I actually think J-Rube’s column today is thoughtful. I have been having many of the same thoughts. She begins by making a statement of fact:
Thirty years after Ronald Reagan was president, Republicans are still running on a tripartite alliance of social, fiscal and foreign policy conservatives. Alas, such candidates run on a myth; that coalition has splintered and what will replace it is far from clear.
She then runs through various scenarios involving different alliances before returning to her original point.
The only certainty is that the candidate who comes forward as a cookie-cutter “three-legged-stool” (strong defense, economic conservative, social traditionalist) conservative is going to wind up pleasing no one and running into the same limitations that Mitt Romney did: There are not enough of those voters who follow those prescriptions to win the White House.
I disagree that such a candidate would please “no one.” They would likely please more than 45% of the voters, just as Romney and McCain did in their campaigns. The problem is that they’d be unlikely to win 50% of the voters or to put together a winning Electoral College map.
That means that the 2016 candidates must go in search of new coalitions. Rubin understands this.
I believe it will sort itself out in the primary itself, which becomes more akin to constructing a parliamentary majority (alliances, concessions, truces, compromises of convenience).
What’s actually happened here is that the Republicans have discovered that the strategy they used successfully in 2004 will no longer work. John McCain had a variety of options in 2008 but chose to tack to the right to shore up an unenthusiastic base. Romney repeated the same flawed strategy.
One way to think about this is to look at the three legs of the stool. In Rubin’s formulation, one leg is based on a strong national defense, one leg is based on economic conservatism, and one leg is based on social conservatism. All three legs have been hollowed out by termites. On defense, it’s not just that the Bush administration destroyed the party’s advantage by invading Iraq; they split the conservative movement which now has a powerful new isolationist strain represented most recently by Rand Paul’s 13-hour filibuster focusing on the drone program. That Paul’s filibuster was about more than just some theoretical domestic drone program became clear when Lindsey Graham and John McCain denounced it on the Senate floor. A seam has opened up on the right regarding our role in the world, and the neo-conservatives are feeling isolated.
The strains are showing on the economic front, too, as Tea Party absolutists are forcing a policy on the Republican leadership that they don’t actually support. John Boehner doesn’t want the sequester. He doesn’t want to toy with the debt ceiling. But he doesn’t have a choice. His own party will not allow him to cut a deal and he has given up negotiating with the president because he cannot deliver a deal. This isn’t just dysfunction. This is unacceptable to the business community, from the national Chamber of Commerce, to Wall Street, to countless people who do business with the government, including the entire defense industry. The economy collapsed on Bush’s watch, which is bad enough for the GOP, but the current iteration of the Republican Party is doing everything in it’s power to weaken today’s economy. And business leaders know this.
If mismanaging our foreign policy and our economy were unforced errors, the problem with the third leg, social conservatism, is largely a demographic problem over which the Republicans have little control. There are at least three problems that conservatives have on the social front. The first is related to sexual morality, and it includes attitudes about homosexuality, abortion, contraception, marriage, and women’s role in the workplace. The Republicans have adopted a minority position on all these issues, and among the younger generations, the GOP’s positions are starkly out of the mainstream.
The second problem is really a racial issue that traces back to the adoption of the Southern Strategy by Richard Nixon and the realignment of the Republican Party as a Southern party that appeals to the white working class’s sense of grievance and resentment. With the election of a black president, a lot of this grievance and resentment that had been subterranean or dormant suddenly came to the surface and did severe damage to the Republicans’ image with not only blacks but Latinos, Asian-Americans, and even Native-Americans. All the talk about the president’s birth certificate really polarized the country, and not to the advantage of the Republicans.
The third problem is basically religious, but only as it pertains to a fundamentalist view that discounts science and higher education. This attitude was best expressed by Rick Santorum in the primaries when he said, “We will never have the media on our side, ever, in this country. We will never have the elite, smart people on our side.” Santorum also called the president a “snob” for wanting people to get a college education. This attitude has thoroughly alienated the academic and scientific communities, but also a huge segment of the professional class. And it’s severe enough that it manifests itself in things like climate change-denialism becoming an orthodox position in the Republican Party.
So, it’s not just that the three traditional legs of the Republican Party are now insufficient. It’s not just that the three legs are no longer working in harmony. The legs themselves are rotted out.
