Don't you hard-right Liti-Cons realize you are undermining the Republican Party?

[KingOrfeo]

Even in minority status, the Republican Party could play a useful civic role as a party-in-loyal-opposition, providing constructive criticism of Democratic policies without the kind of cynical obstructionism they showed in the Clinton years. It is a role they have played in the past, when the party was led by moderates such as the Rockefeller Republicans -- and even, by modern standards, Nixon -- before the ideological conservative movement took it over in a process starting with the 1964 Goldwater campaign and culminating with Reagan's triumph in 1980. The Pubs could play such a role again.

But that's not the way the party is tending. In the ongoing flap between Rush Limbaugh and David Frum, discussed in this thread, Frum is offering rational, measured alternatives to Limbaugh's "aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic" approach (which is still rational compared to what I read here every day from busybody, vetteman, off2bed, etc.).

Look at America's public-policy problems, look at voting trends, and it's inescapably obvious that the Republican Party needs to evolve. We need to put free-market health-care reform, not tax cuts, at the core of our economic message. It's health-care costs that are crushing middle-class incomes. Between 2000 and 2006, the amount that employers paid for labor rose substantially. Employees got none of that money; all of it was absorbed by rising health-care costs. Meanwhile, the income-tax cuts offered by Republicans interest fewer and fewer people: before the recession, two thirds of American workers paid more in payroll taxes than in income taxes.

We need to modulate our social conservatism (not jettison—modulate). The GOP will remain a predominantly conservative party and a predominantly pro-life party. But especially on gay-rights issues, the under-30 generation has arrived at a new consensus. Our party seems to be running to govern a country that no longer exists. The rule that both our presidential and vice presidential candidates must always be pro-life has become counterproductive: McCain's only hope of winning the presidency in 2008 was to carry Pennsylvania, and yet Pennsylvania's most successful Republican vote winner, former governor Tom Ridge, was barred from the ticket because he's pro-choice.

We need an environmental message. You don't have to accept Al Gore's predictions of imminent gloom to accept that it cannot be healthy to pump gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We are rightly mistrustful of liberal environmentalist disrespect for property rights. But property owners also care about property values, about conservation, and as a party of property owners we should be taking those values more seriously.

Above all, we need to take governing seriously again. Voters have long associated Democrats with corrupt urban machines, Republicans with personal integrity and fiscal responsibility. Even ultraliberal states like Massachusetts would elect Republican governors like Frank Sargent, Leverett Saltonstall, William Weld and Mitt Romney precisely to keep an austere eye on the depredations of Democratic legislators. After Iraq, Katrina and Harriet Miers, Democrats surged to a five-to-three advantage on the competence and ethics questions. And that was before we put Sarah Palin on our national ticket.

Well, what's wrong, from a conservative POV, with any of that? Yet this fixation on common sense is about to get Frum read out of the conservative movement, or so say the Freepers. American hard-righters, or at least those on FR and on the Lit GB -- and Rush's dittohead audience -- appear to have a lot in common with Communists, in being so firmly and deeply convinced of the rightness of their positions that they are oblivious or self-deceived as to how far those views are minority views in America today. Frum is not so deceived:

Even before the November 2008 defeat—even before the financial crisis and the congressional elections of November 2006—it was already apparent that the Republican Party and the conservative movement were in deep trouble. And not just because of Iraq, either (although Iraq obviously did not help).

At the peak of the Bush boom in 2007, the typical American worker was earning barely more after inflation than the typical American worker had earned in 2000. Out of those flat earnings, that worker was paying more for food, energy and out-of-pocket costs of health care. Political parties that do not deliver economic improvement for the typical person do not get reelected. We Republicans and conservatives were not delivering. The reasons for our failure are complex and controversial, but the consequences are not.

We lost the presidency in 2008. In 2006 and 2008, together, we lost 51 seats in the House and 14 in the Senate. Even in 2004, President Bush won reelection by the narrowest margin of any reelected president in American history.

The trends below those vote totals were even more alarming. Republicans have never done well among the poor and the nonwhite—and as the country's Hispanic population grows, so, too, do those groups. More ominously, Republicans are losing their appeal to voters with whom they've historically done well.

In 1988 George H.W. Bush beat Michael Dukakis among college graduates by 25 points. Nothing unusual there: Republicans have owned the college-graduate vote. But in 1992 Ross Perot led an exodus of the college-educated out of the GOP, and they never fully returned. In 2008 Obama beat John McCain among college graduates by 8 points, the first Democratic win among B.A. holders since exit polling began.

Political strategists used to talk about a GOP "lock" on the presidency because of the Republican hold on the big Sun Belt states: California, Texas, Florida. Republicans won California in every presidential election from 1952 through 1988 (except the Goldwater disaster of 1964). Democrats have won California in the five consecutive presidential elections since 1988.

In 1984 Reagan won young voters by 20 points; the elder Bush won voters under 30 again in 1988. Since that year, the Democrats have won the under-30 vote in five consecutive presidential elections. Voters who turned 20 between 2000 and 2005 are the most lopsidedly Democratic age cohort in the electorate. If they eat right, exercise and wear seat belts, they will be voting against George W. Bush well into the 2060s.

Between 2004 and 2008, Democrats more than doubled their party-identification advantage in Pennsylvania. A survey of party switchers in the state found that a majority of the reaffiliating voters had belonged to the GOP for 20 years or more. They were educated and affluent. More than half of those who left stated that the GOP had become too extreme.

