As I noted last week, the CDs may be a bit on the boring side, but they’re the bedrock of a stable democratic system. To the right, they offer respect for traditional values and authority; to the left, they bring a genuine interest in the condition of the middle class and the poor. They aren’t bomb throwers. They never vote to shut down the government. Both parties can make deals with them.
The instability in our system since 2008 is largely due to the decline of the CDs within the Republican Party, which in turn is mostly attributable to the failures of the George W. Bush Administration. Can they be revived? Yes, under the following conditions:
1. Trump, who is the antithesis of a CD, has to fail. You can probably take that to the bank. A post-Trump GOP will have to look to the CDs for competence and gravitas.
2. The CDs need to disentangle themselves from the Bush fiasco. Bush campaigned as a “compassionate conservative,” but his monumental failures had nothing to do with his CD ideology. The tax cut and deregulation program that helped lead to the recession were PBP, not CD, measures. You can make a case that the Bush attempt to democratize the Middle East flowed naturally from CD principles, but you can also argue that CD military interventions logically would only be for humanitarian purposes. In other words, a CD foreign policy is not necessarily neoconservative.
3. The CDs need a friendly coalition partner. There will never be enough CDs for them to govern alone. Their traditional alliance with the PBPs brought us the regressive Bush tax cuts. Can the deal between the two factions be renegotiated on better terms for the CDs (i.e., tax cuts more targeted to the less fortunate), or must the CDs make a deal with the Reactionaries, as suggested by Ross Douthat? That remains to be seen.