Anyone who doubts that the Reagan coalition no longer exists ought to look at the latest diatribe by the syndicated columnist Paul Craig Roberts, which ran prominently in my local paper. Roberts, some will recall, was one of the most prominent supply-siders in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. His credentials as a “Reagan conservative” are impeccable: editor at the Wall Street Journal, assistant secretary in Reagan’s Treasury Department, fellow at the Hoover Institution, congressional staffer who helped write the landmark Kemp-Roth tax-cut bill. But for the last few years, Roberts has been unleashing a series of rants against the Iraq war, the Bush administration, and neoconservatives, all delivered with a heavy dose of conspiracy theory involving Israel, AIPAC, and Norman Podhoretz.
Roberts is certainly entitled to air his fevered views. But the extremism of his ideas—shared, alas, by a number of libertarians—shows the futility of hoping that the old alliance of tax-cutters, social conservatives, and foreign-policy hawks that formed the Reagan coalition will reunite behind a 2008 candidate.
Yet this conservative crack-up might also be an opportunity for the next Republican presidential nominee. Reagan’s greatest strength in the late 1970’s was to free the party from a narrow coalition of business interests, Nixonian cultural conservatives, and country-club types. Realignment meant not just redrawing the political map, but remaking the base of the party, attracting a confederation of conservatives who had never really identified with the Republican party.
Because he does not fit neatly into any Republican box, Giuliani seems uniquely suited to take on the task of realignment—and break the red/blue split that forces the GOP to place all its bets on 100,000 votes in Ohio. Yet so far, he has not delivered a personal vision of what the Republican party ought to embrace. His speeches have been full of anecdotes but lack the ideas that ought to guide Republicans and the conservative movement over the next ten years. I think voters are looking for just such an agenda, including those Democrats who can’t stomach the thought of pulling the lever for Hillary.
