Republican Party ought to embrace its factions

The Republican Party seems to be stuck in the mire of a modern notion that fractious politics can be overcome by reason.

Take, for example, the recent spate of ads in which U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and other Republican bigwigs are trying to persuade the little Republicans to line up behind them on immigration reform. Many little Republicans have a simple and, from the Big Republican's point of view, unreasonable position: If you are not legally here, get out.

Unfortunately, there is no universal reason that transcends all of the competing interests. But Big Republicans continue to promote the idea that little Republicans are wasting their time and their votes on their passionately held values. Little Republicans are tired of being told what to do by Big Republicans and talk-show hosts.

In the 21st century, we have come to recognize the incompatible character of competing traditions — that is, competing political value systems. For example, people do not measure justice and injustice in the same way, and this results in completely different accounts of what it means to be politically reasonable. The days when the GOP could discipline members and voters with modern notions about reason and compromise are gone.

Little Republicans and independents are tired of the emphasis on "coming together" — as if there were some universal rational basis on which to do so. Little Republicans want their competing values to have as much influence as possible. They are sick of the Big Republicans insisting on unity — and conformity.

By contrast, the DFL Party back in the 1970s implicitly embraced the idea that politics is about the interaction of factions that cannot agree on priorities or principles. Consequently, it adopted so-called proportional representation within its party process. This process makes individuals feel empowered, because their competing traditions are explicitly recognized by the process. There is no attempt to water down the competing views of what is good and reasonable with the myth of universal reason. There is no attempt to moderate or mutate the influence of competing factions (the gay-rights lobby, the abortion lobby, the environmentalists, the feminists, the ethnic chauvinists, the Marxists) with reason, debate and compromise.

Proportional voting means people at political party caucuses, instead of voting as a whole group for elected delegates, subcaucus and vote in blocs. In the walking subcaucus procedure, people nominate titles for subcaucuses and are assigned a room or area in which to convene. The people who want to join that subcaucus go to that area and elect delegates according to the size of the subcaucus.

Typically, people subcaucus around their paramount issue — their "tradition." This can be very effective in moving an agenda forward. Who could doubt that DFL proportional voting, producing decades of gay-rights subcaucusing, has led to Minnesota being the 12th state to legalize same-sex marriage?

The Republican Party of Minnesota should adopt the DFL's proportional voting system as a model that has succeeded. It needs to cheerlead for all of the competing traditions on the right, instead of trying to amalgamate them. All of these traditions, working proportionally — and "together" in that sense — will help to destroy the government's naïve rationalism, which expresses itself so clearly in, for example, the fascist notion that there should be an objective, universal curriculum for the government schools.

The Minnesota GOP must start attacking this kind of authoritarianism aggressively, which is exactly what the DFL has done by promoting factions — by exercising solidarity with groups that were once considered outside of the mainstream. The GOP must understand that effective, realistic politics are first of all cultural — making strange groups and strange ideas mainstream. Culture and politics are two sides of the same coin. The best method involves recognizing the irreducible interests of groups that can still complement each other — not by being reduced into one group, but by exercising their proportional influence together. It is called a coalition.

Republicans have been lazy. They have not exercised coalition politics. The Big Republicans must allow the little Republicans to be who they really are — gun nuts, anti-immigration cultural chauvinists, people who think the government schools are evil, and so on.

Let the Christians, the libertarians, the paleoconservatives, the neoconservatives and the populists be themselves within the framework of a new GOP that encourages them to exercise their somewhat incompatible identities. This respect for competing traditions, at the expense of the myth of universal reason, is what will paradoxically inspire mass participation in the GOP.