GOP Looking to Run Moderates

5 Comments

1. 

   g on October 7, 2009 at 12:21 pm

   We’ll all be better off if the Republicans steer towards moderation.

   • 

     corvus on October 7, 2009 at 3:10 pm

     I disagree. The ideological core of the party will remain unchanged, and the moderates will be used as political cover for the extremists, enabling them to suck in gullible swing voters. At the end of the day, GOP “moderates” will vote in the interests of their race, social class, and religious faction; they just won’t trumpet it as loudly.

     Personally, I am highly suspicious of the idea that there even can be moderate plutocrats and theocrats.

2. 

   esquimaux on October 7, 2009 at 12:36 pm

   these people are “moderate” only by comparison to the really insane repubs. They are CONSERVATIVE. Here in CA we’ve seen the media portray Whitman and Fiorina (and Ahnold) as “moderate”, but their economic policies are 100% Chamber-of-Commerce. One of Whitman’s few policy ideas is to roll back environmental protection to help business. No thanks. Unfortunately we have the traditional supply of awful candidates on the Dem side.

   • 

     g on October 7, 2009 at 12:47 pm

     I’d agree with that. At this point, I’m just hoping for any kind of improvement. Anything.

3. 

   colinski on October 7, 2009 at 8:53 pm

   Firstly, let me caveat what I say here by admitting to my shortcomings; there are people who understand the subject of realignment theory better than I. However, I have my own understanding of the subject and I invite the better-informed to jump in. I also strongly encourage others to explore the subject.

   There’s a fundamental paradox at work here, since the Republicans can’t ‘choose’ candidates who don’t appeal to their base. Strategy is considered by voters, especially — but not always — by elites (attendees of caucuses, etc.), but there’s a tension between strategic choices and representative ones. Nominees who don’t represent their party can appeal to moderates and others but they fail to win the hearts of members of their own party.

   ‘Choose’ is a misleading term since it implies that the Republican party can merely ‘decide’ rather than represent it’s constituent members. And I’m speaking broadly here, since non-voting organizations such as business, etc., are part of this constituency.

   While it’s clear that there are some (especially the “powers that be” – PTB) within the Republican coalition who have embraced the logic of moving to the middle; it’s also quite true that the Republican coalition has been alienating moderates, so much of the coalition’s support is moving away from supporting them, despite efforts by the PTB.

   We’re in the midst of a realignment that began in the 60s (and even earlier) with the Civil Rights movement. The Democratic party’s support for blacks alienated southern whites, who had been a key element within the Democratic constituency. A graphic illustration of this coalitional shift is the electoral map of 1964’s Presidential election. Goldwater’s success in the “solid south” had arguably less to do with his ideological appeal than with a visceral appeal related to de-segregation, etc.

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_presidential_election

   The two coalitions that existed up through the 60s were less ideologically pure and could be called big tent coalitions. The southern wing of the Democratic party counterbalanced the more liberal constituency elsewhere and the northeastern, Rockefeller wing of the Republican party provided a liberal counterweight to the conservative elements in the rest of the country.

   The Democrats’ loss of the “solid south” contributed to Republican gains in the late 60s (Nixon’s election, but partly because Wallace deprived the Democrats of this crucial block), and their gains continued on through the 80s and 90s. It’s interesting to look at electoral maps for the south during the 80s, since they show the gradual nature of the realignment, and it also underscores the point that there were shifts in party identification that were — to a degree — incorrectly attributed to Reagan’s popularity.

   The problem within the Republican coalition lately is that there is a ratcheting up of extremism. Much of the appeal behind the Republican message, which is exemplified by issues such as anti-immigration, anti-government, etc., isn’t satiated by pleas for moderation. If anything, the dynamics are conducive to more extremism. I’d describe the situation as a combination of Overton’s window and the hedonic treadmill. The core of the Republican coalition needs politicians who will appease their increasingly ratcheted up demands in order to stay in equilibrium.

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

   Instead of looking at the situation as a zero-sum game, in which one party gains when the other loses, I see an increasingly fragile Republican coalition suffering from strain.

   In part, the hyperbolic rhetoric is the product of what emerges when the Republican coalition fractures and extremists are allowed to express their views without the moderating influence of a party establishment. A similar dynamic occurred in the 1850s when the Whig party (Republican predecessor) broke apart, leaving radical elements such as the No Nothings and Anti-Masons in the remains. And we’re seeing the same political pathologies which Hofstadter discussed in his The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Conspiracy theories were in vogue then, too, as the Jesuit conspiracy was the contemporary equivalent of Birthers’ beliefs today.

   http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/conspiracy_theory/the_paranoid_mentality/the_paranoid_style.html

   There’s an interesting parallel between comments in Hofstadter’s “paranoid style” and a diary post I wrote containing analysis by David Paul Kuhn almost exactly a year ago today. There are many insights into political psychology to be gained here.

   http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=68225069-3048-5C12-00FA02842EFBC1AA

   KUHN:

   Racial animus may have been part of the problem for Democrats. At least Democrats could feel good about themselves while losing elections. But it was one of Johnson’s own confidants, Harry McPherson, who later concluded that the problem with white male voters was far more complex — not confined to the South or racial politics.

   “Democratic primaries and conventions often rocked with the language of rebuke,” McPherson wrote in a 1972 memoir. “Very like, it has occurred to me, the language many wives use in speaking to their husbands, particularly toward the end of marriages. You never think of the children, or of my mother, or of me; only of yourself. Substitute the ignored disadvantaged, the homeless, people trapped downtown. The reaction among husbands, for whom read `white male voters,’ is what is normally provoked by attempts to burden people with a sense of guilt.”

   As portrayed by the new breed of liberalism, the white man held all the cards, and everyone else’s bad deal was his fault. The problem was that the bulk of white men did not feel like dealers or players. They felt like pieces on someone else’s table, and their livelihood, their family’s very stability, was in richer men’s hands, as well. Increasingly, as Reagan assumed the presidency, many white men, particularly those in industrial trades, found their lives marked by instability. This was true in the home, as cultural changes refashioned the role of women and the place of sex in popular culture. And it was especially true in the workplace, as many once-secure union jobs disappeared.

   HOFSTADTER:

   Why They Feel Dispossessed

       If, after our historically discontinuous examples of the paranoid style, we now take the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country–that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.

       Important changes may also be traced to the effects of the mass media. The villains of the modern right are much more vivid than those of their paranoid predecessors, much better known to the public; the literature of the paranoid style is by the same token richer and more circumstantial in personal description and personal invective. For the vaguely delineated villains of the anti-Masons, for the obscure and disguised Jesuit agents, the little-known papal delegates of the anti-Catholics, for the shadowy international bankers of the monetary conspiracies, we may now substitute eminent public figures like Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower., secretaries of State like Marshall, Acheson, and Dulles, Justices of the Supreme Court like Frankfurter and Warren, and the whole battery of lesser but still famous and vivid alleged conspirators headed by Alger Hiss.