American Agora

Governor and 2016 President-Elect Bobby Jindal spoke with Bob Schieffer on CBS's Face the Nation this morning. He argued that the GOP needs to do three things to get back on track:

1. Stop criticizing the Democratic Party for over-spending when the Republicans are just as guilty.
2. Stop criticizing the Democrats for corruption, when the Republicans are equally as corrupt.
3. Stop criticizing the Democrats for having the wrong values, when the Republicans are obviously incredibly out of touch (see any argument that says that the U.S. is a "center-right" nation)

What are the common elements in all three of these arguments? One is obvious: the GOP is out-of-touch and as a result needs to revisit core conservative values. However, what is the one point that escapes the reader in regards to the Governor's comments? We are now dependent on the opposition for our own future success.

This form of dialectical dependency is nothing new in political theory. Both Hegel and Marx proposed similar arguments in the 19th century, that oppositional groups need each other to legitimate their own sources of power. And this has never been absent in American politics (the Federalists and Anti-Federalists needed each other, the Democrats and the Republicans always needed one another, America and terrorism always need one another, so on and so forth). But what is most evident in Jindal's remarks are something that we have not seen before: the fact that the Democrats so viciously incapacitated the Republican Party in the 2008 campaign that they can no longer resort to aggressive partisanism.

Thus Jindal is proposing a new way for the GOP that the U.S. has not seen in years, if ever. How do we win? Be like our opponents. What this means is that not only will the GOP have to reshape its own image in the likeness of the "benevolent socialism" of the Democrats, but it will need to radically reshape its own policies in order to appeal to the base. This definitely means revising the party's stance on the Iraq War and Homeland Security, but it also means abandoning the effort to pinpoint the opposition as socialistic, Marxist, communist, etc. The closest that the Federal government will come to socialism is a man named Bernie Sanders, the so-called socialist senator from Vermont (I shouldn't say "so-called" -- he is a socialist) who in no way represents the American people as a whole (as much as I would like him to be).

So what's the answer to Jindal's proposition? How can the Republicans mirror the Democratic Party without compromising the core of their party's values (if they have any at this point...)? Does the GOP's platform need to be completely overhauled?

- A.S. Noel