Republicans Need to Get Religion

I hear still more ideas flying around about what Republicans need to do to regain political momentum in the years ahead.  One camp says change the candidates (already taken care of to some degree – the only positive when you lose, you automatically get to find different candidates).    The other camp says change your platform, the party is too old, too white, too lame for where society is going.  That raises an interest question about whether the Republicans actually want to reflect where society is going, but I don’t think the debate needs to go that far.

There is a good piece by Kimberly Strassel in today’s Wall Street Journal, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324556304578121470291150506.html?mod=ITP_opinion_0 about the victory of David Valadao who was elected to Congress, as a Republican, in northern California, in a district where 70% of the voters are Hispanic.  In short he won because Hispanic voters could identify with him.  He was a Spanish speaking dairy farmer from the district, they could see themselves in him.  

Romney’s failure with Hispanics was not a failure of ideas.  He failed because the Bain Capital ads defined him as a kind of American version of Carlos Slim – the Mexican zillionaire who owns about everything in that country.  Slim is the post child for inequitable distribution of wealth and the Obama campaign (because Romney failed to wrap up the primary early and was cash depleted) successfully put Romney in that mold. 

But conservatives have an advantage with Hispanic voters that the Democrats don’t have.  They can unite with Latinos in a way that transcends politics.  In a post Roe v. Wade world where more and more Catholics are being driven to vote Republican, Republicans can unite with Latinos around that shared faith.  Virtually all Latinos were raised Catholic and are deeply pro-life.  Abortion is still illegal in Mexico even if the laws are not strictly enforced.  

There were multiple whiffs by the Romney campaign, but the greatest of all may have been that, in a year where the Obama administration directly challenged the religious freedom of Catholics with the proposed HHS mandate, the Romney campaign failed to leverage prominent Catholic conservatives like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum.  As I documented in my last post, https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=942549543146755277#editor/target=post;postID=1512586502547354935, the failure of the Romney campaign to answer the pro-abortion propaganda of the Obama campaign cost them the election.

A uniting of conservative values with Catholic values can address both issues for Republicans.  It can help the party find a common bond with Hispanics while also forcing women to at least wrestle with the seriousness of abortion.  I refuse to believe that women who are born infused with the instinct to protect their children with every fiber of their being will continue to put their “choice” above that of a child – even one in the womb.  But they have to hear both sides of the argument.

This isn’t to say that there is a new litmus test that every Republican candidate must be Catholic.  Ronald Reagan was not a Catholic, but you could have fooled me.  But as many Republican Party positions line-up well with Catholic teaching, they ought to leverage the Catholic understanding around those issues.

One notable exception to be addressed would be immigration.  Republicans have been slow to recognize that the entire immigration system is broken and the simplistic solution of trying to keep everyone out is not the right conversation starter.  Republicans need to propose comprehensive solutions to immigration and take that issue off the table as a wedge issue for Democrats.  That will be challenging in the short-term as Democrats are in power and have zero motivation to take the issue off the table (as Newt Gingrich has pointed out, any loss of the Latino vote dooms the Democrats to a permanent minority status).

But even longer-term, uniting Catholic theology with Republican stances on the issues is critical given the challenges we face.  In the world of politics, the thinking for several decades now has been that you have social issues in one corner, fiscal issues in the other, and never the two shall meet.  But the looming demographic winter shatters whatever divides were there.

An abortive, contraceptive society has turned inward, become more selfish.  This has rocked the core institution this country was founded on – not Congress, not the Supreme Court, but the traditional family.  Families are not forming, are less stable than they’ve ever been, and producing fewer children than ever before.  This is not just a social issue, but at the root of our fiscal crisis.    

We cannot afford entitlements in large part because the baby boomers did not replace themselves, let alone grow (immigration has filled in the gaps – but with a very different socioeconomic profile).  We are struggling for economic growth in part because we are a consumer driven economy with fewer consumers in their peak earning years.  This goes to tax revenue and size of government.  We want a bigger government while we stand on the brink of a coming population decline – nobody is framing the issue up this way.  Look at the implications for housing where we have new houses still being built, but fewer and fewer buyers in the pipeline.  It isn’t a credit issue, it is supply.

In a couple of years of thinking about these issues, the only place I have found these connections being made is in discussion involving Catholic theology and what Catholicism has to say about the state of the world today.  The way forward for Republicans is to tap into that thinking, and the emerging Catholic conservative stars in the party like Paul Ryan to put forth the right kind of solutions.  

The solutions won’t purely be political and given we have four more years until the next election in coming blogs I want to look more at what changes Catholics need to work for in society.