Redeeming the Republicans

[Username17]

I'm curious what you guys thing is going to happen to the Republicans in the long term, every time the GOP loses an election all the pundits go on about how they're going to broaden their appeal/be less crazy/ect. and it never happens. The GOP keeps doubling down on the crazy because the inmates are running the asylum. So where does this end? do cooler heads somehow prevail? Does the party stupid itself out of existence by actually nominating on of the Michelle Bachmann? Do the armed wingnuts actually make good on their threat of armed revolt and get gunned down by the Army?

Great realignments happen from time to time.In a winner takes all political system, it's easy for there to develop "big tents" that don't make a lot of sense. Contradictions will inevitably occur as factions align because of agreements on certain issues while still diverging on other issues. As XKCD put it "The basic contradiction of a party of slaveholders ostensibly standing for egalitarianism would go unresolved until the late 20th century."

So it's not inconceivable that the Republicans could stay crazy for a long, long time. The result of the Southern Strategy of Nixon combined with the Reagan Revolution was a party composed of anti-modernist reactionaries bankrolled by billionaires. They are now a party which represents the rural poor and attempts to solve all problems with tax cuts for the wealthy elite. Obviously, that's a problem. As the modernity they rage against becomes more and more entrenched, their voting base shrinks. Demographically, things look bad for the republican coalition, and will probably look worse and worse as long as they try to hold their coalition together.

That being said, it doesn't look for the moment that any part of the coalition can be easily cut free, nor is there any particular will in the current leadership to do so. Republicans are still treated as the natural party of power by the news media, and Republican pundits get demonstrably more air time than their opponents even on networks where the slant is nominally left-wing. The current Republican support network includes some seriously rich people and they dump an enormous amount of money into the system - in 2012 the Republicans outspent the Democrats by $83 million on general election TV advertisements alone. This huge money river is a tremendous boon to Republican aligned grifters. Karl Rove's two super duper PACs took in and "spent" over a hundred and sixty million dollars on the 2012 election. But 20% of that went to "administration" which is basically him paying himself and his friends a salary. That means Karl Rove personally walked away with between ten and thirty million dollars just for shaking down the current Republican party's deep pockets members. When the leadership is raking in cash like that, they certainly don't have any compelling reason to change course. It's not at all obvious that Rove would make money if his team was winning, his team being afraid is what puts the Benjamins in his santa sack.

But just as giant sacks full of money and a fawning attitude from the media makes it difficult for them to voluntarily change course, it also makes it easy for them to win elections. Mitt Romney is a pathological liar who used tax loopholes to pay a tax rate of about 14% and said that 47% of the population of the country were worthless moochers. And he still got 47% of the vote. If he had been able to string together a coherent narrative and refrain from insulting vast sectors of the population it probably would have been closer.

Probably the Republican party is going to have to bite the bullet and become the gay rights party or legalized pot party or something equally nonsensical in order to realign themselves into a new coalition that can win national level elections. But that kind of thing has happened before. They only became the "Whites Only" party in 1964, and they did it to win elections. They could dump the racists and forge a new voting block in just a few years if they have a proper house cleaning event like Civil Rights was for the Democrats.

Basically, you have the Evangelicals, the Fascists, the Libertarians, and the Business Conservatives. This is an unruly and unlikable coalition and seems to be able 40% of the population of the country. If they could cut out one of the groups in order to pick up a demographic or two that was bigger, they would be on their way to being competitive in general elections again.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

Well, there is a third path for the Republican Party that doesn't involve changing in any way. It's incredibly risky, however.

The third path is that they continue to run as a pre-DSCC/DNC Democratic Party and hope that black swans will sweep them into office long enough to push an partisan agenda and then fight its repeal as much as they can. This strategy isn't very workable because black swans by their very nature cut both ways. They could end up like the 1976-80 Democratic Party and get a boost from Watergate even though it's obvious that the New Deal Coalition is over. The Democratic Party got fucking lucky as hell from 1972-1980, because the Nixonian Coalition should have been at its zenith. I mean, shit like stagflation and the Iranian hostage crisis didn't help, but I don't see Carter winning in 1980 without a good deal of luck. And of course the real strength of liberals in the 70s was the court system, enabled by the 40+ years of the New Deal Coalition.

