COLUMN RIGHT/ GEORGE WEIGEL : What Would Lincoln Have Thought? : A new litmus test for ‘moderate’ Republicans.

“Our purpose is to exclude issues of morality and conscience as litmus tests for being a Republican,” said defeated Senate candidate Tom Campbell recently, announcing the formation of a new “moderate” group, the Republican Majority Coalition. “We are not exclusive.”

And thus did the Great 1992 Values Debate achieve its reductio ad absurdum.

Exclude issues of morality and conscience? Will white supremacist David Duke be welcome in the Republican Majority Coalition? How about Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the board-certified executioner of the inconveniently ill? Why not go all the way and invite Lyndon LaRouche inside the Big Tent?

What are we to make of people who think that “politics” and “conscience” or “politics” and “morality” exist in different worlds? We know what Plato, Aristotle, and other classic thinkers in the Western political tradition called such folk: These were the barbarians, the people from “outside the walls,” whose intellectual and moral myopia disqualified them from taking responsibility for the city, for civilization.

Politics, Aristotle taught, is an extension of ethics. To sunder “morality” and “politics” is to reduce politics to its basest level: the contest for power, understood as my ability to force you to bend to my will. As tyrants ancient and modern have always understood, to “exclude issues of morality and conscience” from politics is the end of the politics of persuasion and the beginning of the politics of raw coercion. One would have thought that we had learned that much, at least, at the end of this bloody century.

In the cut-and-thrust of American democracy, of course, we can’t erect a Berlin Wall between our consciences and our political views. Even Tom Campbell can’t do that: His libertarianism is itself an expression of certain conscientious beliefs. Thus the real question is not whether entrance into the Republican (or Democratic) Party requires checking one’s moral convictions at the door; the question is what moral convictions are going to shape a party’s platform and policies. And further, whether the moral boundaries of a political party will be determined by argument, persuasion and democratic deliberation, or by the ukase of party leaders enforcing the demands of various interest groups.

At its convention in New York in July, for example, the Democratic Party made clear that its tent was not big enough to include the liberal Democratic governor of the nation’s fifth largest state, Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, who happened to hold views on abortion that the party’s managers regarded as inconvenient. George Bush’s tent was big enough for Pat Robertson and Lynn Martin; but there was no room in Bill Clinton’s inn for Bob Casey. For all that they handled the argument clumsily (and, in the case of President Bush, sheepishly), the Republicans at least had a debate on issues at the intersection of morality and public policy. The Democrats laid down litmus tests on feminism, abortion and “gay rights” and enforced them rigorously. (A pro-life Democratic Senate candidate in 1992 was, for example, simply inconceivable.)

One also wonders what the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, would think of attempts to build a “Republican majority” by excluding “issues of morality and conscience” from party deliberations.

The Republican Party began as the party of conscience on the central moral-political question of the mid-1850s: Was there was a constitutional right to hold property in human beings? The Supreme Court, in the Dred Scott decision, said that there was. Believing that a fundamental injustice threatening the very legitimacy of the constitutional order had been perpetrated by Chief Justice Roger Taney and the court majority, millions of Americans--incrementalists as well as abolitionists--organized politically to press the moral argument against slavery in Congress and in presidential politics. For the heirs of these Republicans to now declare “issues of morality and conscience” out of bounds is, to say the least, an act of exceptional historical insouciance.

It is also dangerous--for the Republic, not just the Republican Party. The 1992 election was not decided by the “family values” issues; they were rarely engaged at any level of sophistication. Yet millions of Americans believe that the lifestyle liberation movements of recent decades threaten them, their children, their communities and indeed the American democratic experiment. To tell these people that the party in which such concerns could be aired is now going to “exclude issues of morality and conscience” from its deliberations is a prescription for even more cynicism, polarization and divisiveness than we have seen in 1992.