An important step for Republican Party recovery is to move it back to the center. This will be a difficult, decade long, hard turn away from the elite right neo-cons and the social fundamentalists that
Christine Todd Whitman, co-chair of the Republican Leadership Council, says is holding the party hostage.
The move is necessary because these two entrenched groups have run the party to ground. Under their leadership, the party no longer has the moral authority to govern.
The social fundamentalists so overwhelmingly control the Republican Party that they deter many talented Republicans of different beliefs from seeking political office because in good conscience they
cannot support the social fundamentalists’ approved theology. This is not a good situation for the party or for democracy. The net effect is a reduced Republican talent pool that many refer to as
a “dumbing-down” of the party and a dramatic shift away from its historic principles.
What Whitman and other keen observers saw on Election Day was the return of millions of centrist Reagan Democrats from their diaspora. They could no longer accept immoral preemptive wars, the use
of torture, the use of illegal searches, a presidential philosophy that holds itself above the law and so many extreme social and economic positions the essence of which violated their moral
consciences.
Clearly in a democracy the people want governance that does not impose the theocratic hegemony of the extreme right.
WILLIAM H. WESTHOFF
Woodbridge
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