Will the real Republican party please stand up?

Political prognostication falls into that category of things that are always fashionable but rarely ever practical. So, as I'm a man who values fashion above any kind of pragmatism, I'm going to indulge in making a prediction of my own.

My guess is that in a few years, we will look back on this period of the Bush presidency as a time of party realignment. The essence of what it means to belong to each of the two major parties is being challenged, and it will make for some intriguing presidential politics in the months ahead.

The momentum for this change is coming from the Bush administration itself. Every day, the president seems less and less immersed in traditional Republican ideology. That is not to say that he has not kept with many of the core values. He is still fighting for lower taxes, greater government allowances for faiths, a strong defense, and he has even just weighed in against affirmative action. But prominent in his plans are some goals that are markedly un-Republican.

Some of that can be ascribed to the events of Sept. 11. It's understandably difficult to pursue the "humble" foreign policy that Bush promised while at the same time ridding the world of terrorism. And regime change in Iraq has the potential to turn into precisely the kind of nation-building exercise that Bush and other Republicans campaigned against. Call me silly, but I think Helms isolationism is dead in the party.

More impressive is what Republicans are doing to the size and scope of the federal government. The Justice Department's curtailment of civil liberties is an oft-cited example, but there are many others. This Congress, both houses under Republican control, is likely to pass some kind of plan for prescription drug benefits, adding many new costs to the federal balance.

Or look at Bush's "No Child Left Behind" act. His party's rhetoric may be that local parents and school boards, not faceless Washington bureaucrats, should be the ones making decisions on education. But the chief complaints we hear about Bush's plan are coming from the school level: They are afraid of new federal standards encroaching on their abilities to make their own decisions on how to improve. They fear that unlucky statistical variation could lead to a federal label of "failing school" and all its consequences. An unfamiliar critique of a Republican plan.

Or how about free trade? It's another traditionally Republican ideal, but this party has pushed for a massive domestic farm subsidy. Market insulation from the party of free trade? Confusing, to say the least.

So where does all this take us? Quite frankly, I'm not sure. A big-government Bush is a tough one to pin down, as the Democrats discovered in the midterm elections. Everyone seems to understand that Democrats lost because they had no coherent alternative message, but why did the party have such a tough time coming up with one? Could it be because opposing some of Bush's biggest ideas seems to require employing some traditionally un-Democratic arguments? Try adding to the standard class warfare arguments a few lines about a less proactive foreign policy and a less imposing federal government: The end result will be a bunch of really confused partisans. What to do?

If the contest for the Democratic nomination in 2004 boils down to a race between the two front-runners (i.e. Kerry and Lieberman), what we will see in the coming months is a massive war of ideas. Will the party stand ground in the center or attack from the left? More importantly, how will either approach account for an opposing candidate whose overall ideology has become increasingly difficult to assign to a neat category? Clearly, the Democratic party has a lot of questions that it must somehow answer.

One thing seems fairly certain, though: After all this dust clears and the two parties settle down, they will be in two very different places from where they were in the year 2000. The Democrats may attempt to refrain from making that shift, but I believe that we will see an actual inversion on some key issues. And once that happens, a transformation in party bases and overall strategies may not be all that far off. Lowell Schiller is a Wilson School major from Warren, N.J. He can be reached at schiller@princeton.edu.