In the months following the November election, the blogosphere has been overflowing with predictions and speculation regarding the future of the Republican Party. How can it recover from its devastating defeat in 2008, everyone wonders. Can it pull itself out of the muck of the Bush Administration by its own bootstraps, or will it wither into increasing obscurity as the Bright Light of Barack Obama shines ever brighter? The answer, I think, could be the former, if the Republican Party could remember what it means to be conservative.

In his brilliant essay for Harper’s Magazine, Garret Keizer scathingly points out the irony of the Republicans’ current predicament. After all, it “was supposed to stand for small government and fiscal restraint, and instead it has given us big government and the virtual socialization of large segments of our economy”. When did conservatism call for the completely unrestrained frolicking of large corporations? Say what you want about the free market, conservatives don’t trust large bodies of people to do the right thing (no pun intended) and as a result preach the virtues of small government high and low. So how can a true conservative (or anyone, for that matter) believe that corporations aren’t susceptible to the same flaws which make a large government dangerous? After all, corporations have the same powers of influence as government, only with more money.

The politics of the Bush Administration haven’t been based on conservatism so much as absolutism. As Barack Obama points out in his book The Audacity of Hope, it is not a conservative idea which brought on the current financial crisis, but an absolutist idea. No market regulation, no government interference, no safety net, rather than conservative political participation in the same. To again quote Keizer, such blatant eschewal of authority reeks more of '70s adolescence than any political idea ought. He even refers to Reagan as “the last of the California hippies, a man who told us that if we just let the markets run wild and the Magic Bus of juggernaut capitalism go barrel-assing down the road with its freak flag flying all would be groovy and out of sight.”

From that point of view, the idea of a free market economy seems to stem from a healthy dose of flower power as much as insatiable greed. Free love is a great idea too, in theory, but only in a world without chlamydia.

As everyone knows, the economy is seriously infected. All that playing sure was fun, but now we have an epidemic on our hands, and as is often the case, the ones who are most affected are not the ones that got us into this mess in the first place. And the sad thing is, the ones that did bring us here were the very ones who should have been the first to spot trouble coming.

But that’s water under the bridge now, and I don’t see any reason to add my voice to the finger-pointing multitudes. What interests me is where the Republican Party is going to go from here, whether they will forge a new identity which reclaims their conservative roots, or whether they will continue to alienate themselves from American reality with absolutist ideas.

Obama goes on to describe the “religious absolutism of the Christian right…[which] insists not only that Christianity is America’s dominant faith, but that a particular, fundamentalist brand of that faith should drive public policy, overriding any alternative source of understanding, whether the writings of liberal theologians, the findings of the National Academy of Sciences, or the words of Thomas Jefferson.” For a party which considers upholding the Constitution as a matter of fierce patriotism and pride (see: maniacal obsession with the Second Amendment) they have a crafty way of sweeping “separation of church and state” under the rug.

Or take the example of abortion. A great example of how much the Christian right has overtaken the Republican Party is the GOP’s stance on a woman’s right to choose. To quote Barry Goldwater’s 1960 book, The Conscience of a Conservative: “the choices that govern [a man’s] life are choices that he must make; they cannot be made by any other human being, or by a collectivity of human beings.” Sexist language aside, that certainly sounds like a classic pro-choice argument. It seems to me that a true conservative would tell any government which attempts to control their body to take a long walk off a short pier.

Surely there are some aspects of the Republican Party which are reminiscent of conservatism. Its views on gay marriage can hardly be surprising, given the very definition of conservative includes a proclivity to tradition and the maintenance of existing institutions. So I am certainly not saying that a return to conservatism by the GOP would erase its sins in my eyes, or earn my affiliation. But I do think a genuinely conservative Republican Party would be a lot more successful, a lot more effective, and a lot more American.