Pennsylvania’s 18th

Good news for the two-party system

AS FAR as we can tell, Roy Moore still hasn’t conceded defeat down in Bama. So the Republican candidate in Pennsylvania’s 18th congressional district, Rick Saccone, might hold out hope for a few more days. In that race, it’s still early. In a congressional election in which a quarter-million people voted, a 600vote difference might very well merit a recount.

But one thing’s already for certain in the Pennsylvania special election: There’s hope yet for the two-party system.

Where, oh where have the Mike Rosses and Mike Beebes gone? Or, for that matter, the Winthrop Rockefellers. Once upon a time, chillen’, there were conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans. The parties weren’t so cemented into their ideological positions.

A liberal Republican could be elected president. Like, say, somebody like an Abraham Lincoln. And conservative Democrats could be elected to high office as well. Like, oh, any of the Southern governors and senators who roamed these latitudes from the Civil War to the New Deal to the Reagan Revolution.

Today, it’d be difficult for a liberal Republican to keep his rewards card at the local grocer, much less win a Republican primary. And a conservative Democrat? Well, you can see what has happened to the Blue Dogs. Mostly they’ve been hounded into retirement, and not just by the opposition party.

Yet there are occasional exceptions to that dismal rule. Case in point: The Democrat who is currently leading the Pennsylvania 18th.

HIS NAME is Conor Lamb, and, no, we hadn’t heard of him before last week either. But we have a feeling we’ll be hearing a lot more about him in the years to come. He’s a part of a rare breed: a conservative(ish) Democrat.

What’s more, he claims to be. Which might be more amazing. For who goes into a Democratic primary bragging about being anti-abortion and pro-gun?

Conor Lamb has called for stronger background checks, but no new restrictions on guns. He’s said to be a debt hawk. He even supports President Trump’s tariffs, although we’re pretty sure that’s not a conservative position, only a Trumpian one.

Conor Lamb also personally opposes abortion. But . . . and with some politicians there’s always a but. Dispatches from the campaign trail say he supports the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision legalizing it. So he feels really bad for the kid aborted, but . . . so what? He won’t vote to do anything about it? If that’s a brave stand for a politician, what would a convenient one be? Although it may be close to how many Americans think about the subject, more’s the pity.

In the aftermath of the election Tuesday night, some commentators on the right accused Conor Lamb of running as a Republican on the Democratic ticket. How that’s a problem for either party isn’t clear.

There was a time—it wasn’t that long ago—when members of the other party were considered the loyal opposition, not the enemy. And after hours, not even opposition. And during floor debates, one party member could be dispatched to the other side— white flag unneeded—to discuss avenues of compromise. And eventually sent back, scalp intact. When all that began to change is unclear, but it’s been recently. What is clear is that the adversarial nature of American politics has been replaced by a combative one, and that’s not good for We the People.

REBRANDING isn’t necessarily a bad thing in politics. Sometimes it’s downright necessary. It’s been a common practice, even before it was called rebranding. That’s how Federalists became Republicans, and those Republicans became Whigs, who became Republicans again, and started out as liberals opposed to slavery and ended up as conservatives standing astride of the world yelling Stop!

Ended up? Who’s to say anything has ended up? For as much as we know, soon the Republicans will be considered the left again and the Democrats the right. And they’ll fight over the legacies of former presidents both will call their own. Much as today liberals and Republicans claim Lincoln.

So what’s in a name? A lot. It meant something when liberals became progressives, mainly that “liberal” had acquired too much baggage to be a salable tag in American politics, just as the Federalists had come to stand for a discredited past—despite their glory years as designers of the Constitution and the first party to govern under it, setting precedents still respected and observed even till this day.

Will Conor Lamb be a turning point in American politics, when the parties open up again to opposing points of view, and don’t appoint special intra-party prosecutors to drum out all but the pure of heart and thought? Or will he just be a blip in an off-year special election?

We know which we’d prefer. And the one that’d be the best news for the American system.