Insanely out of balance, the Republicans are all set to fail

[SpartanDem]

The conservatives who now dominate the party of the American right may come to rue losing their moderate wing

Michael Tomasky in Washington The Guardian, Monday 9 March 2009

...
Limbaugh is a dominant figure because the Grand Old Party is no longer a political party in the usual American sense. It is an ideological faction. In America, as you know, we've had basically a two-party system for most of our history. In parliamentary systems, small ideologically driven groups tend to form political parties, win a few seats, and make coalitions with larger parties.

In America, it doesn't work like that. Our small ideologically driven groups have chiefly located themselves within the two big parties and fought for power internally. For instance, the Democratic party has, since Franklin Roosevelt's time, been an amalgam of clashing interests. Notably, FDR's Democratic party included northern liberals and southern racists (many of whom were liberal on economic and redistributionist questions as long as the redistributing was limited to white people). By the early 1960s, though, the tension became too great and the Democrats made choices - good and courageous choices - that forced the racists to leave.

Meanwhile, from the mid-1950s, a conservative rump group decided to "burrow from within" and work inside the Republican party to take it over. The GOP of the 1950s, led by Dwight Eisenhower, was quite middle of the road by today's standards, and conservatives held Ike in contempt.


Well, to make a really long story really short, they succeeded. A cohort of moderates remained within the GOP through the early 1990s. Today? There are 41 Republicans in the Senate and 178 in the House of Representatives. Perhaps four of the former and 10 or 12 of the latter can be called moderate. The rest are committed conservatives.

This is insanely out of balance for an American political party. You look at the Democrats, and they aren't uniformly liberal in the way the Republicans are uniformly conservative. Of the 58 Democratic senators, nearly 20 are genuinely moderate. This exasperates liberals and will get under President Obama's skin. But historically speaking, it is as it should be. American political parties are supposed to be big and diverse

Any sane person can grasp, then, that Steele should revive a moderate wing. But the conservatives will not permit it. Co-operation with the president is capitulation, and any vote or utterance that admits even the most modest role for government is socialism.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/09/republican-conservatives-balance

[yourout]

1. Right on the money.

[Skittles]

2. the repuke party is now a bunch of goose-steppers

'nuff said

[Joe Fields]

3. the guardian is being too kind.

but then again, I suppose that greed, selfishness, bigotry, classicism and blind loyalty to their leadership might constitute an ideology.

[opihimoimoi]

4. Extreme Right = Negative Mode = deception, denigration, Bully

[leftofthedial]

5. 58 Democratic Senators:

20 genuinely conservative

35 or so genuinely moderate


dead on about the repukes though.

They would be fringe right in any country in world history.

[SpartanDem]

6. What makes it all the the funnier

is they are too stupid to see the writing on the wall that a party at its base that is composed of aging white bigots is not a recipe for future success.

Honestly though it may be too late even now with the far right so deeply entrenched any party head who would suggest moderating their positions would be promptly disposed of by them. I would like to see the remaining moderates break away and start a new moderate right party. With an independent source of money they wouldn't be beholden to hardliner party leadership and would be even more inclined to vote with us. With the far right frozen out the Democrats could shift even more to the left.

[bridgit]

7. Correct, they're insanely stoopit, pissy & mean spirited too

[Jim Lane]

8. A very insightful analysis of the Republican Party, but I disagree on one point

Tomasky states that the effort to revive a moderate wing of the Republican Party is doomed to fail, because the conservatives won't permit it. I don't think it's that clear-cut. Neither Rush Limbaugh nor Michael Steele can dictate the outcome of every primary. Just as the DLC organized Democrats who wanted to pull their party closer to the center, and just as the DLC scored some successes in that project, so the Republican centrists are not to be counted out. In fact, they've banded together as the RLC (), calling for both low taxes and environmental protection.

Referring to political change as a pendulum has become a cliche, but that's because it's so often true. Democratic control of the federal government will give Republicans more targets to shoot at. Republicans will increasingly be able to exploit a nonideological "Throw the rascals out" theme. There'll be a niche in some states for candidates who say, "I'm not like those crazy anti-gay abolish-the-income-tax right-wing Republicans, but neither am I backing the huge overspending of the liberal Obama." Some of the candidates in that niche will be DLC Democrats, but some will be RLC Republicans.

Of course, I'd be delighted if Tomasky were right. I just fear that it's overly optimistic to count on all Republican candidates for the next twenty years being Rushbots.