If the Republican Party is going to give up on gay-bashing, embrace immigration reform, and accept pro-choice candidates, then their army of bigots and fundamentalists will stay home. That’s the prospect that McCain faced when he chose Palin over Lieberman, and the choice Romney faced when he decided to recommend an immigration policy focused on self-deportation.
The GOP establishment is trying to figure out a way forward but all signs point to more of the same. Almost all Republican lawmakers are currently more concerned about a primary from the right than a defeat in a general election against a Democrat. Nothing in recent Republican primaries would indicate that a candidate can win by tacking to the center.
Probably the best way for the Republicans to proceed is to open up all their primaries to independents so that their mouth-breathing base doesn’t continue to terrify anyone considering moderation on any issue.
The Republicans are very unified in their opposition to the president, but it’s a surface unity that will not hold. The party of Reagan is spinning apart.
The religious part of social conservatism relates in part to education, which goes back to the religious schools being the refuge of those who wished to preserve segregation.
A second anti-intellectual strand is involved in the defenders of “Western civilization” against multi-culturalism and modernism. You saw this bunch in the academic attacks on supposed “political correctness” in the 1980s. The bought-out intellectual hacks want the freedom to peddle their snake oil.
William Kristol knows that the defense leg is rotted out.
Kinda funny since Kristol was the one who rotted it out
Regarding the 2003 Iraq invasion, a major contributor to the rot in the defense leg of J-Rube’s stool, today is the 10th aniversary of the invasion. I write emails; here’s my submission today to NPR’s Talk Of The Nation radio program:
Today’s TOTN host allowed a major misrepesentation of the facts in regards to the runup to our nation’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. Your host allowed Fred Kagan to claim that Saddam Hussain had kicked out the UN weapon inspectors just before the invasion. In fact, the US Congress’ granting of war authority to the President if a true threat from Iraq remained and the US’s gathering of a coalition of nations willing to support military intervention if Iraq did not provide more proof that it had fully complied with UN resolutions became successful in reestablishing weapons inspections under UN authority at the end of 2002.
On March 7, 2003, UN inspections leader Hans Blix reported accelerated cooperation throughout the month of February. Blix informed the UN security council that “it will not take years, nor weeks, but months” to verify whether Iraq had complied with its disarmament obligations under UN resolutions. These inspectors were told to leave Iraq by the US government, not Hussain, before the Coalition forces attacked Iraq on March 19, 2013.
It is also very disturbing that the TOTN producer asked Fred Kagan to come on air to comment on this issue. If Kagan needed to be invited, reportage attempting to inform the public would demand that TOTN’s host be prepared to bring up the Kagan family’s long-time advocacy of war on Iraq. In 1997 and 1998, Robert and Donald Kagan signed onto rather notorious documents published by the Project For A New American Century. More than a half-dozen signatories to these calls for preemptive wars in Iraq and explicit projections of military power throughout the world ended up in powerful positions in the Bush Administration; these signatories included Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. Fred Kagan was supportive of these advocacies and others which expressed similar desires.
The first paragraph here describes your program’s willingness to amplify a direct and specific propagandistic lie; the second paragraph describes an omission of vital factual context which takes us away from the facts. The first hurts our search for truth slightly more than the second, but both paragraphs describe despicable journalistic conduct, so despicable that it gives off the smell of NPR’s acquiescence to wealthy and powerful underwriters. I am accustomed to expecting more from TOTN; I am growing to view those higher expectations as a quaint relic of a past time.
You’re losing me as a listener with behavior like this. Much more importantly, behavior like this shows TOTN and NPR as active and willing destroyers of the public’s understanding of extraordinarily important issues. I suspect that is not what you wish to claim as your mission. So, why don’t you stop it? Lies become facts when journalists do not correct the record.
I found yesterday’s coverage of the Iraq Invasion to be entirely nauseating, sanitized, dishonest, biased, and full of shit. I could not listen to the radio without yelling at it and restraining myself from throwing things.
I have not felt THAT angry in quite some time, but the 10th anniversary is bringing back so much: the ignored marches; the active complicity of the NYT and WaPo; the lying liars; Colin Powell’s vial of goo; that fucking drugged-out chimpanzee telling us we’re going in as the bombs started falling, making his little fist-pump pre-speech; the smearing of the UN inpsectors and anyone else who told the truth; and everything else that was so fucking predictable even an idiot like me could see it.
I’m still angry about it.
