I wish George Will would describe the mechanism or the causal chain of events that leads him to believe that the Conservative Movement may lose control of the Republican Party permanently if Donald Trump is their nominee.
You see, I might agree with him, but I really have no way of knowing unless he explains his reasoning.
I’ve mentioned many times that the GOP is like a vehicle that can carry any kind of passengers. The same is true of the Democratic Party. The cars can come to a stoplight and all the segregationists can exit one car and get in the other. There’s no reason for the Republican Party to be the home of conservatives if conservatives consistently lose presidential elections. In truth, though, as long as they do okay in down-ballot and state and local elections, the conservatives can probably retain control.
I see demographic doom for the Conservative Movement on the near horizon, and I think that moderates will get the funding soon to make a real show of taking back control of the steering wheel. I’m not convinced that Trump is or could be a catalyst for this, but I’m willing to listen to the argument.
Funding is not the issue. The moderates have their funding now – look at the huge sums jeb: got. That was, more or less, moderate money. It didn’t help jeb: one whit. The moderates’ problem is that don’t have anything like enough votes to control a major party. If either the evangelicals or the Tea Party exit the Republican party, it will cease to exist because it won’t be able to win elections, and as long as they’re in they so vastly outnumber the “moderates” that they will control the party.
I’m not entirely sure what the “moderates” will do but my prediction is that the majority will swallow their “moderation” and submit to their new masters on bigotry as long as they get their tax cuts, which the new masters are OK with for now. Wealth does bring privilege on most issues; the wealthy (most of the Republican “moderates”) will be able to have stable gay relationships, get abortions, etc., regardless of government policy, just as they always have. A smallish minority will exit the party and engage in a likely futile approach to restart the DNC. Webb’s flop gives a good idea how that’s likely to go.
Jeb money isn’t moderate money. You can argue that if you want, but it’s not what I mean. Jeb’s failure is more an indicator that the conservatives can no longer be given responsibility for running an American major party. Real moderates would probably emerge regionally at first and grow in strength over time as they did a better job of winning statewide and finally a national election.
These “real moderates” you speak of have to be as notional as unicorns. Can you point to any reports of such moderates being spotted in the wild? Where would they come from? How would they organize? Can you point to states where they hold influence in Party organizations?
It’s as moderate as any money in the Republican Party would be. Jeb was for immigration reform and has been fighting a sad retreating campaign against the vicious anti-Hispanic rhetoric. Anybody who think Jeb is way too conservative is not going to have any influence in Republican Party.
Honestly, I see the term “moderates” used in these discussions and I don’t know who you are referring to. Is it pro-choice or pro-gay rights Republicans? Pro-immigration Republics? Can you name a politician or two that fits the definition?
I think Will, when referring to Goldwater, is by inference referring to the need to reject Wilkie Republicans who embraced the New Deal. But honestly, those Republicans have left long ago.
Will is just being sloppy when he discusses “conservatives” because he can’t admit that after 50 years of skilled, dedicated, persistent organizing the Republican Party has been taken over by a far right-wing reactionary tendency that wants to ride war-mongering, Islamophobia, and racist demagogy to a successful electoral putsch. Spinning out flannel-mouthed blather like, “Conservatives’ highest priority now must be to prevent Trump from winning the Republican nomination in this, the GOP’s third epochal intraparty struggle in 104 years” is just a denial of the fact that his notional “conservatives” have lost their power and their credibility within what was once “their” organization. They can either cut their best deal with Trump or face up to who they are and what they and their party have become — and Will himself is not prepared to do that.
I don’t know where Booman is coming from with formulations like “moderates will get the funding soon to make a real show of taking back control of the steering wheel” though. The history of the GOP since 1964 shows pretty conclusively that the “moderates” would have a hard time organizing a sleepover for a bunch of third-grade kids, much less taking over the Republican Party. “Moderate” Republicans, like “moderate” Democrats, are about the most ineffective and spineless life forms on the planet.
