OPINION: How the right has lost sight

Ask 10 Republicans why their party has fallen into a state of disarray, and one gets 50 different answers.

A story in Wednesday's Metro section of The Gazette explained that El Paso County Republicans, once heroes of the state's GOP politics, no longer win leadership positions. They cling to social platforms, such as abortion, that make it difficult for them to work with moderate Democrats and Republicans alike. And so on and so forth.

At an Independence Institute banquet Nov. 13, syndicated conservative columnist and Colorado resident Michelle Malkin addressed the fact Republicans are divided over faith-based politics, such as the need to ban abortion. She encouraged conservatives to maintain their positions on social issues despite pressures to back down. She said conservatives could work through immigration disagreements.

And what of economics-only libertarians, who largely despise the party's opposition to gay marriage, abortion and fetal stem cell research? Malkin said "let them go their own way."

"In other words, leave the Republican Party," wrote blogger Ari Armstrong, on www.FreeColorado.com, the state's best libertarian blog. "We have left. The result is that Bob Beauprez lost the governor's mansion, Bob Schaffer lost the U.S. Senate seat, Marilyn Musgrave lost another House seat, and candidates like Libby Szabo lost the state legislature."

Malkin and Armstrong are both correct. Republicans do need to continue as the party that stands strong on moral issues, particularly in their fight to protect the unborn. The GOP's demise hasn't coincided with a strengthening of the social platform, but with a dilution of it. The last great Republican leader, Ronald Reagan, stood firmer on abortion and of his successors have.

Until recently, free-market libertarians have held their noses and voted Republican despite the pro-life platform. That's because the GOP offered something irresistible. It offered steadfast defense of limited government, sensible foreign policy that placed the country's interests above all else, and a platform that wasted little energy on trying to regulate immigration. The GOP has traditionally offered libertarians a platform that respected the individual, and held that decency and prosperity result from liberty.

If market-centric libertarians aren't voting Republican, it's because they refuse to tolerate the GOP's social platform if the party has lost its central theme. And clearly, the vast majority of Republicans have lost any sight of the need for limited government. Rather than a belief in the power of the individual, the GOP has become a party that wants to deliver Republican values as a product of government.

Republicans wanted better, stricter, more results-oriented schools, so President George W. Bush federalized education with No Child Left Behind. Republicans support religion, so Bush funded religious institutions to provide social services, thus entangling federal bureaucracy with our beloved churches. Senior citizens vote mostly Republican, so the president gave them unprecedented federal subsidies for prescriptions. Republicans value law and order, so they supported their president in creating the largest, most invasive bureaucracy in the history of the republic. Republicans oppose terror, so they supported their president in spending trillions of dollars and thousands of lives to fight a war with no clear nexus to this country's vital interests.

At every level of government, Republicans have become the party that uses government for social change, far beyond protection for the unborn. They're distinct from Democrats mostly in the flavor of what government should provide. If they abandoned the social issues, Republicans would have little to distinguish themselves from Democrats.

Republicans cannot back down on their opposition to abortion. But they must return to an understanding and appreciation of limited government, the one and only Republican principle that kept the religious right, social conservatives, paleo-conservatives and free-market libertarians under one big tent of tolerable tension.

Without a steadfast platform that favors limited government - meaning low taxation, a non interventionist foreign policy, minimal regulation, and a moderate immigration platform - the Grand Old Party has nothing grand to offer its diverse coalition.