Yep, W rotted it out by considering it the only element of national power. We were the world’s sole remaining superpower until W’s wars showed the limits of US power by drastically overextending it on missions guaranteed to fail (as they had in Vietnam).
Both McCain and Romney were, in Republican terms, from the moderate centre of the party. They couldn’t “tack to the centre” or choose a centrist VP nominee because their base (and their funders) would have failed to turn out for them if they did. Someone like Reagan, coming from the right wing of the party, could tack to the centre without incurring the same problem. The problem now, however, is that even Reagan would be regarded as a compromising centrist in terms of today’s GOP ideological spectrum.
So the question becomes: why has today’s GOP become so right wing? Is it:
The problem for the GOP is that just as it has been moving to the right, the majority have become more diverse, more tolerant of sexual diversity, and much less enamoured of the military and financial elites which gave you Iraq and the financial meltdown.
In fact, Obama is probably the one factor which keeps the GOP united in hatred because he so perfectly encapsulates all that they hate. With him out of the picture in 2016, it’s difficult to see where the GOP can go except into oblivion for another generation – unless the Dems manage to seriously screw things up – always a distinct possibility.
But this also means that Clinton or Biden aren’t a shoe-in for 2016. The majority of Dems may have moved to the left of them by then.
“Someone like Reagan, coming from the right wing of the party, could tack to the centre without incurring the same problem.”
Plenty of people from the right wing of the party lost to Romney in the primary, though. I can’t really understand why. My first instinct is to say ‘because there were so many of them, splitting that vote,’ but I suspect that begs the question.
And all of them – Sarah Palin, then Michelle Bachmann, then Rick Perry, then Herman Cain then Newt Gingrich and finally Rick Santorum all led in the polls at one stage – only to be undone by their utter cluelessness. Romney was literally he last man standing after all the others had politically self-deported. Indeed there seemed to be no limit to how ridiculous you could be and still lead the GOP polls such was the GOP desperation for a really right wing candidate.
Yeah, but as you say, it happened every single time. Which makes me suspect it’s an intrinsic feature of ‘coming from the right wing of the party’ that you’re willing to say things that exhibit utter cluelessness.
That’s what got them to where they were in position to run for the nomination. The skills it takes to win in GOP districts is partially antithetical to what it takes to win a country that can’t be gerrymandered (though Scumbag Scalia is trying).
Another problem they have is that – while everything the original post says is true – they’re constantly in denial about ALL OF IT. Their assertions and articles of faith change daily, so now you’re hearing “Reagan never raised taxes” and “Bush kept us safe.”
Anyone who isn’t already committed to believing the daily truth, if they’re paying attention, will notice that they’re sitting there spouting bullshit. The example of Romney insisting Jeep was sending jobs to China even after the company showed otherwise was a rare one that was too obvious even for the media to ignore.
The alliance between fundie know-nothings and Wall Street utilitarian modernists has been a mystery anomaly waiting to break for decades. It had to happen sometime, but the apparent speed of the dissolution comes as a shock. I’m still not confident that they won’t manage to patch it together somehow — money is a great glue.
Downside of this event is the further infiltration into the Democratic Party by the “financial industry” thieves, who have nowhere else to go. With their help the Dems will become more Republican, less lite, than it is now. I think this is the outcome that the left of the party has to prepare to mitigate.
Or prepare to form another party. If the democrats shift a little to the right and that becomes the right wing party in this country it will be a vast improvement.
The problem is in creating a new party without cannibalizing existing party infrastructure. I don’t know how to do so without it, though it’s possible technical organizing tools have made this easier.
Maybe the Democratic majority will be so huge in 8 or 12 years that the party will break up, like the Liberals in 19th-century England, and half of it will be openly social-democratic. I don’t think the bankster-Democrats can succeed in taking over the party, because Democratic voters mostly don’t like them much. I think they must ultimately join Republicans in a more normal kind of conservatism.
Booman’s analysis is spot on, but the GOP strategists know that. Their only hope is to fuck up the country so badly that it will surrender to a strong leader promising salvation- shock therapy.
So, the GOP won’t change anytime soon, except maybe in turning the up-fucking up to eleventy. They will either kill the GOP or succeed in creating a Neo-Fascist dystopia.
Thoughtful? I lost it at, “So what does the GOP do to remain a national party based on a core belief in liberty?”