Alarmed at the chance that the Republican party might pick Rudolph Giuliani as its presidential nominee despite his support for abortion rights, a coalition of influential Christian conservatives is threatening to back a third-party candidate in an attempt to stop him.
The group making the threat, which came together Saturday in Salt Lake City during a break-away gathering during a meeting of the secretive Council for National Policy, includes Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who is perhaps the most influential of the group, as well as Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, the direct mail pioneer Richard Viguerie and dozens of other politically-oriented conservative Christians, participants said. Almost everyone present expressed support for a written resolution that "if the Republican Party nominates a pro-abortion candidate we will consider running a third party candidate."
The participants spoke on condition of anonymity because the both the Council for National Policy and the smaller meeting were secret, but they said members of the intend to publicize its resolution. These participants said the group chose the qualified term "consider" because they have not yet identified an alternative third party candidate, but the group was largely united in its plans to bolt the party if Mr. Giuliani became the candidate.
The Iron Law of Institutions is: the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution "fail" while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to "succeed" if that requires them to lose power within the institution.
Now, I don't think that there are any iron laws governing human behavior, but I do think that this is generally a useful guide to American politics. In the context of the threatened thecon bolt from the Republican Party should Giuliani become the nominee, it brought to mind the following thoughts:
Conservatives of all stripes have frequently made threats of this nature, but outside of the various Dixiecrat candidacies during the third quarter of the 20th century, there has never been a major third-party conservative challenge for the Presidency, ever. As such, until a break actually happens, I consider all of these threats to be attempts to leverage social conservative power within the Republican coalition, rather than serious moves to at least temporarily break with that coalition on a national level. Since the civil war, American politics has generally catered to conservatives, albeit with fits and starts surrounding Teddy Roosevelt, women's suffrage, the 1930's, and the early and mid-1960's. Conservatives also have a tendency to fall in line.
In the unlikely, but not impossible, event of an eventual break with the Republican coalition in the Presidential election, it will be primarily because Dobson et all believe both that their own power at the head of these social conservative institutions are endangered by the support of a (now only semi-) pro-choice nominee like Giulian. In that scenario, they will bank upon either the institutions of the conservative movement being powerful enough to temporarily thrive on their own without the institution of the Republican Party, or that the Republican Party will fare so poorly without them that it will beg for their return on bended knee. It would, in a sense, be a strike against the Republican Party. It would be a withdrawal of support and labor until either a new covenant was forged with the larger coalition that would be more preferable to social conservatives, or until the collapse of the power of the social conservative institutions conducting the strike. While conservatives never tried this before, Progressives utterly failed to show this strength in the splits of 1948 and 2000, and thus ended up in a worse position in the party than before the strike. It would certainly be interesting to see if the institutions of the conservative movement really are so developed that they would be able to force a different outcome. A successful outcome for any suck strike requires, at a minimum, garnering a high vote percentage ala LaFollette in 1924 (16.61%) or Ross Perot in 1992 (18.90%). A small total, say 2-4%, simply won't do the trick. In fact, such a low total would greatly lower your strength within the coalition upon your inevitable return, since you have demonstrated that you do not have the ability to generate significant votes. As such, not only would I cheer for a social conservative split, but I would also cheer for a low social conservative vote total in the general election. Such an outcome would set back the relative power of social conservatives in American politics at least a decade. We could defeat Republicans and the conservative movement at the same time.
Thinking back over the past decade and applying this line of thought to the major progressive electoral challenges, it seems pretty obvious now that centrist Democratic elites are far, far more threatened by attempted progressive take-overs of the Democratic Party than they are by progressive threats of third party splits. There was tremendous elite hysteria over Nader in 2000, Dean in 2004, and Lamont in 2006, but the nature and outcomes of that hysteria was different. First, Nader in no way threatened the power of Democratic leaders within the Democratic Party, and only threatened the power of the Democratic coalition relative to the Republican coalition. This is probably why there was as much, if not more, Democratic activist anger at Nader and his supporters than there was elite Democratic attacks against him. Further, unlike the Nader 2000 campaign, the Dean and Lamont campaigns were supported by significant institutional power, including large unions, the blogosphere and MoveOn.org. In other words, the Dean and Lamont campaigns scared many Democratic elites way, way more than the Nader campaign, because they represented large institutional forces making a serious bid for control of the institution of the Democratic Party itself. By comparison, a generally non-institutional campaign that threatens only to tip the balance of power between the two major coalitions is not nearly as serious a long-term concern, especially when it can only muster less than 3% of the popular vote. Both in polls before their elections and on Election Day itself, Dean and Lamont scored a lot more than 3%.
Power-hunger elites, like management, only care about the loss of your support when that loss threatens their own power. I don't know how accurate my thinking is here, and I know I need to flesh this out more. Still, looking at politics from the perspective of institutional power certainly seems to hold some promise for progressives.
