A Christian Liberal is NOT an oxymoron.

Posted by XT on July 9th, 2010 in US News

I haven’t been writing much here lately. Not to offer a lame excuse, but I’ve been doing other things. Obviously.

American political scientists sometimes like to talk about something they call “realignment.” It’s a concept that seeks to explain, and perhaps predict, when an entire generation will suddenly and irrevocably change their political identity. It was first identified in the sudden switch of New England “rock-ribbed” Republicans to Democratic New Dealers. It was extended to explain how a generation of black voters left the Party of Lincoln to become the most reliable pro-Democratic voting bloc in the country. There was even a theory that American politics lent itself to a periodic and regularly occurring realignment.

But then there was the missing realignment. Sometime in the 1970s, or perhaps 1980s, we should have seen a massive shift. But we didn’t. Oh, there were the “Reagan Democrats” – but they were simply the conservative Democrats that were always there. And they remained Democrats, for the most part. This led to the idea that we were in a period of dealignment. A time when partisanship didn’t really matter so much.

But, for realignment to happen, there has to be stark differences between the two parties. For most of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, there really didn’t seem to be that much of a difference at all. Or, to be more correct, the differences seemed to revolve around social issues – abortion, welfare, etc. There was an ideological basis for these arguments, but while those issues created a cleavage between the two parties, they only forced a roughly equal alignment between the them.

Michael Gerson thinks that may be changing. But it will not be the ascendancy of Obama that causes it, so much as it will be the self-destructive realization of the disparate parts of the Republican coalition…specifically, the anti-government tea-party segment that has given the long-standing libertarian segment a popular voice.

Gerson cites Sharron Angle (GOP Senate candidate in Nevada) and Rand Paul (GOP Senate candidate in Kentucky) as being prime examples of this – and he’s right. Both are being severely limited in their press time because they don’t want their actual beliefs to come under public scrutiny. It isn’t that they make good old fashioned gaffes, like Joe Biden – those can be explained away and tend to become endearing in an odd way. And it’s telling that both of them are running well behind where they were expected to run.

If they go down in defeat, then more moderate elements may regain power in the GOP. If they win, they will be seen as THE path to victory. And THAT, more than anything else, may actually cause the realignment that political scientists have been looking for.

But I’d note – it’s a change of parties, not of ideology. A failing GOP will lead to a more conservative Democratic Party. The ideology realignment, if it happens, will happen later.

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