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Conservatism, crackpots, and the GOP
Elki
get busyModerator, ClubPA Mod Emeritus
get busyModerator, ClubPA Mod Emeritus
We'll start with the Economist's Buckley obituary.
(the articles are optional (except the first one))
And then on to the GOP.
And the reactions:
It was pretty hard to find responses that don't focus on how Obama is evil; the NRO is a totally shit rag these days.
I know it'll be a bit tough to keep this from turning into a second campaign minutia thread, but let's try.
What's happening what the conservatism and the Republican party these days, and what's with all the heretics and kooks? I know, I know con != Pub, how dare I, but we always end up talking about both, so let's mix them.
What should conservatives and Republicans do out in the wilderness? The Economist thinks the center might be there for the taking but it doesn't seem where the increasingly homogeneous party wants to attack. It's not discussed in the articles I posted, but I believe Republicans have a Godsend in McCain because they are spared another national effort, by themselves, from forever alienating Hispanics from the Republican party. But that's most definitely a temporary reprieve, and I have faith in House Republicans to get back to doing that job with great vigor; it could energize the base and give Republicans some short-term gains, but on the long-term it doesn't look like anything but a big mistake.
Foreign policy doesn't seem like a place to get on the rebound. Most Americans are disillusioned with the war, and as Rudy discovered, '9/11' isn't the magic number it used to be. And if Iraq winds down, it's hard to see how a hawkish foreign policy could be a winner. "Elect us and we'll star a war!"?
Then there are the cultural issues: abortion, gays, guns, etc. The first is a pretty good base-turner, but it's not coalition builder. Gay marriage was exhausted in '04, and opinion seems to be turning on it, and guns are no game changer unless the Democrats decide to do something stupid in Congress, and I think they're unlikely to with all the conservative Dems they've been picking up.
And of course the Economy. Reliable conservative rhetoric about free market seems to fall flat in an environment such as ours no matter the merit (or lack of), but to me the economy is still the wildcard. If it rebounds under complete Democratic control then they get the credit and it's hard to make the argument. Conservatives and Republicans warn of the return to the bad old days of the 70s, but they overestimate Obama's doctrinalism. Still, it's hard to forecast 4/8 years ahead in a global recession. So, wildcard.
Now talk! (the articles and my posting discuss different issues. address whichever you want)
(the articles are optional (except the first one))
The Economist wrote:
FEW intellectuals change the political weather. Even the most successful—an Arthur Schlesinger, say, or a J.K. Galbraith—usually tilt into the prevailing wind and enjoy the sail. William F. Buckley, who died in his study this week, aged 82, was a weather-changer.
When Mr Buckley decided to make his name as a conservative intellectual the phrase was an oxymoron. Dwight Eisenhower's Republican Party was as adamantly middle-of-the-road as it was middle-brow. Ike did not take it as an insult when people said of him that “his smile was his philosophyâ€.
At that time, America's tiny band of right-wing activists included a remarkable number of crackpots. Kent Courtney, the founder of the Conservative Society of America, accused Barry Goldwater of being “tainted by socialismâ€. The John Birch Society worried that Eisenhower was an agent of international communism. Lionel Trilling was right when he pronounced, in 1950, that “liberalism is not only the dominant, but even the sole, intellectual tradition†in the United States.
Mr Buckley devoted his life to changing this. He founded the National Review for the conservative intelligentsia at the tender age of 29. And he turned himself into a one-man opinion machine—tossing off articles and books with ease. All in all he wrote about 55. They included sailing memoirs and spy novels.
Mr Buckley famously said that the purpose of the National Review was to stand “athwart history, yelling ‘Stop’â€. But in fact he did more than just stand athwart. He helped to drive the crazies out of the movement. He persuaded a disparate band of enthusiasts—free-marketers and social conservatives, anti-communists and American traditionalists—to band together against the liberal-collectivist foe. And he attracted a brilliant group of intellectuals to the conservative cause, including, for a while, such unlikely people as Garry Wills and Joan Didion, both (now) liberal writers.
What made Mr Buckley such a weather-changer? Money helped: his father was a multimillionaire and the young Buckley tapped both his personal wealth and his family's connections to finance his new magazine. But the young man also brought a rare collection of qualities to his self-appointed task.