That said, this strategy isn't as forlorn for the conservatives as it seems, because they have a secret weapon. Their secret weapon is voter apathy. That is, they cause the Democratic Party base voters to sit out elections at an increasing rate over time. They can enhance this apathy over time by causing gridlock. Because the current status quo favors the Money Men, a future in which there is just enough environmentalism to stave off the worst of global warming, liberalization on social issues, and just enough sops (Obamacare, minimum wage increase) to prevent a populist revolt is the best case scenario for them. If they get ahold of the courts because they won a Presidential election in the interrum, they stack them as much as possible and have them fight a rearguard action.

Like I said, it's a risky strategy because it becomes increasingly unworkable for the Republican Party as time goes on -- unlike the dilemma faced by the Democratic Party, where they 'just' had to hold out for 30 years before things would start going their way. And of course the voter apathy issue requires a bit of complicity from the Democratic Party leadership. If Hillary turns out to be a Secret Populist like FDR or a liberal like Warren/Brown/O'Malley/etc. wins the Presidency in 2016, 2020, or 2024 the jig is pretty much up.

We'll see how 2014 goes. If the Tea Party wing gets their scalps and make a partial comeback and/or the Democratic Party shows surprising strength in the elections, then the establishment is going to frantically be looking for a way to realign their party. If however the Republican Party does well in the midterms while simultaneously not knocking off too much of the establishment, my money would be on 'gridlock + black swan election' strategy.

[Redshirt]

Long-term, I think the libertarians and the business conservatives win out over the culture warriors. Cultural reactionaries will always exist, but what exactly they're reacting to changes from generation to generation, so they're more volatile as a bloc. Economic constituencies are more stable, and libertarianism is a better draw for young voters than being afraid of black people or gays.[/i]

[Lago PARANOIA]

I don't think that libertarianism is the wave of the future. At least one in Multiracial America. Three reasons:

1.) The problem with it is that it's anchored too much in confederate revanchism. The passing of the torch from Goldwater to Ron Paul to Rand Paul + Andrew Napolitano doesn't seem to have changed anything. Like the Reform Party, it'll become the hot new thing for maybe a cycle or two and then people will get a good look at it. Rand Paul says something retarded about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Napolitano spouts off some bullshit about blacks being happier under slavery and that's the end of that.

2.) The second is that the 'purer' form of libertarianism isn't popular among the conservative base. It's not popular economically and it's not popular socially. Non-rich conservatives, as it turns out, like sucking at the cock of Uncle Sugar and getting their SS and Welfare and farm subsidy checks. Libertarianism can be popular among the base if it sticks to Confederacy apologia, but returning to a 'pure' form like the Randroids advocate is a non-starter.

3.) The third problem is that Millenials are genuinely economically more liberal than the previous generations. Libertarianism's economic tenets can resonate among Generation X and the Silent Generation, but it's a total non-starter with this block. There's a reason why libertarianism advocates are confined towards weblogs that skew towards an older audience like Mother Jones and Slate and New York Times and why they're even more of a ridiculed minority at Cracked and SomethingAwful.

[Lago PARANOIA]

If I was a Money Man and I was tasked with finding a way to preserve my ill-gotten wealth, my strategy would be to Sister Soulja the religious right ASAP and adopt libertarian rhetoric -- while keeping the actual libertarians far away as possible. I'd throw out a couple of liberal sops like student loan forgiveness and a minimum wage increase and some toothless promises to reign in the financial sector. To staunch the bleeding among the rest of my base, my platform would be drug liberalization and demagoging on abortion and guns. At this point, I'd flat-out accept that gay marriage and multiculturalism and anti-climate change policy were going to be things and unconditionally surrender to the Democratic Party on this count. Thereafter I'd adopt the extremely dishonest strategy of ruthlessly needling the Democratic party centrists for making any economic moves to the right -- even if they're moves that I advocated for -- and start shrieking about socialism about any moves to the left that didn't have bottom-up support like the minimum wage. Finally, I would also do something about Citizens United. It looked like it would be a good deal for the Money Men but the problem with it is that it makes it too easy to break party discipline via a couple of eccentric multi-millionaires. I'd heavily lean on the IRS and DOJ to teach Perkins and Koch and Adelson a lesson or three about keeping their traps shot and toeing the line.