I think one problem maybe conflating rich people with moderates, as if all rich people are.
i.e. The Kochs
The Hill
Like the car dealer that boasts of losing $200 on every car he sells with the plan to make it up on volume.
Money well spent. These are the people who don’t want to pay an extra penny in taxes.
Was evident from his campaign finance reports which I assume I’m not the only one that looked at them and recognized that he wasn’t building a campaign but coasting on a fundraising operation that was taking in a lot of money but could only keep it going by spending most of it on fundraising.
But this is all Doctor Carson knows; it is his whole world and a metaphor for the wastefulness of the self-fulfilling grift mill which is part of the Republican party’s problem. None of these people, from Ann Coulter to the SuperPAC executives, gives a brown fig for the long-term best interests of the GOP as long as the gravy train keeps on rolling.
Tea party, social justice, Facebook activism; it is all one long, beautiful con on the marks, as light-fingered and unethical as trimming them for over-valued gold and snake oil remedies. Which brings us right back to Carson again; a crossover con artist who thinks big.
The great hope of the establishment, Marco the Magnificent, deflates:
Shazam! He thought he was being so very clever with Cruz on immigration and now realises it was a terrible, irreversible and untimely trap. Postscript (h/t Political Wire):
That’s the Rubio I’ve been expecting and I’m guessing we’re all going to have had a snootful of him before long.
I’m still not sure why the establishment decided to put their hopes onto Rubio. Even if he somehow won the nomination, he’s a time-bomb waiting to go off. He has very unpopular opinions with abortion, gay marriage, and separation of church and state. He’s Mike Huckabee de-aged a couple of decades and cleaned up for the cameras. We just run a few commercials stating his promise to appoint justices to overturn gay marriage and there go the Millenials. We run a few more commercials stating his desire to ban any abortion that’s not for the life of the mother and there goes women.
That Marco Rubio isn’t being seen as Pat Robertson 2.0 and is instead the Great Hope of the Storied Establishment is probably the greatest indictment of their cluelessness and hopelessness.
There’s no amount of media fluffing that can turn him into anything but a high-risk strategy. These people could care less if they elected a dressmaker’s dummy as long as their sinecures are preserved. I’m guessing there is going to be a reckoning.
He’s their least bad option now that Bush has imploded. Doesn’t make him a good option, as you say, but he’s about all they have now.
“He has very unpopular opinions with abortion, gay marriage, and separation of church and state.”
Unpopular with lefties, very popular with righties. Besides, who in the clown car doesn’t share those opinions?
In 1983 I was called to DC to participate in a planning session for students for Hart ahead of the Young Democrats convention.
The Hart HQ was in a shack southeast of the capital – but they were kind of proud of it – because it was dirt cheap. Mondale and Glenn’s HQ were in much more expensive real estate in NW DC. I went to the Mondale HQ – full of nice offices and conference rooms.
It is an enduring lesson of primary campaigns – and the mistake is repeated over and over. Large fund raising begets expensive staff and consultants, and when the shits hit the fan the campaigns are often broke. When Mondale lost NH he was essentially broke. The same thing has happened to more campaigns I can count – see Dean in ’04 for example. In fact, I was always amazed that Joe Trippi, who saw Mondale go broke did the same damn thing with Dean.
An interesting personal anecdotal story. Although, iirc, Dean’s campaign operation was lean and thrifty. It’s my understanding that it was Trippi’s lavish spending on ineffective Iowa media buys that was at the crux of Dean’s financial problem. Dean in ’04 and Clinton in ’08 made a similar strategic error; focused on the wrong competitor.
He’s going to have to acknowledge that ‘the conservative movement’ is what’s birthed Trumpism, that his life’s work has consummated not in his idyllic dreams of neo-plantation life where the proles are ruled by their betters, but by a charismatic thug leading a mob of howling madmen.
Madmen with guns.
Mad men who see nothing whatsoever wrong in saying ‘it’s time for people to clean society of scumbags’
His is the common fear of the GOP Establishment, who are beginning to sense that once the howling mob may not be sated with the blood of the Other, and will turn on them as well.