The first was an appetite for bomb throwing. Just as radical artists like nothing better than baiting the bourgeoisie, Mr Buckley was at his happiest baiting the liberal establishment. His first book, “God and Man at Yaleâ€, which he published shortly after graduating, took aim not just at his alma mater but at the academic elite in general.
The book turned him into a national sensation, with students queuing around the block to buy it and grandees such as McGeorge Bundy denouncing its author as a “twisted and ignorant young manâ€. It also linked two of the themes that were to drive forward the rise of the conservative movement—opposition to Keynesian economics (the man part of the book's title) and dislike of secular intellectuals (the God part).
Mr Buckley's second quality was his patrician style. He was a leading adornment of the establishment he liked to excoriate. He sailed his own boat and holidayed in St Tropez and St Moritz. He liked to hang out with such liberal luminaries as J.K. Galbraith (in the local book store in Gstaad, where they both went skiing, they would battle to get their books the best spot in the window). His wife, Patricia, was one of New York's leading socialites. Mr Buckley managed to be every liberal's favourite conservative as well as every conservative's favourite conservative.
Mr Buckley put both qualities on display in his television appearances. As the host of “Firing Line†from 1966 to 1999 he pioneered a type of televised political mud-wrestling that has since become tedious but was once regarded as ground-breaking. His style was all his own—he spoke in languid sentences, adorned with erudite allusions and polysyllabic flourishes, in an accent that had a touch of English-aristo. But he was not above raw populism. He was infamous for using the word “queer†on television (during a debate with Gore Vidal).
This belies the third thing that made him important—an inner core of seriousness. Mr Buckley was in it for more than the champagne. He was a committed Catholic, as were many of those around him at the Review. He felt that modern liberalism was corroding the foundation of Western civilisation, no less. For him, first things always came first.
Bill's children
Mr Buckley lived long enough to see the movement that he founded not just flourishing but ascendant. He saw two avowedly conservative presidents in the White House: Ronald Reagan, who was a close friend, and George W. Bush, who describes today's conservatives as “Bill's childrenâ€. He saw his fellow conservatives create a network of institutions from think-tanks to rival conservative magazines such as the Weekly Standard. The lone prophet became the father of a new establishment.
But it was not clear that he was entirely happy with the direction of the movement. He grew disillusioned with the Bush administration and even said publicly that, if America were a parliamentary system, Mr Bush would have resigned. He was uncomfortable with the Iraq war. He engaged in a fierce public debate with Norman Podhoretz over whether Iraq is, as Mr Podhoretz claims, “an amazing successâ€.
Indeed, Mr Buckley's death comes at a time when the movement he created is at one of its lowest points in decades. Conservatives are uncertain where to go after the Bush-Cheney years. They are showing signs of intellectual exhaustion. And the crackpots, once exiled, are beginning to define conservatism once again. The movement has never needed a new William F. Buckley more than it does today.
And then on to the GOP.
Modern conservatism began as a movement of dissident intellectuals. Richard Weaver wrote a book called, “Ideas Have Consequences.†Russell Kirk placed Edmund Burke in an American context. William F. Buckley famously said he’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. But he didn’t believe those were the only two options. His entire life was a celebration of urbane values, sophistication and the rigorous and constant application of intellect.
Driven by a need to engage elite opinion, conservatives tried to build an intellectual counterestablishment with think tanks and magazines. They disdained the ideas of the liberal professoriate, but they did not disdain the idea of a cultivated mind.
Ronald Reagan was no intellectual, but he had an earnest faith in ideas and he spent decades working through them. He was rooted in the Midwest, but he also loved Hollywood. And for a time, it seemed the Republican Party would be a broad coalition — small-town values with coastal reach.
In 1976, in a close election, Gerald Ford won the entire West Coast along with northeastern states like New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont and Maine. In 1984, Reagan won every state but Minnesota.
But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.
Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.
What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.
Republicans developed their own leadership style. If Democratic leaders prized deliberation and self-examination, then Republicans would govern from the gut.
