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Big Think Interview With John Aldrich
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TRANSCRIPT:

Big Think Interview With John Aldrich

Question: Will the Republican Party always be conservative?

John Aldrich: Well, even a very long perspective, all things fell in, but in any foreseeable future, I think that, you know, conservative thinking is a very important part of Republican Party and the Republican Party is very important to the conservative movement. Indeed, since the 1960's, the polarization of the two parties and their alignment with essentially liberal and progressive and conservative thinking respectively is one of the big changes and it's made it really hard to separate those two out and so party and ideology are much more intertwined today than they were even 20 years ago, let alone 40 years ago.

Question: Was the GOP's 2008 defeat a typical pendulum swing or a watershed?

John Aldrich: It's, yes, it's both. It's typical in that the party that loses always has to try to figure out a way to right the ship and in essence, is a standard, normal part of it. But there are two things that make this more complicated. One is that there is a substantial loss, it wasn't just a small loss, but a substantial loss. And so figuring out the best way to come back is more difficult when your party has been narrowed. The second thing in this is going to be a problem in sort of selecting which way to come back, which sort of branch of conservative thinking is going to be the best for building for the future is the crises we're in right now. This is not, you know, ordinary circumstances, you know, we still are in two hot wars and if you count the sort of general war on terror we in effect have three wars simultaneously. We have the economic crises, we have these huge budget deficits, those attract attention and necessarily so and so it's very difficult. For example, for the evangelicals' right to be very interested, as they always are, in social issues, it's just hard to get that attention and it's hard to make that a voting issue, certainly, in the short term. And so that's a disadvantage for their agenda. And it's obviously stronger for the fiscal conservatives' agenda, but they actually also have to figure out a way to make that substantial enough to actually try to take the House or the Senate or someday the presidency.

Question: Do you see a leader currently emerging in the Republican Party?

John Aldrich: Not at present. There's nobody who is, you know, sort of poised, to take, there are a number of people who you could imagine, but I'll come back to that in a second, but I'd like to say is it's not really even since the '60's, there's actually three strains and those go back to the turn of the 20th century. So it was the long-running division in the Republican Party was between what was known as Wall Street and Main Street Republicans. And sort of different expectations about the use of the federal government. And then you add the religious right, which, while it's concentrated in the south, was a part of the Goldwater coalition before he was able to break through in the south, in the actual 1964 election. So even outside the south, there's, you know, a base for that, so you have three different streams. Which is one of the reasons it's hard to get one leader to emerge out of the rest. The second reason that it's hard for a leader is because, you know, the Democrats have the House, the Senate, and the presidency. When the Republicans first took the House in 1994, they had an opportunity for Newt Gingrich to emerge as a national leader who can stand on the same stage as Bill Clinton as a national leader. Right now, there's no such platform and we won't see one until at least the 2012 presidential nomination campaign. So it's really early to know who is going to emerge in that regard. There are a large number of potential individuals, but there's so many of them that no one is looking like a, you know, a strong candidate going in. Indeed, George W. Bush, at this point in, you know, before the 2000 campaign, was just a, you know, a sort of relatively unknown governor of Texas.

Question: Do you foresee any party realignment?

John Aldrich: There's always that potential and in some ways, it's a little bit brighter now than it has been since the early 1990's with the Reform party.

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