Steve Chapman has a superb essay on Slate, delineating the GOP’s long slide away from Goldwater’s embrace of states’ rights. The FMA is the worst example, but there are many others. Chapman gives one reason for the change:
[W]hat alienated Republicans from federalism? It’s not simple hypocrisy. True, their sympathy for states’ rights was partly the product of a historical accident. From the New Deal onward, state governments were generally less activist than the federal government, where the legislature was under almost unbroken Democratic control for half a century. So, conservatives preferred to keep decision-making in places where they could prevail. But their fondness for states’ rights also stemmed from conservatives’ sincere distrust of government power and their belief that one crucial way to constrain it was to diffuse it among 50 capitals instead of channeling it all into one.
That perspective lost much of its appeal once the GOP found it could not only elect presidents with reasonable consistency but also dominate Congress as well. Virtue is harder to practice once temptation is beckoning.
I think that’s true. But I also believe the fusion of Republicanism with fundamentalist Christianity is also antithetical to the federalist impulse. If you believe you are right, and you believe that God is behind you, it becomes much harder to allow others to try other things or experiment or differ. That doesn’t just apply to people, but to states as well. Today’s Republicans, when it comes to something like, say, medical marijuana, cannot get past their visceral hostility to individuals’ experiencing pleasure or even medical help not licensed by their God. So they seek to ban it – quick. If that means violating states’ rights, so be it. Religious zeal as well as hypocrisy and opportunism are the factors here. None is conducive to the tolerant spirit of principled conservatism.
QUOTE OF THE DAY II: “American policy in Iraq since the fall of Baghdad has been incompetent. Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, used too few troops to secure the borders or to capture the stockpiles of weaponry. Disbanding Iraq’s security forces was a foreseeable error. Backing Ahmed Chalabi for president flew in the face of wise counsel. The blitz on Falluja was a military and diplomatic catastrophe. The rather good interim government of Iraq that took power last week emerged in spite of, not because of, the United States…
I begin to think the West can purge itself of American misdemeanours only by some symbolic sacrifice. Rumsfeld would have done nicely had the president dismissed him over the Abu Ghraib horrors. He signally failed to do it. Now only the defeat of the Republican administration will suffice.
Senator John Kerry does not impress. Whereas the president has difficulty in stringing two words together, the Democratic candidate can say nothing in fewer than four long sentences, which is worse. The main charge against Kerry – a telling one -is that he is inconsistent. But is Bush less so? Was not this president elected on a platform of disengagement and did he not go on to fight two foreign wars? Did he set out for battle despising the UN and America’s former allies in “old Europe”, and does he not now grub about for their moral and practical support? … For America to brush away its recent disgraces, the electorate will have to bin this administration. I never expected to say this to my American friends: vote Democrat.” – Michael Portillo, one of the leading lights of the British Conservative party, and a staunch pro-American, in the Times of London, July 4.
ANOTHER BUSH NOMINEE: This one believes that wives should be subservient to their husbands. Well, the Bible says so! And that’s how you interpret the Constitution, isn’t it? And if the Constitution suggests otherwise, you can always amend it or strip courts of the ability to review legislation. Today’s Santorumized GOP: gays in “conversion therapy,” women in the kitchen, blacks in the front row of the convention line-up.
The Dish 