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Cleveland Plain Dealer - Published: Jan. 06, 2023
California Republican U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, right, talks with Tennessee Republican Rep. Andy Ogles during the eighth round of voting in the House chamber Thursday, Jan. 5, as the House met for the third day to elect a speaker and convene the 118th Congress in Washington. After 11 failed rounds of voting Thursday, with McCarthy continuing to come up short of the majority he needs to become speaker, the House again adjourned to reconvene today and continue the attempt to elect a new House speaker. In a guest column today, Santana F. King, a recent GOP congressional primary candidate in Northeast Ohio, urges the Republican Party to set aside the infighting and rethink its priorities, to enable it and Democrats to govern in a more unifed way in order to confront strategic global threats the United States currently faces. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)AP
NORTH ROYALTON, Ohio -- A nation needs the friction of diversity and the tension of opposites to birth cooperation, compromise, and progress. What a nation doesn’t need is division. It doesn’t need two halves of its whole at war where neither side is willing to work with the other.
In politics, as in life, most answers are discovered in compromise. Compromise is not one party capitulating to the other, but both parties reconciling their difference to pursue universal gain for all Americans.
The United States is becoming increasingly polarized, and the current political atmosphere doesn’t allow for cooperation. Compromise has become a pejorative term -- it has become tantamount to defeat. Politics are inherently adversarial, where ideas engage in competition, but our politics have turned divisive. They have gone from contest to conflict; from parties debating policy to detesting one another. It has become one party labeling the other to be repugnant and the other believing the opposition to be the enemy instead of compatriots.
Both main political parties have been influenced by their most marginal members -- those whose positions exaggerate and lack alignment to their parties’ fundamental doctrines.
America’s two major political parties are on different trajectories. The future decline of one party will eventually lead to a lesser nation, a nation that will lack the necessary friction and competition that births pragmatic progress and prevents atrophy.
The 2022 midterm elections have highlighted that the Republican Party is contracting and may face dissolution in the coming decade. Its reputation has been damaged and its fundamental principles are being contaminated and perverted. Its brand is damaged, and if the party continues course, it will lead to decline and disarray.
At its best, the Republican Party embodies the best of all Americans. It champions earnest hard work, entrepreneurship, industriousness, ambition, self-determination, civic participation, civil liberty, and opportunity. Principles core to American culture.
If the party wants to endure and regain ground, it must pivot away from divisiveness and change course. It must champion its fundamental principles while evolving with inevitably shifting demographics. That does not mean overturning all that exists but building on all that gives it foundation: to pragmatically pursue progress.
The preservation and elevation of the GOP cannot happen in a nation at conflict with itself, and alienating compatriots will only drive division and accelerate decline. GOP officials must lead like genuine statesmen, because the United States faces immense dangers to its security and prosperity. The country cannot confront threats to its national security if it, itself, is one of the threats.
As I wrote in an August guest column for The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com, the United States must contend with Chinese ascendancy and the possible supplanting of the United States as head of the liberal international order, while tackling the amorphous issue of climate change. It cannot do this if two halves of its whole are at war, and a nation also cannot reconcile if it is too blind to see itself as part of a whole.
It is easier to alienate than to reconcile and easier to fight than compromise. The GOP ought to take the lead, because the threats to the United States are intertwined; they are internal and external. In confronting one, you help to remedy the other. Illuminating the enormous national dangers will remind us that it is the totality of the nation that is in danger -- not a party -- and that the totality of the nation is what it will take to combat these dangers.
The Republican Party is at a junction, and it must determine what path it will pursue: one of unifying, pragmatic statecraft or one of divisive, low, cunning-filled brawls. The party has the opportunity to ensure its preservation by taking the lead and pursuing uniform prosperity.
Santana F. King is a defense and national security consultant in Washington, D.C.
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