George W. Bush restrained some of the populist excesses of his party — the anti-immigration fervor, the isolationism — but stylistically he fit right in. As Fred Barnes wrote in his book, “Rebel-in-Chief,†Bush “reflects the political views and cultural tastes of the vast majority of Americans who don’t live along the East or West Coast. He’s not a sophisticate and doesn’t spend his discretionary time with sophisticates. As First Lady Laura Bush once said, she and the president didn’t come to Washington to make new friends. And they haven’t.â€
The political effects of this trend have been obvious. Republicans have alienated the highly educated regions — Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham. The West Coast and the Northeast are mostly gone.
The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.
Conservatives are as rare in elite universities and the mainstream media as they were 30 years ago. The smartest young Americans are now educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment.
This year could have changed things. The G.O.P. had three urbane presidential candidates. But the class-warfare clichés took control. Rudy Giuliani disdained cosmopolitans at the Republican convention. Mitt Romney gave a speech attacking “eastern elites.†(Mitt Romney!) John McCain picked Sarah Palin.
Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the “normal Joe Sixpack American†and the coastal elite.
She is another step in the Republican change of personality. Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all — men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch.
And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.
And the reactions:
Those who have seen excerpts from David Brooks’ Atlantic remarks will be familiar with the main outlines of his column today. First, Brooks’ column and his “fatal cancer†remarks from earlier in the month have to be understood in terms of his long-standing crusade against populism, which he despises as both a style and as a matter of policy. These are the “nihilists†he denounced earlier this month for opposing an absolutely indefensible bailout (which now appears all the more indefensible for its inadequacy and its outrageous nature). It should go without saying that after the last few years of technocrats and experts getting so many things so magnificently wrong that this is an unusually poor time to declare the return of a technocratic establishment and the bankruptcy of populism, but this gets at the main problem of populism that is defined as little more than a style or a reflex rather than a more or less coherent set of policies. The basic truth behind the populist skepticism of experts, or at least self-declared, well-placed experts, is that there is no accountability for most of them, which consequently results in the sort of long-term poor performance that a lack of accountability will create. To the degree that failed or compromised oversight was responsible for much of this calamity–in Congress, at the SEC and elsewhere in government–the basic populist demand for oversight and accountability seems more important than ever. The glorification of Palin’s lack of policy knowledge in some quarters should not excuse the failures of all those people in positions of authority and power who should have understood the situation and did not. Here’s the thing–it helps the establishment remain unaccountable if it can label as populist any politician that uses lifestyle and cultural cues as a substitute for policy arguments. As I hope to explain, Palin’s lack of policy knowledge is clear evidence that she is not just a bad populist, but rather not a populist in any meaningful sense at all.
Even in his digs against Mr. Bush’s visceral decisionmaking, his prizing of instincts over intellect, Brooks feels compelled to attack such “populist excesses†as “the anti-immigration fervor, the isolationism.†The latter would come as news to those of us who are usually branded as “isolationist,†since it has never been clear when this “excess†was threatening to dominate anything. Certainly no one looking back on the Republican Party of the last eight or ten years could have perceived an excess of isolationism. Indeed, I think most people would be hard-pressed today to understand why a rather more “isolationist,†or rather America First, foreign policy would be either dangerous or excessive. Certainly a foreign policy that recognizes the limits of American power and does not try to overreach with ludicrous security pledges and declarations of Sakartvelian solidarity seems much more appropriate to our present predicament.
It is also remarkable that Brooks complains in the same column that the GOP does nothing for working-class Americans and nonetheless attacks the “populist excess†of opposition to mass immigration, when the failure of immigration enforcement and border security and the travesty of immigration “reform†championed by the Bush administration and columnists such as Brooks are directly antithetical to the interests of working-class Americans. The alienation of the GOP leadership from its constituents over immigration demonstrates how empty and meaningless Mr. Bush’s quasi-populist poses have always been. Palin does represent a continuation down the path charted by Mr. Bush, which is the substitution of symbolic lifestyle politics for policies that will serve the constituencies that support the party. In our debased political discourse, what Palin does on the stump is defined as populism. Meanwhile, she serves as the running mate for an establishment fixture who has opposed every so-called “populist excess†that would have served his constituents and the national interest. Everyone criticizes or praises Palin’s “populism†in terms that stress the absolute absence of policy substance, but this is rather like saying that you can have religion without worship or science without knowledge.
