A coalition unraveling - Foley exposes the fault lines of the GOP and conservatism

There's a dirty little secret that the Republican Party doesn't want you to know about. The party that is supposedly for "family values" and is prominently against homosexual marriage and homosexual rights, is chock full of homosexuals, like disgraced former Florida Congressman Mark Foley.

This may seem very strange. How can the GOP function when one-half of the party - its conservative, white Baptist and Pentecostal base - wants see another part of the party either go through mass reconciliation or burn in hellfire? But those who know and study how U.S. political parties have traditionally been organized know it's not strange at all to see two seemingly opposite groups belong in the same political party. However, how long that arrangement lasts is another question.

Unlike European or Third World political parties, U.S. parties have never been exclusively created for one class of people, one religion or tribe, or one ideology. A good example of course is the Democrats. They were formed in 1796 as a matter of political expediency. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, representing the landed Southern gentry, needed allies to compete against the then dominant Federalists. They found them amongst the middle and working class people of the large cities in the form of a political machine called the Society of St. Tammany (eventually to be known as Tammany Hall) in New York City, run by Aaron Burr. Madison and Jefferson visited Burr while supposedly on a "butterfly hunting expedition," in New York and cemented an alliance that created the Democratic Party. It was two of the most unlikeliest groups of people ever working together to win elections.

But even unlikeliest groups have to have something in common to stay working together. And for the Democrats, their something was the fact they opposed what its voters felt were their rivals, the commercial and moneyed elite of the East, whether they were known as Federalists, National Republicans, Whigs or Republicans. Likewise, the Republican Party formed with some pretty odd groupings as well: Puritan moralizers from New England, big business, including the nation's new industrial base, anti-slavery Democrats and Protestant ethnic groups in the Midwest. Yet their opposition to slavery and to the South and its way of life helped to bind them together for many years.

Nothing lasts forever of course, and such political alliances come to an eventual end. For the Democrats, their partnerships ended in 1964, when Southern whites started voting for Republicans for the first time en masse and Strom Thurmond switched parties and when reformers took control of the New York County Democratic Party away from Tammany Hall, which signaled their and other political machines' death knell in the years to follow. The Democratic Party could not be a party of political reform and yet have corrupt machines in their midst. They could also not be the party that supported civil rights and opposed segregation while also being a party of segregationists, North or South, especially after World War II. Something had to give.

Now in 2006, we may be very well witnessing the unraveling of another coalition, one that not only defined a party, but a political ideology as well.

Like your average political party, there were many kinds of different people and ideas that made up the conservative movement in the 1950s and 60s, from traditionalists, monarchists, Buckleyites, Ayn Rand libertarians and John Birch anti-communists. What brought all these groups together was their strident anti-communism and a theory called "Fusionism," which welded the tradition-minded to the libertarian. If public morality was on the decline, the people were not at fault, it was the government's fault! If education is on the decline due to bad standards, the government is to blame! If the American people are decent, God-fearing folk, that decency will show if only the government can be removed from the equation! That's Fusionism in a nutshell and it has worked for the last half century.

Some of those libertarians, however, were homosexuals. They were attracted to libertarianism and to Barry Goldwater-style conservatism because it promised a government that would not pry into their private lives which was fine with them. They wished to remain anonymous. Plus, the people that were considered social conservatives back in the 1950s and 60's were urban and Midwest Catholics and Southern Protestants and both groups were aligned with the Democratic Party. So to the Republicans and to Barry Goldwater, such homosexuals were attracted to (in a political way). That attraction survived even when the specter of communism disappeared because such homosexuals were opposed to their counterparts on the left's desire to turn them into another special interest group willing to codify special rights, protections and privileges on their behalf. These were not people interested in being a part of the civil rights movement because philosophically, they opposed it.

But the connection is starting to unravel and it started when the GOP began incorporating large numbers of those very Catholics and Baptists into their ranks who used to be Democrats. They may not have liked homosexual rights anymore than the libertarian homosexuals did, but they also didn't like such people period, especially when the Bible says, according to Rev. Fred Phelps, "God Hates Fags." So long as such homosexuals stayed in the closet, there weren't any problems. But in this day and age of exposure, that's very hard to do. And once such persons became "outed," their lives and careers were wrecked. Terry Dolan, who's National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC) helped the GOP win control of the U.S. Senate in 1980, was disowned by the conservative movement when he was diagnosed with AIDS. When the secretive Arthur Finkelstein, who was a part of Jesse Helms' political organization, "married" his long time companion in a ceremony in Massachusetts, he suddenly found himself no longer in politics. Homosexual Republican Congressmen like Jim Kolbe of Arizona and Steve Gunderson of Wisconsin found their careers short-circuited. Indeed, there is a "gay-ceiling" within the GOP. One can be homosexual and be a member of the party. One can belong to the Log Cabin Society. One can even be in public office on the local level or in a legislative district. But a statewide office? Never. Something Foley found out the hard way when rumors of his sexuality wrecked his planned run for the U.S. Senate back in 2004.

Now Foley has been "outed" in the worst way possible, as a potential criminal pervert. In fact, he really didn't try to hide himself all that well to begin with (Maf54? Are you kidding me? Why don't you wear a name tag too?). Holding public office and remaining in the closet becomes virtually impossible, especially if you are a Republican. Leading a different life from the way you vote and the way you speak in public is a cognitive dissonance that can drive a person crazy, crazy enough to start sending sexually explicit emails to a teenager. Republican House leaders were certainly driven nuts enough to try and hide and protect Foley's peccadilloes in order to protect their Congressional majorities.

That's a lot of hiding to do, almost too much. At some point, something's got to give. Either the social and religious conservatives are going to walk away from the GOP and the conservative establishment in disgust at their hypocrisy and manipulation of their honest views they have no desire to follow through on, or the libertarians are going to walk away because they cannot stand to lead double lives in both their orientation and their votes. Nor can they no longer stand a "conservatism" that wishes to expand the government's reach in U.S. citizen's personal lives for their own political purposes or to advance their own religious views. One group will be true to itself and its political views and the other will be true to the party and consolidate its control of it.

The bet is it's the libertarians that walk. After all, what place do they have in a GOP that's now the party of federal intervention in the Mary Schiavo case, the party of the Patriot Act, the party of torture, the party of immigration restrictions, the party of the Iraq war, the party earmarks and farm subsides every other non-libertarian thing you can imagine? With Democrats more and more chafing at the expansion of federal power in the Bush II Administration, the libertarians are going to find themselves allied with a group of unlike people once again, united only by what they dislike more than they like.

And thus the cycle of U.S. politics repeats itself.

--Sean Scallon