[Redshirt]

The problem with it is that it's anchored too much in confederate revanchism. The passing of the torch from Goldwater to Ron Paul to Rand Paul + Andrew Napolitano doesn't seem to have changed anything. Like the Reform Party, it'll become the hot new thing for maybe a cycle or two and then people will get a good look at it. Rand Paul says something retarded about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Napolitano spouts off some bullshit about blacks being happier under slavery and that's the end of that.

I think that's a historical accident caused by cross pollination. Libertarians and Southern conservatives are generally in the same party, and coalition parties tend to cause their membership's ideology to converge even when there's nothing profound linking say, free-market capitalism and jesus together.

I think the maturing of Silicon Valley into a more politically assertive interest group could change that dynamic. It's crawling with libertarians, and it has a shitton of money. In that context, I think a lot of the current republican base could get shifted towards the democrats, or hang onto the republican copyright while the party itself withers away like the whigs did. If you marry drug legalization, immigration liberalization, international isolationism or at least non-interference, and some sort of rollback or limitation on the surveillance state with powerful business interests, I think you could end up with a decent core coalition to replace the original base, which is a declining demographic. You could even make a few regional welfare programs sacrosanct in order to broaden your appeal.

[Username17]

Libertarians can't get thrown out of the party, because it's the conservatives only "in" with the confused youth vote. Ron Paul is and was a creepy racist who wants state governments to control your vagina, but he got a lot of youth votes from people who didn't know that. Libertarianism can be explained in less than twenty minutes and sounds superficially plausible - it is really easy to recruit highschool and college students to libertarianism.

Right now of course, the libertarian banner is waved by deeply insincere neo-Confederates who use the anti-federalism as a dog whistle for being against civil rights, and by deeply insincere plutocrats who use the anti-regulationism as a dog whistle for being against taxes on rich people. The first group honestly has to go. Young people do not swell up with pride at the thought of nullification whether they are white southerners or not. The second group has fat stacks of money and will bankroll the party for hundreds of millions of dollars every election cycle for the foreseeable future. They are too valuable to cut loose even if their message was deeply alienating to a majority of the population.

But I could see the Republicans cultivating a sincere, or at least not racist Libertarian caucus. The Tea Party keeps threatening to turn into that, until they remember how much fun they have employing Brownshirt Tactics. The Young Republicans need a recruitment slogan, and Libertarianism is about the only place they are going to find it. They used to recruit with Communism scare stories, and that just doesn't work anymore. Modern children just aren't afraid of communists. Or blacks. Or queers. They aren't even afraid of Muslims or Mexicans for fuck's sake. But they could be recruited into a bizarre anti-government utopian cult. That is a thing that young people could be recruited with.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

I think the maturing of Silicon Valley into a more politically assertive interest group could change that dynamic. It's crawling with libertarians, and it has a shitton of money.

Yeah, and? Even though in 2012 Ron Paul raised way more money in Silicon Valley than Mitt Romney, it was still an embarrassingly small amount compared to what Obama raised. And that is where the non-Neo Confederate strain of libertarianism is literally at its strongest. Libertarianism, by its very nature, is already an out-sized privilege-to-power ideology that is over-represented in discourse. What it needs is a voting base, not more money.

The fact is, 'pure' anarcho-libertarianism has already hit a ceiling on support. And current demographics are going to make it smaller. It's not popular among the Money Men, who prefer vulgar libertarianism; it's not popular among Millenials/racial minorities, who prefer raw progressivism; and it's not popular in the exurbs/South/soccer moms, who want the government to keep their hands off of their Medicare.

Who is libertarianism supposed to appeal to in this day and age that wouldn't be better served by another ideology? I don't even see a brief Reform Party-style resurgence because Ross Perot at least had an ideology that was broadly popular. It can basically exist as a fad until libertarians admit to wanting to dismantle child labor laws, the Civil Rights Act, and Medicare -- then it becomes as popular as a bucket of lead paint in the hospital nursery.

[Ancient History]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/1 ... 49165.html

Case in point, this is the kind of quasi-racist, academically-bankrupt economic moral which the GOP needs to shed.

