The Future of the Republican Party

It’s been clear for a while that Utah Governor Jon Huntsman bears watching. You’re bound to sit up and take notice when a Republican governor of a coal-dependent state decides to sign up for a regional agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

The shrieks of climate denialists notwithstanding, Utahns apparently had little problem with Huntsman’s putting Utah into the Western Climate Initiative. He was re-elected governor November 4 with a handsome 78 percent share of the vote that his fellow Republican candidates could only dream about.

Huntsman’s resume has some sparkle to it. Like New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, he has diplomatic experience. Like Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, he speaks fluent Mandarin.

We are also told that he rocks out to Dream Theater’s progressive metal and that he’s a pretty good keyboard player.

Recently, he’s been telling his fellow Republicans that they better start playing some new tunes.

Check out this comment he gave to Politico the other day: "If we’re going to survive as a party, we need to focus on the environment. There’s a fundamental tone deafness with our party when it comes to the environment ... The last place we can be as a party is to be viewed as the anti-science party. That’s not a model for the future."

Took the words right out of my mouth, Jon.

Or, this comment about global warming at the Republican Governors Association meeting: "When you’ve got a body of science that already is rendering certain judgments about what is happening in our world, for us to shy away, say it doesn’t matter as an issue, I think is foolhardy, it’s shortsighted and it’s bound to do us damage in the longer-term."

Will the talk radio crowd and think tank ideologues give this guy a fair hearing?

Probably not. The self-appointed arbiters of what is and is not conservatism will not cotton to a pragmatist like Huntsman who wants to return to the conservative principle of stewardship. In their view, all who do not subscribe to their dogmas to the nth degree must be purged and cast into the outer darkness.

Forget Ronald Reagan’s aphorism that someone who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is your 80 percent friend, not your 20 percent enemy.

Forget Reagan’s "big tent" rhetoric. We’re not even talking pup tents with this crowd. For them, the party should be a very small sleeping bag on a very narrow ledge.

More of the same, only harder, is a ticket to permanent minority status. For many young citizens in particular, the Republican Party will be a hard sell unless there is much more substance to its thinking about the environment than talk radio harangues about "enviro-wackos."

Appealing to the young will require a return to old principles. Conservatism is not about looking out for number one in an all-consuming pursuit of material gain. It’s about stewardship of what conservative theorist Russell Kirk called “the permanent things” in life, including the environment that underpins our civilization and graces our lives with beauty.

The way back for a revived conservatism founded on an ethic of stewardship will not be smooth. The "movement" reactionaries who have been breathing each other's exhaust for years will not gently yield either their radical definition of "conservatism" or their tatty political strategy of exclusionary dogmatism.

Huntsman and other fresh faces from the up-and-coming generation of Republicans will have a strong go at wresting the party from the reactionaries’ deadening grasp. Wish them luck.