n

No one likes the Republican Party. Pretty much every power center in America is arrayed against it\u2014the media, the academy, the entertainment culture, what remains of our high culture, the corporate suite, the nonprofit world. The young aren\u2019t drawn to it.<\/p>\n

The party is split, if not shattered. The opposition has a new presidency, almost a Senate majority, the House, albeit by a hair. The president nearing his hundred-day mark and deeply committed to showing energy in the executive, has yet to make masses of voters crazy with rage. His approval numbers are steady.<\/p>\n

Everything\u2019s against the Republicans nationally, even many of their leaders in Washington, many of whom don\u2019t trend toward brightness.<\/p>\n

What would constitute an active civic and political good in America in 2021? Helping to bring that party back. It is worth saving, even from itself. At its best it has functioned as a friend and protector of liberty, property, speech and religious rights, an encourager of a just and expansive civic life, a defender of the law, without which we are nothing, and the order it brings, so that regular people can feel as protected on the streets as kings. At its best it has been Main Street, not Wall Street, a stay on the hand of government when it demands too much. At its worst it\u2019s been\u2014worse! But let\u2019s dwell on the good, which can function as a guide in rebuilding.<\/p>\n

Some Republicans the past few years have talked of breaking from the two-party system and starting a third. But that\u2019s not the way to go. Better to strengthen the system that for more than a century and a half has seen us through a lot of mess. In its rough way the two-party system, even without meaning to, functions as a unifying force: At the end of the day, for all our differences and arguments, you have to decide if you were a constituency of Team A or Team B. The parties, in their rough and inadequate way, had to be alive to your interests. Things proceeded with a sense, an air, of majority rule. With a third party you can win the presidency with 34%. That won\u2019t help national unity. And this being America, once we have a third party we\u2019ll have a fourth and a fifth, and everything will be chaos, with a loss of any feeling of general consensus.<\/p>\n

Two parties are better for the country, and better for the Democrats. A strong Republican party keeps them on their toes. As Oscar Hammerstein once said, liberals need conservatives to hold them back and conservatives need liberals to pull them forward. One side should stop the other when it goes too far, or boost it when it fails to move. Hammerstein was a cockeyed optimist, but this isn\u2019t a bad time for that.<\/p>\n

I know a little about the modern Republican Party, have known its meaning, its reason for existing and what it has been as it traveled through history. Back in the 1980s when I was a new worker in Ronald Reagan\u2019s administration, I told a friend that the American people looked at us and saw some very good things, but there was an air about Republicans also that they were in some private club, a country club, and it gave the party an impression of snobbery, exclusivity, social superiority. The phrase made its way into columns, and a concept was born.<\/p>\n

During the 1984 election I set off on a mission to do outreach to Democrats, because I felt so many of them wanting to vote for Reagan but needing to know they weren\u2019t being disloyal or leaving the team but were in fact joining something that was more like them. I was thinking: you shouldn\u2019t be held back by old historical categories when new categories are being born\u2014when you, Reagan Democrat, are that new category. You didn\u2019t have to come from the country club to be a Republican. President Reagan spoke high and sincere praise of admirable Democrats\u2014 Henry Jackson, John F. Kennedy, Harry Truman. And of course it was natural to Reagan, who\u2019d been an ardent New Dealer, a Democrat into his 40s.
\nThe country club is mostly Democratic now, and rougher places trend Republican. Things change.<\/p>\n

I left the Republican Party at some point in the 2000s. I didn\u2019t like a lot of what I was seeing. I began to say, honestly, that I was a political conservative but not a Republican. Readers could see it in my work, and I heard from them a lot. I reregistered to vote in a Republican primary in New York City, and have kept it that way, maybe for reasons of orneriness.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019ve done a lot of mourning over it the past 15 years, shed literal tears over the GOP. There were a lot of break points. Iraq was one: If that wasn\u2019t the country club at work, what was? People to whom nothing much bad had ever happened, so they expected good fortune to follow their decisions. Immigration was another, with the elite decision makers of the party not caring at all how the unprotected see and experience life. It was a total detachment from their concerns accompanied by a claim of higher compassion. Sarah Palin was another. I felt her choice as a vice presidential candidate degraded a good insight, that an ability to do the show business of politics is important\u2014FDR, JFK and Reagan knew that\u2014but you can\u2019t let politics degrade into only showbiz; you need the ability to think seriously about issues. It is wrong to reduce politics to a subset of entertainment. There were more.<\/p>\n

But now, at a time when the Grand Old Party is at the bottom, I find myself more loyal than I meant to be, to paraphrase Tennessee Williams. If the party is going to go forward and be a healthy contributor to the democratic future, it will have to figure out why it exists, what its meaning is, its purpose in the 21st century. It\u2019s going to have to be alive in some new way to who exactly is going to join it and save it in the next few years. It will have to see all the new categories. Especially: the immigrants to America of the past quarter-century, people who fled something bad or limiting and don\u2019t want to see those things instituted here, people who have businesses, who want freedom and peace and the possibility of flourishing.<\/p>\n

It is a badly divided party. It will have to work through a great deal. It can\u2019t keep existing only to own the libs, manipulate the distracted, monetize grievance, and plot revenge against those who spent the past few years on the wrong side.
\nSometimes you have to look to who will follow you if only you take right and serious stands aimed at helping the people of your country.<\/p>\n

The exact nature of the new Democratic Party now emerging will help the GOP find an agreed-on mission, but it won\u2019t be enough. What you favor is as important as what you oppose. There will be a lot of thinking along the way in this space on what those things should be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been out of pocket the last few days visiting friends down in Florida. Now that I am back at my desk, I find that the Potlatch site is down, probably for maintenance and tweaking. With luck it should be up and running soon. In the interim, I was delighted to read Peggy Noonan’s column…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-by-robert-fischer"],"yoast_head":"\nPeggy Noonan's Column, "America Needs the GOP, and it Needs Help,"Wall Street Journal, April 10, 2021 - Potlatch<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/potlatchga.com\/?p=595\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Peggy Noonan's Column, "America Needs the GOP, and it Needs Help,"Wall Street Journal, April 10, 2021 - Potlatch\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I’ve been out of pocket the last few days visiting friends down in Florida. 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