Populism without policy substance is almost entirely worthless; it is not really populism. To reduce populism to a style or a reflex, one in which intellect and knowledge are derided, is the most vicious anti-populist trick, because it associates advocating policies that benefit the commonwealth and the broad mass of the people with ignorance and visceral reactions. It leaves the people exposed to whatever abusive policies members of the political class see fit to impose. It allows progressive globalists of both parties to flatter themselves that the policies they prefer, those that happen to serve a few entrenched interests at the expense of the many, are also the best informed and held by the best educated. The derision heaped on populism, which Palin makes so easy when she is identified wrongly as a populist, is another way of evading accountability for the misguided policies favored by all those who seem to regard representative government itself as a kind of populist excess. Naturally, these are also the same people who seem to be most serious about duplicating the “successes†of our managerial democracy around the world.
It was pretty hard to find responses that don't focus on how Obama is evil; the NRO is a totally shit rag these days.
[URL=http://rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/10/a_seat_at_the_table.php]Ross Douthat[/URL] wrote:Various folks have already gone round on this subject, but I think it's worth saying something further about the way figures like Mark Levin, Mark Steyn, Victor Davis Hanson and others have responded to those right-of-center pundits who have harshly criticized the McCain-Palin ticket and/or the GOP in general lately. I think this Hanson line is worth quoting:... with Obama now with an 6-8 point lead, some in the DC/NY corridor these last three weeks figure it's time now to jump on, or at least sort of jump, since the train they think is leaving the station and there might be still be some space at the dinner table on the caboose. They also believe as intellectuals that the similarly astute Obamians may on occasion inspire, or admire them as the like-minded who cultivate the life of the mind-in contrast to the "cancer" Sarah Palin, who, with her husband Todd, could hardly discuss Proust with them or could offer little if any sophisticated table-talk other than the chokes on shotguns or optimum RPMs on snow-machines.
I've always found the class-war element in inter-pundit sniping a little bizarre: Whether it's the netroots types hating on center-left columnists, or paleocons whining about how neocons get invited to all the cool parties, or Hanson's peculiar vision of David Brooks and Barack Obama chatting about Proust on the Acela (or something like that), it usually seems to involve the implication that successful newspaper columnists or think tank fellows live the lives of Hollywood starlets - or maybe Gilded-Age robber barons, maybe. (My favorite example in this vein: Daniel McCarthy capping off a blog post on paleocon successes by writing, "that sound you hear is Bill Kristol choking on his foie gras... ")
But leaving that issue aside, I think it's worth taking Hanson's larger point seriously. There is unquestionably a sense in which center-right scriveners who work for institutions more liberal than they (or merely exist in a climate more liberal than they) have both personal and professional incentives to criticize their own side as often as they do the other one, and to advance arguments and strike attitudes that drive more committed partisans up the wall. I'm flattered that Julian Sanchez's list of conservative writers in this position includes David Brooks and, well, me, but I think it's pretty easy to come up with a longer tally - it would include everyone from Rod Dreher (one of the very few explicitly-conservative writers at Beliefnet and the Dallas Morning News, I believe) to Christopher Buckley (Forbes FYI editor, New Yorker contributor, and now Daily Beast blogger) to various other (Peggy Noonan, Tucker Carlson, Joe Scarborough, etc.) with one foot in the right-wing intelligentsia and one foot in the MSM. Not coincidentally, this list happens to overlap in many cases with a list of right-of-center pundits who have been highly critical of the McCain campaign and the GOP recently. And while I'm sure that these writers and talkers are striving for objectivity in all things and at all times, I'm also acutely aware, from my own experience, of the way that peer effects - the desire to be perceived as the "reasonable conservative" by friends and peers, the positive reinforcement from liberal readers, etc. - can subtly influence the topics one chooses to write about and the tone one chooses to take. It's not a matter of wanting a seat at the table in the Obama Administration, or anything absurd like that; it's just a matter of being aware of your audience, and wanting to be taken seriously by people who don't necessarily share your views, but who exert a significant influence over your professional success even so.