“Demographic Doom” for the conservative movement may well be on the near horizon, but there’s a very dangerous road between here and there.
“The howling mob may not be sated with the blood of the Other, and will turn on them as well.” They have manifested, indeed nurtured, exactly their worst fear. All within the surrealistic hall of mirrors that passes for the Republican party.
As long as they don’t get in the way and don’t harbor cultural enemies, the fascists always turn on the old aristocracy last. And the process usually takes years, if not decades, to get to that point.
I’m sure that a lot of these soi disant social dominators feel that they could survive the opening rounds of purges of the impure and then prepare to cash out right before the Black Shirts storm their estates. Then again, most of these people didn’t predict the 2007 financial crisis, so a lot of Adelsons and Kochs and especially Romneys are going to be very surprised when they and their families get fit cement shoes. But we won’t be around to enjoy their black karma.
Morbidity aside, the point is that we can’t rely on the mere aristocrats to be of any help in stopping the neoconfederates/fascists. If for some reason Trump wins the general election they’ll be all ‘oh, okay. That worked better than they thought.’ and believe that they’re out of the woods.
This ain’t the Weimar Republic, not yet. In spite of their aggrieved sense of entitlement most of these armchair Brown-shirts are way more comfortable than the unemployed ex-servicemen and blue-collar workers that formed the ranks of any cohort fighting for the streets of Berlin. As you say these things sometimes take years. It’s the McVeighs they should worry about; we all should.
The “turn on them” seemed more electoral, in practice, than physical. Frum’s piece below is strained and manipulative, but his exposition, while tangled, is original and uncharacteristically exposes some truths and, in spite of his title, accurately identifies the Trump phenomenon as mutiny. That’s exactly what it is and it puts their party in enormous peril. But how’s this from a wannabe Republican thought leader on Tea Party ‘ideology’:
Sounds like good ol’fashioned bigotry to me. These are the same bunch that defenestrated Cantor, sent Cruz on a juggernaut of congressional mayhem and toppled Boehner. And now they are marching Trump to the convention with a parade of jubilant torches. “Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater got into an argument and George Wallace won”. The Southern Strategy eats its parents.
The fascists might turn on the aristocrats last, but this crowd could turn on them early. Trump got some milage with a call to “tax the rich” even if his plan actually gives them a monstrous tax cut. This wing of the Republican Party also HATES the banks.
Some populist running to break up the banks and prosecute/tax from the 0.1% could get a lot of traction with these people. Sanders is even getting some support from them. Somebody who doesn’t call himself a socialist and can thump the Bible and dogwhistle against minorities would be wildly popular.
Trump is a populist on the dark side. Bernie is a populist on the bright side. I say those two sides have more in common than they have differences; something Bernie has been trying to tell us all along. Bernie can get the votes of the ones not too deep in the dark side. This is why Bernie beats Trump by a wide margin while Hillary is at the edge of losing that contest.
I think for the dark side hate will override everything. I know what they hate most of all; Hillary.
They aren’t conservatives, they’re radicals and they have had a risky, irrational string of policy initiatives that are all based on magical thinking and have all failed; supply-side economics, non-conservative geopolitics, austerity.
Secondly, there is no mechanism for correction, just a growing industry of well paid apologists and obfuscators whom have no ambition but to ‘win the day’ and smokescreen what has been a series of abysmal failures.
I’m with Charles Pierce, in his answer to David Frum’s ‘lengthy weeper’ in the Atlantic [emphasis added]:
They are radicals and nihilists and the verdict of history will be harsh on those who misrepresent them. Personally I consider the whole selfish Republican party and all their enabling minions to have been engaged in borderline sedition since the late Seventies. The sooner it is crushed utterly and all the bigots shamed back into their trailer parks the better. In the meantime we had better get our own house in order and prepare blankets and hot cocoa for the survivors.
