Knowing the Territory

I love Meredith Wilson’s great musical, The Music Man, and one of my favorite spots in it comes right at the start, when the chorus sings that great argument song, “You can talk all you want. But it's different than it was. No it ain't, no it ain't. But you gotta know the territory. Shh shh shh shh.”  That pretty much describes the Republican Party these post-election days.  Conservatives are wandering hurt, bewildered, after losing a great battle and perhaps a war, and they’re wondering how it happened.

The explanation is easy if you remember your history, and conservatives should. It’s appropriate to recount it now, since yesterday was the anniversary of the speech by the first great Republican leader, Abraham Lincoln, that commemorated the Battle of Gettysburg, (and besides, I love to tie together oddly-matched metaphors.)   Michael Shaara’s great historical novel about Gettysburg, The Killer Angels, makes the reason very clear.  Befuddled about the battleground and the location of the Union army by the antics of their cavalry leader, JEB Stuart (the Tea Party?), who was off having fun circling the Yankees and whooping a lot, the Confederate army arrived only after the Union army had already seized the high ground. They had to spend three days in futile charges uphill at entrenched Union positions.  In a sense, the battle itself, great and fierce as it was, was only an aftermath; for the Confederates, it had been lost before it began.  Without the eyes of Stuart’s cavalry, Lee and his generals hadn’t known the territory well enough to position themselves effectively.  General Longstreet pretty much had the problem figured out, but Lee’s pride prevented him from listening.

Of course, the bigger problem for Republicans is that they can’t agree on what constitutes high ground.  A major wing of the party, the social conservatives, keeps insisting the high ground is faithful adherence to principles like anti-abortion, opposition to gay marriage, opposition to illegal (?) immigration, etc.  The moderate conservatives, scouting the territory now and for the future, argue that those are the high grounds of the past and no longer appeal to the contemporary electorate.  Meanwhile fiscal conservatives argue for the austerity of their depression era upbringing while moderates reason that some give and take on taxes and regulation is needed to satisfy modern voters.  The conservatives are still, to paraphrase Keynes’ memorable phrase, mentally the slaves of long-dead moralists and economists, while the moderates have not yet worked out their logic for dealing with change. Their real argument is over whether social virtues are eternal and immutable or subject to changing with the times.  “If it was good enough for grandpa…” But of course, that is an argument settled many times and in many ways in countless other societies; the real social virtues are those of recognizing and honoring both the intrinsic value and the autonomy of other people.  They last and do not change, but specific positions on narrow issues are soon left behind on the ash heaps of history.  The purpose of taking a political position at any time should be to address a pressing need of people of that time, and those needs change with time.

The conservatives have forgotten that in human history, change is inevitable. Any success at what you’re doing now will beget some change in the future.  The issue is not how to stop disagreeable change.  It is how best to manage its pace and direction.  It is “how not to throw the baby out with the bath water.”  Traditionally, the conservative solution to the problem was to favor careful, incremental change, but change nevertheless, while liberals favored more rapid progress.  But the pace of societal change has itself quickened.  The reasonable incrementalism of our grandparents is like no change at all today, while our grandparents’ rapid change is today’s incrementalism.  Republicans need to quicken their pace as a party to keep up with society, or they will be left behind.  That would be a shame, for adequate change management to address changing social needs does require both the rapid and the incremental points of view, sometimes one way, sometimes the other.  Supreme Court Justice Souter in an address at Harvard noted that both the much castigated “Separate But Equal” decision of 1904 and the apparently opposite “Brown v. Board of Education” decision in 1954 were appropriate recognitions of the maximum change absorbable by the pace of social change for their times.  In his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail”, Martin Luther King, Jr. recognized that the pastors of Birmingham were honorably seeking incremental improvements, but argued that the time and circumstances demanded immediate and drastic change.  Different times, differing resolutions.  Knowing the territory is what counts.