Now of course similar incentives are also at work for people who make their living writing and talking to a more partisan audience: If you run, say, a right-wing talk radio show, or work for an explicitly conservative magazine, stoking partisan fervor is almost always in your professional interest - and if you're going to accuse David Brooks of pandering to his liberal audience, what would you say about a Levin or a Limbaugh? But I want to make a different point. Suppose that you accept the most cynical account of, say, Peggy Noonan's uncertainty about whom to vote for in this election, or Christopher Buckley's Obama endorsement - that they're just craven, self-interested bandwagon jumpers who want to keep getting invited to all those swanky cocktail parties I keep hearing about. Suppose that you regard every right-of-center writer - or single-issue fellow traveler with the Bush Republicans, in the case of Christopher Hitchens - who's publicly hurled brickbats at the McCain campaign as a quisling and a coward, a stooge for liberalism and a rat fleeing a fast-sinking ship. In such circumstances, what's the best course of action - denouncing the rats, or trying to figure out why the hell the ship is sinking? Even if Brooks and Noonan and Buckley and Dreher and Kathleen Parker and David Frum and Heather Mac Donald and Bruce Bartlett and George Will and on and on - note the ideological diversity in the ranks of conservatives who aren't Helping The Team these days - are all just snobs and careerists who quit or cavil or cover their asses when the going gets tough and their "seat at the table" is threatened, an American conservative movement that consists entirely of those pundits with the rock-hard testicular fortitude required to never take sides against the family seems like a pretty small tent at this point. And if I were Hanson or Levin or Steyn I'd be devoting a little less time to ritual denunciations of heretics and RINOs, and at least a little more time to figuring out how to build the sort of ship that will make the rats of the DC/NY corridor want to scramble back on board, however much it makes you sick to have them back. Who knows? It might just be the sort of ship that swing-state voters will want to climb on board as well.
I know it'll be a bit tough to keep this from turning into a second campaign minutia thread, but let's try.
What's happening what the conservatism and the Republican party these days, and what's with all the heretics and kooks? I know, I know con != Pub, how dare I, but we always end up talking about both, so let's mix them.
What should conservatives and Republicans do out in the wilderness? The Economist thinks the center might be there for the taking but it doesn't seem where the increasingly homogeneous party wants to attack. It's not discussed in the articles I posted, but I believe Republicans have a Godsend in McCain because they are spared another national effort, by themselves, from forever alienating Hispanics from the Republican party. But that's most definitely a temporary reprieve, and I have faith in House Republicans to get back to doing that job with great vigor; it could energize the base and give Republicans some short-term gains, but on the long-term it doesn't look like anything but a big mistake.
Foreign policy doesn't seem like a place to get on the rebound. Most Americans are disillusioned with the war, and as Rudy discovered, '9/11' isn't the magic number it used to be. And if Iraq winds down, it's hard to see how a hawkish foreign policy could be a winner. "Elect us and we'll star a war!"?
Then there are the cultural issues: abortion, gays, guns, etc. The first is a pretty good base-turner, but it's not coalition builder. Gay marriage was exhausted in '04, and opinion seems to be turning on it, and guns are no game changer unless the Democrats decide to do something stupid in Congress, and I think they're unlikely to with all the conservative Dems they've been picking up.
And of course the Economy. Reliable conservative rhetoric about free market seems to fall flat in an environment such as ours no matter the merit (or lack of), but to me the economy is still the wildcard. If it rebounds under complete Democratic control then they get the credit and it's hard to make the argument. Conservatives and Republicans warn of the return to the bad old days of the 70s, but they overestimate Obama's doctrinalism. Still, it's hard to forecast 4/8 years ahead in a global recession. So, wildcard.
Now talk! (the articles and my posting discuss different issues. address whichever you want)
Elki on
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I, personally, don't feel that Palin (i.e that pretty face they discussed in that snippet) has a future after this election. After this is over she'll be known for a mudslinging simpleton who can't hold up to the scrutiny of the press, and of the people. She polarizes the base, most certainly between the religious and the "social elite" of the party. There is certainly a large gap between the religious sect and the "upper class" of the party, which as far as I can tell, are pretty upset at the idea of Palin staying around.
As an extreme social and economic liberal, I can say I hope conservatism dies a heinous, thrashing death.
It's at this point where I honestly have no idea where they go. Do the party faithfuls get a wake-up call, and relegate to Christian right to the backseat where they belong, or do they flail about a bit, still not understanding where they went wrong? The Democrats spent a long fucking time in the wilderness, and are only now finally getting it. (Despite the hatred he may get from the right, Clinton was idealogically a very moderate Republican.)
