Over on Twitter, Ross Douthat, Seth Mandel, and Chris Hayes were wondering whether liberals wanted a more moderate Republican party if that made for a more responsible, but also politically stronger, opponent. Douthat wrote that the center Left would be fine with a more responsible center Right, but the Left’s definition of responsible conservatism didn’t resemble conservatism. I think that is true, but I think it is also bound up with tribal politics and social class as much as it is with ideology.
Look at Jon Huntsman. He was the supposed moderate Republican in the 2012 race. His tax plan turned out to be way to the right of Mitt Romney’s, but liberals who were talking about how Huntsman was moderate didn’t mean his policies. What they liked were Huntsman’s snobby insults of low-status Republican voters. If a Republican presidential candidate adopted the Democratic platform and spent the entire general-election campaign calling Republican voters a bunch of toothless, snake-dancing Klansmen, then maybe these liberals would say we finally had a responsible Republican running for the White House.
The problem is that while these John Weaver–inspired attacks on Republican voters are good for getting some mainstream media attention in a crowded GOP primary field, they can’t form the basis of a general-election campaign. Center-right candidates would still have to run on their center-right policies, and against the policies that liberal want. Liberals would then discover that their primary pets incarnated all that was evil in American history.
If Huntsman had gotten the nomination, he would have been attacked as the worst Social Darwinist ever. If John Kasich were the nominee, he would be getting compared to George Wallace, and the Joe Bidens of the world would be explaining how the Republican ticket wants to “put y’all back in chains.” And liberal writers would be explaining that all of this hysterical rhetoric would not be necessary if the GOP did not nominate such reckless extremists. We know this because that is exactly what happened the last two times the Republican presidential nominees were decent, experienced men with substantial records of compromising with the opposition.