[Maj]

How the fuck do you people read HuffPo? It takes 45 seconds for one page to load, and then my entire computer goes to hell.

---

Paul Ryan is sort of right about income and eligibility for benefits, though... I don't believe that he has the solution for the problem, but I've run into the income conundrum plenty of times.

[Meikle641]

Indeed, I think the rules should improve on income and benefits. It's crazy that they deduct so much you get screwed if your income goes up even a little.

If one spouse is on disability and the other works part time, why penalize the both of them for what the working spouse makes? Not trapping families in poverty would be nice.

[RobbyPants]

How the fuck do you people read HuffPo? It takes 45 seconds for one page to load, and then my entire computer goes to hell.

Mine did the same thing.

[erik]

Click to flash. Adblock. These have made my weblife better. A friend recommended Comodo browser but I have not played with it much yet.

[Lago PARANOIA]

So. Am I just imagining things, or are American conservative Christians really planning to revive the culture wars on contraception? Right now, I just think that it's a flare-up of momentary insanity like the conservatives do with gold buggery. But it has increasingly come to feel like a 'thing'. I'm not the only one who feels this way.

Again, we'll see how winter 2014-2016 plays out. If contraception hysteria is really going to become a reopened front on the culture wars, it'll be then.

[Morat]

So. Am I just imagining things, or are American conservative Christians really planning to revive the culture wars on contraception? Right now, I just think that it's a flare-up of momentary insanity like the conservatives do with gold buggery. But it has increasingly come to feel like a 'thing'. I'm not the only one who feels this way.

Again, we'll see how winter 2014-2016 plays out. If contraception hysteria is really going to become a reopened front on the culture wars, it'll be then.

Having learned from the Slacktivist how recent the white evangelical shift on abortion was (and what prompted it), I think that very soon the fundies are going to have always been opposed to contraception.

Already, they're pretty much getting a pass on how a few years ago, they thought that a tribal hatred of contraception was dirty Papist heresy. Just like abortion a generation earlier.

edit: And today, Fred posted about this. Note the 1973 quote from the Baptist Press, the official news service of the Southern Baptist Convention: "WASHINGTON (BP) — The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision that overturned a Texas law which denied a woman the right of abortion except to save her life, has advanced the cause of religious liberty, human equality and justice." That was the official position of the Southern Baptists on Roe.

And then, after they'd politically organized because the IRS was going after their still segregated schools, they decided that even in 1980 acknowledging being butthurt because the feds wouldn't subsidize segregation, so they'd retroactively become upset about abortion instead. And everyone accepted it.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I wish that there was a nice unifying theory of the animating impulses of social conservatism and economic conservatism. In a lot of countries (Germany and the U.K.) they more-or-less went hand-in-hand for a long time; in others (France and the U.S.) the convergence seems a lot more recent. That is, while both economic and social conservatism could be broadly described as 'conservative' they're ideologically non-overlapping in a lot of ways.

The closest one I could find is the (neo-)confederate strain found in the U.S., where economic and social conservatism was married into an arbitrary if coherent theory of aristocracy well before the American Civil War. Unfortunately, it's not internationally expandable and didn't even apply to most of the U.S. non-South until the 1970s.

Anyone got a nice pet theory? Or are we going to throw in the towel and just say that calling economic and social conservatism 'conservatism' was just a historical accident?

[Mistborn]

Anyone got a nice pet theory? Or are we going to throw in the towel and just say that calling economic and social conservatism 'conservatism' was just a historical accident?

Corey Robin had a pretty good book about how conservatism as an ideology exists to preserve hierarchy in the face of democratic challenge, that seems like a unifying factor for both economic and social conservatism.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Word on D-Street is that the Republican Party is trying to ram through a conservative agenda despite a certain veto in order to gin up the base. The thing is, this agenda is on the face of it unpopular and moreover Boehner can't even prevent his plans from exploding in the hangar. Like, the 20-week abortion ban? Couldn't even get to a floor vote on it because of a revolt in the not-so-vile-and-perverted Republican faction. Not only that, but, fuck, he made a KKK-sympathizer one of his Top Dawg Whipcrackers. That's not the look of a party operating from a position of medium- or long-term strength no matter how well the 2014 election went.