There's two things that have led to the Republicans going hard right the way they did and taking license to do whatever they want. First, the Democrats stopped being a significant liberal challenge. After McGovern got his ass handed to him in '72, the Democrats began shifting to the right. After '84, when Reagan pretty much slaughtered Mondale, the Democrats took a hard turn right to compensate, taking it as a message that they were losing ground with the public with liberal policies. With no significant liberal challengers, the Republicans went off the deep end, falling farther and farther right to the party we see and loathe today.
Another factor is the concept of the permanent campaign, which also started to pick up in the '70s but was perfected by Clinton, and built on by W. Basically, priority is given to short-term political gain over long-term vision, continuing to "campaign" for policies, including continued smearing and attacks, even in non-election years. It creates a huge culture of divisiveness. In addition, the 24-hour new cycle plays into this, with constant reporting of who won the day, what political gaffes were made, etc. Now, this system can have a place as it can be an important tool for keeping an eye on the public attitudes to aid in policy making, but it gets carried way too far. Karl Rove was a master of this, and pushed the Republicans even further in a crackpot direction.
Now, you also have Palin. Believe it or not, her crackpot statements are actually a political move. The VP candidate is actually supposed to be a little more "out there," energizing and firing up the public in ways that the presidential candidate can't with serious repercussions. Cheney was good at this (for the wrong reasons). Palin goes too far. If you look at the Democrats, you can actually see this strategy implemented with Biden, making more fiery and direct attacks than Obama.
In short, the direction the GOP has taken is very sad and disappointing, and I don't think they can necessarily pull themselves out of this, at least not any time soon. At the same time, the Democrats aren't entirely blameless. The only hope is likely for a third party to actually take the reigns and build support, but there's really too many obstacle in the way (placed there by the Democrats and Republicans) to allow that to happen.
The rest of the struggles we see in the GOP, I think, are all results of that collapse. Weak ideas result from the fact that the party's splitting factions do not agree on substantive issues. Weak party leadership results from the fact that no one can bridge the gap and lead the whole party, rather than just a faction of it. Electoral failure results from the fact that moderates in both factions are beginning to defect to an increasingly unified, ascendant Democratic Party.
I don't believe this will result in a permanent Democratic majority or any such Rove-esque dreams of electoral conquest. Rather, the Democrats will temporarily take the reins of government and the Republicans will begin the search for a new way to split the Democratic Party or to form a winning coalition of their own.
The so-called "social conservatives" are likely to fade into the background until the major issues we as a nation face fade into the background. Moralizing doesn't go over so well when there are actual problems, it's really something that only really takes hold when the economy is good, we're not at war, etc. That's why it saw a resurgence during the Clinton years.
I personally don't see the Republican party as it is currently configured lasting very much longer. There's already an internal powerstruggle between the socials and the fiscals, and after the election it's going to be pretty clear that a new direction is necessary. The only thing that's been keeping those sides together for the last decade or so was the fact that they've been winning. Now that they're starting to lose, everyone involved is going to start blaming the other guy for it.
My prediction is a Dixiecrat style split within the party, with those that leave swelling the ranks of either the Constitution or Libertarian parties depending on who gets the boot.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
I belive the big wildcard is Immigration. If, as I hope, the Democrats manage to pass some immigration reform it might serve to help the economy and also solidify their future. Of course, any reasonably immigration reform might also temporarily cede the center and give the Republicans a point to attack on in the center. Hispanics are the future though, they're the largest growing ethnicity in America and stand to become the majority in a few decades. If the Democrats can solidfy their support there, if its even possible in such a diverse ethnicity, as Obama appears to be doing then their long term future is bright.
Short of declaring that gay marriage and abortion are now required, the Dems aren't likely to lose the "middle" unless they let Republicans (or whoever winds up on top of the conservative heap) frame the issues. That's something that they've always had trouble with, but it definitely looks like they're coming out of the woods on it in this cycle.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
But see, that wasn't always their base. Their base used to be people that wanted less market regulation, increased personal accountability (not saying liberals don't, conservatives just had a greater desire for it), and had a stricter adherence to traditional values and were much more cautious about new ones lest people get carried away.