By the time the dust settles we may be lucky to count ourselves among the survivors…
Except the flexibility of authentic liberal minds will have an advantage over inflexible, rigid minds. The latter struggles with the reality of change and therefore, can’t innovate, only repeat and double-down on what they have been told is supposed to work regardless of evidence that it no longer works.
I can’t buy this because I count among my acquaintances a disappointingly large number of Democratic Party activists who would vehemently advance a claim to having the most authentic of liberal minds — yet are determined to believe that running the same liberal campaigns, in the same liberal ways, is the key to success “this time”. All evidence to the contrary be damned.
What if it’s the liberalism itself that isn’t working? How does a “liberal mind” step outside its liberal frame of reference and develop a critique of liberalism?
But, all meta BS aside — if it comes down to a bunch of inflexible rigid minds armed with assault rifles against a bunch of authentic liberal minds, I’ll bet on inflexible and rigid every time…
Whatever makes you assume that Democrats possess “authentic liberal minds?”
You may have been speaking of a mid-point in a disaster/survival scenario and I went further down that path when weapons are of less use to their survival. When the bellies of their armies are too empty for them to crawl and shoot.
Only their earnest assertions, and the fact that they go into a defensive crouch whenever liberalism or its limitations is questioned.
Marie is harking back to the Enlightenment when a few people with irresistible ideas turned Europe on its head.
I’m an American not a European.
Lincoln wasn’t an abolitionist and FDR wasn’t a socialist. But they did have liberal minds.
I wasn’t speaking of political orientation so much when I used the term “authentic liberal mind.” Even though it’s true that those with more flexible thinking skills tend to self-identify as political liberals.
Take out the word “liberalism” and substitute any political orthodoxy and explain how that statement doesn’t apply to all of them?
A liberal mind easily grasps the future and what should be but isn’t. Less liberal slowly accepts change as it begins to seem inevitable and manages to accommodate to it. Conservative accepts it when it’s clear that she/he is the minority. Conservative-conservative never accepts it.
We had a real live experiment in this wrt same sex marriage. The liberal mind — “never thought of that, but now that you mention it, why not? It’s only fair and right.” Less liberal — “that might be going too far. Makes me uncomfortable, but I’m not homophobic. We need to think about this for a long time before doing anything rash.” Conservative — “marriage is a sacred bond between a man and a woman. But I’m not a homophobe.” conservative-conservative — see NOM.
I might take that bet; I can eventually outwit my border collie in most matters most of the time and she’s pretty smart.
A Wyoming man is recovering in the hospital after his dog accidentally shot him.
I dunno. Some of these dogs are getting pretty carried away…
But, but…Hillery Clinton something something…..
.
Has been reduced to apoplexy over Trump’s bromance with Putin. It is a cri de coeur and a call to armchairs. Trump should probably hire a food-taster for catered events.
George Will is cursed by the same blindness that other insiders in his party face — the inability to wrap their minds around the fact that Donald Trump is their party’s ID. They’ve played the base for all it’s worth for so long, they can’t get that they can no longer control the monster of their own making. It began, in modern times, with Pat Buchanan’s Southern Strategy. George Will supported it as long as it worked. He came across as a moderate when he advocated moderation for fear of going too far, such as when Reagan was president and he said we can’t cut funds for babies with spina bifida. But that wasn’t because of some strongly held moral sense that we should support such children; it was only for fear of going beyond what the country would support.
Fast forward 35 years and the party is no longer willing to accept the wisdom of people like George Will. That’s his beef. Donald Trump is the outward manifestation of this reality, which is why he thinks Trump will the end of his party as he knows it. This is true. He’s wrong only in thinking it hasn’t already happened. The natives are not getting back in line to support a Bush or a Rubio. If the party tries to steal the nomination from a guy like Cruz or Trump, we’ll see a fracture and that will be the end of the Republican party as its been since circa 1980 (though progressively more so dating to at least 1964). We’re watching a political realignment in slow motion and George Will doesn’t like it.