We'll see how 2014 goes. If the Tea Party wing gets their scalps and make a partial comeback and/or the Democratic Party shows surprising strength in the elections, then the establishment is going to frantically be looking for a way to realign their party. If however the Republican Party does well in the midterms while simultaneously not knocking off too much of the establishment, my money would be on 'gridlock + black swan election' strategy.

I said this over 10 months ago and while I'm a bit surprised at how the Democratic Party did more poorly than I and a lot of the Sam Wang/Nate Silver types were expecting, so far it seems like my prediction has come to pass.

First couple of weeks after a more conservative-leaning Congress was swept in and they've already decided to go all-in in a gridlock + black swan election strategy. Not just with boneheaded legislation on abortion and Social Security and difficulty in funding certain departments, but with how the Republican Party frontrunners are going. Seriously, Mitt fucking Romney outpolls Jeb Bush among the base? That does not signal the moves of a party willing to move forward.

They got enough of a cushion in 2014 such that it's more likely that the Republican Party can successfully cockblock Democrats in 2016, but another big surprise is how the Democratic Party is sincerely moving in the direction of more economic populism since 2014. With more strength than I thought. If the Democratic Party doesn't engage in centrist economic debacles (probable, but less likely than in 2010), doesn't get hit by a surprise recession or scandal (anus puckeringly dubious), retakes the Senate in 2016 (likely) then reforms it (less likely but doable), and somehow claws out a win in the US House of Representatives (the biggest fly in the ointment) then the GOP in its current incarnation is fucked.

The real question is: is the Democratic Party really up to the challenge? I don't know, man. Despite our position of weakness, I feel more confident about this party now than I would have prior to any year after 1964, but I'm not sure which way the wind is blowing.

The next few years are going to get reeeeeeal interesting, let me tell you.

[Mistborn]

How well the democrats do in the coming decades is going to depend on how well the party elite is able to exclude it's younger internet based wing from the conversation.

They've been raised in an echo chamber and not only do their talking points not fly in the face of real opposition but the are incapable of realizing that this is the case. We Are All Already Decided is the sure fire way to alienate people. They're also ridiculously illiberal in their own way seeing no problem with people being harassed or fired from their jobs for having the "wrong political views.

This is why we need economic populism in the party. Without including class and economics into the conversation leftist movements become these stunted mockeries of themselves. Like the internets social justice culture.

[Occluded Sun]

Leftist movements are inherently stunted mockeries. It's not a bug, it's a core feature.

[Maxus]

Welp, it's becoming ever more apparent that it's true:

The world changes, and conservatives lose. Take this, f'rinstance. Federal Court declares Alabama's same-sex marriage ban unconstitutional.

Now, there's been a two-week stay issued on it, but it's still happened and now there has to be an actual debate/discussion on this and it's just not gonna look good for the connies no matter how it goes.

And, of course, a bunch of the legislators here began howling about 'family values' and then something epic happened.

Openly lesbian Alabama lawmaker calls bullshit on her colleagues; threatens to out the ones who either have committed adultery/are committing adultery if they keep trying to play the 'family values' card.

So the world changes, and conservatives lose once again.

[Occluded Sun]

Why, exactly, would anyone want to 'redeem' the Republicans?

If you've previously considered yourself a member, but they no longer represent your interests and you see no way to get them to do so, why not just find some other group that will?

If you've never associated with them, why would you care whether they wither away?

[Whipstitch]

I think most of us would cheerfully dance on the party's grave rather than mourn, but hey, this is a gaming forum and so idle thought exercises is pretty much the whole point of being here.

[Occluded Sun]

I don't think the Republican brand (which is what the parties are at this point, brand names) will be permitted to break down completely, as the boogyman of the Republicans is the only thing keeping all of the various groups that make up the Democrats 'in the tent'.

If left unopposed, those groups would lose their only motivation to cooperate, and would shatter that party too.

[Schleiermacher]

Permitted by whom?

It looks like the answer you're implying is "the Democrats", but that makes absolutely no sense. And if you mean the Koch brothers the internal GOP leadership, then what does keeping the Democratic party together have to do with anything?