But then some jackass decided it'd be easier to just cater to the crazies and blame the other side when crazy legislation they had no intention of actually getting passed failed.
I'm not sure I buy that. Just because the Democrats are more popular this year doesn't mean that the electorate is shifting. I would say its more a reflection of the unpopularity of Bush. I guess we'll find out though. I do hope you're right though.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
It's undoubtedly a result of Bush backlash on some level, but it's also attributable to the fact that conservatives have had the last 8 years to bone the country and they've done a bang up job of it. Conservatives led us into an incredibly unpopular war, tanked the economy, etc. And now, they've got loser stink on them with this election cycle looking like a Democratic landslide.
By all indications, we're seeing a demographic realignment that's similar in scope to the one that put FDR in the Whitehouse and the New Deal into effect. Quite frankly, it was overdue at this point.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
What effectively happened was that the Republican leadership became so enamored with its Evangelical base that they forgot there were other Republicans out there that needed a seat at the table. In 2000, there weren't any wars or economic problems; the Republicans could wage a culture war because life was good. We could afford the luxury of caring about abortion because we were still riding the tech boom and American soldiers weren't getting blown up. In '04, we were getting our war on, but the economy didn't suck and gay marriage still had some political mileage left in it. Now Americans are suffering from war fatigue and have watched the Dow Jones act like a Six Flags ride. "Reagan Democrats" and the conservative intelligensia were sufficiently satisfied to continue going along with the Republican party until things got out of hand and the party needed actual ideas, not merely contrariness.
Now we see Republicans overrun with Evangelicals. They've gathered enough clout to demand nearly anything including a veto on VP nominations. By all accounts, McCain wanted Lieberman or Tom Ridge but was forced to take Palin because of her ideological purity. They've allowed the culture war to get wildly out of hand, going from criticizing liberal academia to criticizing the educated-at-large. Religious hot buttons have trumped fiscal concerns and the idea of a permanent Republican majority pulled the wool over their eyes regarding the strength of their party. And now, with demographic shifts and litmus tests for purity, they've managed to leave the Western Libertarians of the party high and dry as well as the blue collar crowd in Appalachia who tend to vote for their wallets and protectionism.
Repairing the damage isn't likely anytime soon. Obama's campaign will have likely cemented a new generation of Democrats and the xenophobia of the Republican party, once a winner with the "Southern Strategy," has now become septic in the face of demographics. It's going to take a very charismatic leader and a fresh set of ideas to pull people to the party at this point and I don't see that leader anywhere currently. I also see the Evangelicals not wanting to give up their power, even if it means taking the ship down with them.
In response to what you quoted and to add on, polls done recently on some of the hot-button social issues show that a majority of people in America agree with the Democrats. A slim majority consider themselves "pro-choice" and believe that abortion should be legal most of the time. A majority believe that gays should be able to serve freely in the military, and that gay couples should have some kind of legal recognition (either civil unions or marriages.)
One side is flat-out wrong, and they attempt to cover up their wrongness by dressing up their arguments in the superficial intellectual trappings of the opposing side.
Intelligent design advocates can't get peer-reviewed papers publish? They start their own fucking science publications and peer review themselves!
Conservatives lose policy debates and intellectual arguments with liberals? Fuck the liberal elite, William Buckley is going to start his OWN magazine!
The media constantly calls out conservatives for corruption and hypocrisy? Fuck the mainstream media, let's start talk radio and Fox News and make our OWN media!
I think there's always been a strong sense of "I don't like your stupid rules so I'll go home and play with myself" in the conservative movement—both the "intellegensia arm" and the "raging xenophobic talk-radio cultist" arm.
Probably not as near as Kurzweil claims, but I think it's very likely that rapid technological progression is going to push a huge number of divisive social issues front and center of public consciousness: neuroscience advances that erode the religious conception of the soul, human genetic engineering, robot intelligence and robot rights, and eventually, functional immortality and the possibility of merging biological and technological intelligences and experiences. If you think the abortion debate is divisive, you ain't seen nothin' yet.
As these things become more mainstream, the religious backlash is going to be huge. The Republicans will be there to scoop up the outrage and repackage it politically. I think Sarah Palin is the face of the future Republican party.
Matt Taibbi, one of my new favorite people, interviews Byron York and positively eviscerates him.
