Rightward March!

An editorial in today’s Times, “The Race to the Right,” says nothing revelatory yet is nevertheless a valuable (and disturbing) reminder of the GOP’s success in shifting the political center dramatically rightward. Policies once considered the bedrock of moderation — progressive taxation, the separation of church and state — are now branded as steps on the road to socialism. Republicans have managed to reframe previously routine negotiations as opportunities to ransom the country’s financial stability for ideological priorities: a “balanced-budget” amendment, the Keystone XL pipeline, even a provision preventing Washington, D.C., from using its local tax dollars to help fund abortions. Suddenly, the question is not whether to cut spending, but by how much. (Would the patient like his arm amputated, or would he prefer the arm and a leg?)

The Republican primaries are a microcosm of the GOP’s new world order. The Times writes: “Candidates often move to the ideological edges to win a primary, because that’s where the primary voters are, but the frenzied efforts of Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich are particularly hard to watch.” Precisely because neither Romney nor Gingrich have the impeccable conservative credentials demanded by today’s Republican voters, “each has now adopted positions at the far end of the ideological spectrum.” Gingrich would send out the federal marshals to drag liberal judges before Congress to explain themselves, while Romney has maintained a drumbeat of falsehoods — Obama apologizes for America; Fannie and Freddie caused the financial crisis; Democrats favor “equal outcomes,” not equal opportunities — steady enough to make poor Paul Krugman reach for his blood-pressure medication.

The most interesting aspect of the Times editorial, however, is the observation that Gingrich and Romney have swung so far rightward because they “are competing with candidates like Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann who have much longer and more consistent conservative records.” On its face, this is an obvious statement; the presence of candidates who see sharia law as a looming menace and gay rights as a threat to religious freedom is bound to drive the conversation to the right. Yet neither Santorum nor Bachmann — to say nothing of Rick Perry, who thinks “there’s something wrong in America when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school” — poses a credible threat to the two frontrunners. Both are polling in the single digits, a fact all the more remarkable given Bachmann’s first-place finish in August’s Iowa Straw Poll. What is easy to forget is that a primary race, unlike a general election, is a multi-candidate field. Romney isn’t just trying to out-poll Gingrich; he’s trying to prevent Santorum and Bachmann from peeling off enough votes to become spoilers. Die-hard conservatives are already more likely to gravitate toward Gingrich, so Romney can’t risk a situation in which Santorum or Bachmann, both evangelical favorites and Tea Party darlings, plays Ralph Nader to Romney’s Al Gore. In a very real sense, Romney is competing with not only Santorum and Bachmann but Rick Perry, Ron Paul, Jon Huntsman (OK, maybe not Huntsman) and a potential Sarah Palin write-in as well. In the absence of this second tier of candidates, the two frontrunners could battle it out without being forced to throw red meat to the Tea Party. But because Iowa’s caucus-goers will be able to choose from an array of candidates who fall at every conceivable place on the conservative spectrum, Romney can’t rely on simply outdoing Newt Gingrich, whose ideological impurities include that moment on the couch with Nancy Pelosi and a $1.6 million payday from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

The losers in this breathless game of conservative one-upmanship are not necessarily primary voters. Despite polls that consistently register a high degree of dissatisfaction with the Republican field, voters and caucus-goers could hardly have a wider variety of candidates to choose from: Libertarians have Ron Paul and his quixotic battle to “End the Fed,” while the three people in New Hampshire who laughed at Jon Huntsman’s Nirvana reference can cast lonely votes for the motorcycle-riding, Mandarin-speaking moderate. The real losers will only emerge in November 2012, when the general election arrives and voters face a choice between Barack Obama and whichever rightward-charging panderer emerges from the Republican primaries. By then, the real losers will be the American people.