Newt Gingrich is calling for a “green conservatism”: is he trying to save the Republican party from ideological extremists?

Truth-First.com :: With Democrats and Republicans fighting each other from hardened rhetorical gun turrets, taking for granted the other side’s evil and intransigence, Pres. Obama’s first 18 months in office have been characterized by a near total lack of cooperation from moderates in the opposition.Republicans are talking like radicals and insurgents, but claiming to be traditional conservatives, and Democrats are struggling to remain populist while tasked with actually governing.

Part of the problem is that the Republicans are fighting to be the conservative party in a system not of their own making. The Democratic party fashioned, in large part, the existing system of public services and national government, through the New Deal and the 60 years of Congressional dominance, from 1932 through 1994.

To defend the existing norms would be the Democratic thing to do. So, ironically, it was Republican “conservative” propaganda that allowed Barack Obama to be the “change candidate” the entire globe was able to see as distinct and revolutionary. Obama’s message is new, and he has been aggressive about reform, but his politics is Democratic, and seeks mainly to continue pursuing the aims of the Democratic party historically, in an updated, more dynamic fashion.

Contrary to the popular media bent, Pres. Obama’s first 18 months in office have been stunningly successful, as he’s achieved more major legislative reforms than any president in memory, and with the stiffest opposition ever seen. (The use of the filibuster in the Senate is at an all-time high, essentially altering the Constitutional process of legislation, and requiring the president to get 60 vots for almost any bill.)

What Republicans need to worry about is triangulation. They have been fighting a pitched battle against Democratic “liberalism”, while offering no coherent platform of public services or government accountability that is strictly “conservative” yet able to operate in the system that already exists. This makes them first of all a reluctant party of radical change, and second, a party at risk of being boxed out ideologically by more policy-oriented parties.

Democrats have to worry about this as well, but energy in favor or against the Democrats is trending largely along traditional lines, in line with “likely voter” tendencies for presidential and midterm elections. That’s a bad sign, if one considers that Pres. Obama’s 2008 campaign was a watershed in terms of turnout, winning him more than 17 million more votes than either Bush or Gore won in 2000. But it is not an historic threat to the Democratic party.

The Republican party, on the other hand, is seeing increasingly entrenched passions take over: a hard core of extreme conservatism is laboring deliberately to “purge” the party of ideologically “impure” moderates, and outside the party, rancor over the corruption and policy failures of the Bush years still runs deep. Meanwhile, major demographic trends could shift popular support to Democrats, possibly giving them an unexpected stronghold even in Texas, if the Republicans botch their approach to immigration reform.

A possible threat to both parties’ dominance, but especially to the Republican party’s standing as the lead mainstream party in opposition could be a kind of Green-Libertarian coalition. I first wrote about this idea for Cafe Sentido in November 2008, a week after the election of Barack Obama and the Republicans’ second consecutive major loss in Congress, then again in September 2009, after the Sotomayor hearings.

Now, the idea of a Green-Libertarian coalition has again resurfaced as Newt Gingrich has declared his intention to push for a strong “green conservatism — a new pathway to environmental stewardship“. There is much that is disingenuous about Gingrich’s argument, including his attacks on the “secular socialist machine” of Obama’s pragmatist reform agenda —as if the separation of church and state were not a Constitutional mandate and as if keeping in mind of the liberty and wellbeing of actual citizens were some kind of authoritarian takeover—, but Gingrich appears serious about his declaration.

There is significant overlap between the policy goals of the Green party and those of the Libertarian party, despite deep philosophical differences on the role of government. A multi-state coalition among representatives of these two parties could forge a path for viable opposition to the two-party stranglehold on power. The effects would likely see one of the two major parties pushed into third place.

As the numbers stand now, a Green-Lib coalition might be able to shave as much as 10% off Democratic support nationwide, assuming Democrats or liberal independents —still wary of repeating the 2000 election, where a Green candidate effectively denied the Democratic candidate the White House— believed the coalition was big enough to keep the Republicans at bay. Republicans might lose anywhere from 20% to 35% of their support, as they struggle against Green-Lib claims that they are not rights-oriented and not green enough.

This may be a little bit like fantasy baseball, but there’s something to the idea: Bill Maher, a staunch libertarian and a committed liberal, clearly sides with Green party politics on a number of issues. His audience sees the world through a very complex, but real and palpable, Green-Lib prism of political choices. Voters are looking for something more “their own” nowadays, something different from and more personally relevant and attuned than the old prevailing norms.

The question of why or how a Green-Lib coalition might play out —and that is really just one example— will have a lot to do with what party is bleeding votes in what way, and why? Right now, the Republican party is bleeding votes because 1) Bush’s politics failed on a grand scale; 2) the party has acquired an air of radical intolerance; 3) the party appears to be “out of touch” with the average voter; and 4) because Obama’s 21st century message of dynamic vision, inclusiveness, public service and sustainability, is prevailing.

Those four factors all suggest a Green-Lib coalition would more easily capture would-be Republican votes —perhaps all of them independents— than Democratic votes, as the Democrats are now more united and more determined than at any time in nearly 50 years. Pres. Obama needs to make sure he keeps his own message, his own revolutionary pragmatist framework at the center of the Democratic discourse, because that is what brought over 65 million voters to his cause in 2008.

The Republicans do not have that luxury. They don’t have a nuanced, complex, adaptable message that fits so many competing interests. If the Democrats can hold onto that momentum, analysts now suggest, they have a much better chance to expand their electoral base and build reliable votes into every election for coming decades, in part due to demographics, in part due to changing attitudes on a range of social issues.

The Republican party wants to carry the conservative banner, but has had a difficult time explaining what conservatism means in modern America. As such, the party has opted for an explanation whereby modern America is the problem and conservatism is about stripping away layers of change, making social structures more rigid and shifting power back toward the top of the socio-economic pyramid.

In 2006 and 2008, this approach was roundly rejected by American voters, which is why Barack Obama won 16 million more votes than George W. Bush did in 2000 (69,456,897 [PDF] to 50,456,002). It was by far the most votes any presidential candidate has ever received, and well more than doubled his opponent’s Electoral College tally (365 to 173).

The Republican party’s shift toward corporate interests is not really a conservative political ideology at all, but a matter of fact for a party which is struggling to inspire small donors in large numbers. Money became key to political stature in the United States when the Supreme Court found that “money is free speech”, effectively allowing political parties to organize their philosophical platforms around fundraising.

Barack Obama, however, demonstrated that big-donor fundraising doesn’t necessarily equal political might. He won more support from a larger number of small donors (individuals giving under $200) than any presidential candidate in history, and in some months actually tripled previous records for fundraising. There is a new model for how to do political outreach, and the Republican party may not have the rhetorical or philosophical reach to do it well.

This is increasingly apparent as the 2010 electoral process moves forward, and the Republican party has been saddled with some less than well-thought-through platforms coming from ideological radicals and political neophytes, symbolic of the party’s confused and grudging inside-out political and contextual rethinking. The temptations of dogmatism are taking root, even as “tea party” activists seek to decentralize control of the party.

Gingrich could be recognizing that somehow there’s an opportunity to capture the “act locally” aspect of the environmental movement and use this energy to bring the tea party under control. He may be trying to copycat James Cameron, whose campaign of many years to green the Conservative party has finally landed him the prime ministership. But his strategy is clearly the beginning of something: whether it will affect the 2010 polls is unclear, but he will lose considerable green credibility if he does not back climate legislation this year.