Wow. You can see the contempt literally drip off Taibbi's words.
That was glorious.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Of course, both of those terms carry such baggage that they'd have to be euphamized somehow.
But I say let's make everyone pick between a pro-religion, pro-tax, pro-debt, pro-distribution, anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-immigrant government powerhouse (a lot of Hillary and Bush supporters fit this bill just fine, it's working-class America), and the opposite, a pro-rights/freedoms, free-market, open-border, small government party.
I'm not saying one of those needs to control everything, but I really think that those are the defining political endpoints right now, and that too many voters and too many politicians are fallaciously lining themselves up along convoluted, outdated party lines just because the risk is too great to acknowledge what you really think government ought to be doing.
Damn.
This was one.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
This is going to be horribly unabashedly partisan, but I don't really care.
The Republican party as it currently stands is corrupt to the core. The leadership is more interested in maximizing their holdings and investments in corporate interests than running the country, and shamelessly uses social wedge issues to distract their constituency. Failing economy? Housing bubble? Shitty labor laws? Wage gap? Oil companies raping the environment? Oh, don't pay attention to those things... here, pay attention to this! Gays! Brown people coming over the border stealing your cars! Black people coming up by affirmative action taking your jobs! Pregnant teenagers! Atheists! 9/11! Iraq! They deliberately cultivate fear and hatred, turning the downtrodden against one another so we don't pay attention to what's going on being the curtain. There's an old saying about "don't piss on my back and tell me it's raining." They don't just piss on my back and tell me it's raining, they piss on my back and tell me it's the black/brown/gay/foreign/pregnant people doing it.
The Democrats; yellow-bellied, two-faced, mealy-mouthed pandering career politicians that they are, at least have a conscience. When it's all said and done, I can see that the Democratic leadership would prefer not to see the country go to hell in a handbasket. I can't say the same about the Republicans.
I haven't spoken to a grassroots Republican who actually had sound logical reasons for being Republican in... fuck, I don't know how long. Most of the intelligent Republicans I've talked to are like ElJeffe: they're going "what the fuck, guys?" at their own party. If they're not voting Obama, they're voting third-party or they're simply not voting. In the last couple of years, every die-hard Republican I've talked to in person has either been horrendously uninformed, a religious fundamentalist, or unbelievably pig-headed. And when pressed on the issues, they engage in some of the same anti-rational rhetorical dances of the worst Creationists. Blame the biased media. Blame liberal higher education. Hue and cry that "you don't care what I think anyway so why should I try to convince you?" Act like politics is an opinion like liking a flavor of ice cream. "You have your opinion and I have mine." Okay, but your "opinion" has resulted in a record deficit and 6% unemployment. Say, "Well, nobody really knows for sure what caused the economic crisis." We know exactly what caused it! "Yeah, but economists contradict themselves all the time." The thinking is so slippery it's like trying to hold on to a ball of mercury.
Yeah, it's insulting, but there's no nice way of telling good people that they've been hoodwinked.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Anyway, my issues with the GOP or the Dems is that neither fully represents who I am or what I want. They represent parts of what I like, but there's a whole lot of crazy shit that's added in that I don't want at all... on both sides. Why can't I have lower taxes, and gays being allowed to marry (and be miserable and legally bound and unable to seperate without spending a bunch of money like the rest of us chumps!), and women having the right to choose, and be able to have my guns? Why does it have to be an either/or? Why can't I have socialized medicine for the poor and also not want to drop bombs on people?
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
A) Campaign minutia.
It's only "campaign minutia" in the sense that Titanic hitting an iceberg was the result of "navigational minutia."
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Not really.
I know exactly how GungHo feels. I'm in the same camp. Such is the curse of being Texan.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Gun control is probably the only thing. And that wasn't entirely taken away from Congress - the Supreme Court decided that there is an individual right to own firearms. What firearms that encompasses is less clear.
But the rest:
Lower Taxes - if you make less than $250,000 a year
Gay Marriage - Civil Unions ok?
Right to Choose - Enshrined in the Dem Platform
Socialized Medicine - As close to it as we're gonna get at this point
Not Dropping Bombs on People - well, no large-scale unnecessary wars, but we'll be the world police as long as we spend $Alaska on "defense"
Oh, right. That never happens.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.