[Raine]

9. and they are so delusional they don't see it

they are being lead into oblivion. :silly:

[blue neen]

10. It's going to be very interesting here in PA if Toomey decides to challenge Specter.

Pat Toomey is a TOTAL right-wing nut job.

You can only vote your party registration here in PA, so if the conservatives are pissed enough at Specter, they'll be out in force. They're all furious because Specter voted for the stimulus package.

[burythehatchet]

11. One should remember that the current crop of fascist Repuke goose-steppers

are the direct result of implementing the immoral minority programs of the 80's. They planted their candidates in lower level political positions with the plan of having them take over the party and the government and turn it into a theocracy. FAIL.

[Laelth]

12. David Michael Green makes a similar argument.

He does so in this essay:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/11/24">What to Do When Your Party Sucks

:dem:

-Laelth

[starroute]

13. It was the Southern strategy that set up the GOP's current plight

The GOP conservatives in the 1950's weren't exactly a "rump group" or "burrowing from within." There had always been a strong faction within the Republican Party that was deeply resentful of the East Coast/Wall Street establishment. In the late 40's and 1950's, it was identified with Robert Taft and was rooted among conservative Midwestern manufacturers. In the early 60's, the West Coast Birch Society types and Goldwaterites became more influential, and that was the background that movement conservatism came out of in the late 60's.

There was a rough balance those two factions within the Republican Party for a considerable period -- but it broke down when Nixon started trying to woo disaffected Southern Democrats.. The movement conservatives jumped on the bandwagon and by the early 70's they were making common cause with the Wallacites and the Birchers, even though they often privately mocked them as ignorant yahoos. The domination of the Republican Party by the Reaganites came out of that alliance by the end of the decade, as did the close coordination between the movement conservatives and the religious right.

The movement conservatives never did warm to George H.W. Bush, who they saw as a figure of the East Coast establishment, but they threw their full support behind George W. Bush in 1999 when Grover Norquist told them he was the candidate of their dreams. And that same mixture of anti-government ideologues and the religious right is the group that has control of the Republican Party today.

Along the way, what used to be called Rockefeller Republicans have been squeezed out -- in part, I think, because more educated and suburban voters who had rejected the Democratic Party as long as it was identified with Southern racists and big-city political machines are now rejecting the Republicans out of the same kind of distaste.

There's an element of snobbism there, perhaps, but I suspect it has to do more with the inclinations of a group that votes on issues rather than on the basis of tribalism. There's a definite class division at work -- but it isn't the upper class/middle class economic division that most of us are sensitive to. Instead, it's a cultural class division -- educated vs. low information, urban vs. rural, cosmopolitan vs. parochial, secular vs. religious.

That division is the one that's uppermost in the minds of people who love Sarah Palin. They know perfectly well that they're being squeezed out of the mainstream of society and they're very resentful about it. Of course, it's history that's squeezing them out, not any kind of elite conspiracy -- our society is becoming better educated, more tolerant, and more global-minded simply because the planet is becoming complexly interdependent in ways that require that sort of mindset. But the people who are on the losing end of the shift are never going to be able to see it that way, precisely because the vantage point from which they're observing makes it impossible.

What's likely to happen, though, is that the GOP will be increasingly defined by litmus tests. If you're not ideologically or tribally identifiable as "one of them," you'll be demonized and excluded. And though it might be possible for an "RLC" to successfully field moderate Republican candidates in certain areas, as long as the intolerant minority has control of the national GOP message machine and fund-raising mechanisms, they're not going to get very far.

A massive infusion of corporate cash is one thing I could see recapturing the Republican Party from the ideologues and the tribalists -- but given how discredited the corporations themselves are at the moment, I can't see that translating into broad-based popular appeal either.

The libertarians are the other independent force on the right at the moment -- and given Ron Paul's wide appeal, they might have more of a future than either would-be GOP moderates or corporate fronts. The movement conservatives pretty much blackballed the libertarians back in the late 60's, because they saw them as a bunch of long-haired, pot-smoking hippies -- and though there was a certain degree of reconciliation in the 80's and 90's, when the GOP was at it's peak of success and hoping to become a majority party, that's now fallen apart again.

Not that the libertarians are going to have much interest in pulling the movement conservatives out of the quicksand they've gotten themselves into, either -- but they might be effective as an insurgent movement to take over a crippled GOP.