If the Republican Party goes Frum's way it has at least a chance of regaining relevance and playing a valuable role in American government. If it goes Limbaugh's way, the CPAC way, which appears more and more likely, it will only continue to decline while becoming ever more shrill and strident and useless and annoying. Hard-right Pubs will defeat moderates in the primaries and get creamed in the general election, over and over and over. As a liberal I guess I should be glad to see the GOP working so hard to remain irrelevant, but it's still a sad thing to watch. I believe a vibrant two-party system is inherently better than a de facto one-party system (and a multi-party system is better still, but that's another discussion).

You, RW Litsters, are not helping that situation one little bit by demonizing Democrats and liberals and even moderates. You are not helping it by repeatedly screaming that Obama is a socialist, or that he was not really born in the U.S., or that he bears comparison with Hitler or Stalin, or that he might be the Antichrist, or that any compromise or cooperation or accommodation with the Dems makes a Republican a RINO who should be driven out of office.

 

[Saint Peter]

Good luck with that.

 

[off2bed]

You still don't get that Conservative and Republican are not synonyms. I personally don't give a shit if the GOP lives or dies, the way they've devolved over the last twenty years. I say the sooner it's Kevorkianed the better, and let's have a real Conservative Party out there.

 

[Sean]

You still don't get that Conservative and Republican are not synonyms. I personally don't give a shit if the GOP lives or dies, the way they've devolved over the last twenty years. I say the sooner it's Kevorkianed the better, and let's have a real Conservative Party out there.

LMAO. Piece today by Michael Tomasky:

Michael Steele, the new chairman of the Republican party, is surely setting some sort of land speed record for public-relations disaster. Elected on 30 January, he barely lasted a month before the first calls came for his resignation. The month in question included various oddities on his part, most notably his disastrous attempt to show he was a bigger dog on the Republican porch than radio fat-mouth Rush Limbaugh, which ended with Steele in full retreat, tail between his legs.

The calamity proved that Limbaugh, in Republican and conservative circles, is not to be tampered with. Everyone has observed that. But few have taken the lesson one step further and asked what, in turn, is proved by Limbaugh's preeminence within the party. Within the answer to that question lies Steele's biggest task as chairman, but it's a task that, for implacable structural reasons, he'll find impossible to take on. If you've been wondering why the Republican party is such a train wreck right now, this is why.

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.

But today's GOP consists, with those few exceptions, only of its conservative faction. Conservatives have been disciplined and strategic and have poured billions into political infrastructure-building over the years. When things were going their way, they didn't have to worry about the lack of moderates. But now, things aren't going their way. Unless Obama really, really blows it, the GOP is going to be the minority party for quite some time. It's easy to see now why Limbaugh has such power, no? If the GOP had a moderate wing, he wouldn't.

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.

Steele himself seems to have no interest in changing direction. Incredibly, he said he would not rule out primary challenges from the right to moderate GOP legislators who support Obama on key legislation. One of the moderates, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, is up for re-election in 2010. A rightwinger who nearly beat him in a primary the last time just vowed to run again, and he will have support from conservative money sources. What will Steele do?

The likely result of a primary win by the conservative challenger, of course, is that the Democrats will pick up the seat, because the challenger, Pat Toomey, may be too rightwing to win in Pennsylvania. And if the Democrats get that 60th Senate seat in 2010 (60 is a filibuster-proof majority), the Republicans will really have no plan except to hope Obama fails.

Mind you, I'm hardly upset about any of this. I think it's all pretty wonderful. Certainly the selection of Steele, who is African American, played against type. He was supposed to be a breath of fresh air. So far the air is awfully hot and stale.

 

[fgarvb1]

Go jackoff Obama.

 

[KingOrfeo]

You still don't get that Conservative and Republican are not synonyms. I personally don't give a shit if the GOP lives or dies, the way they've devolved over the last twenty years. I say the sooner it's Kevorkianed the better, and let's have a real Conservative Party out there.

But, then the conservative movement would have less power than it has now. Conservatives of the kind you mean are a minority in America, a very large and well-organized minority, but still a minority; you will never live to see that change. At present you have considerable influence in one of the two major parties. As a third party, you would be as marginal as the Greens, and the Pubs would have no reason even to listen to you. Politics is, you know, the art of the possible, and a Conservative Party rising to major-party status in America is not possible.

 

[Drixxx]

But, then the conservative movement would have less power than it has now. Conservatives of the kind you mean are a minority in America, a very large and well-organized minority, but still a minority; you will never live to see that change. At present you have considerable influence in one of the two major parties. As a third party, you would be as marginal as the Greens, and the Pubs would have no reason even to listen to you. Politics is, you know, the art of the possible, and a Conservative Party rising to major-party status in America is not possible.

You're really talking way over the heads of your target audience here. Perhaps if you acted it out with sock puppets they might get a small grasp of what you are talking about.

 

[Le Jacquelope]

But, then the conservative movement would have less power than it has now. Conservatives of the kind you mean are a minority in America, a very large and well-organized minority, but still a minority; you will never live to see that change. At present you have considerable influence in one of the two major parties. As a third party, you would be as marginal as the Greens, and the Pubs would have no reason even to listen to you. Politics is, you know, the art of the possible, and a Conservative Party rising to major-party status in America is not possible.

I say let's help them form a third party.

The Democrats will carry every state in the union into perpetuity...

 

[KingOrfeo]

You guys really need to study the Pew Political Typology, particularly the percentage figures. "Social Conservatives" make up only 11% of the population. Add all the other Republican-leaning groups and you still have a minority.

 

[KingOrfeo]

I say let's help them form a third party.

The Democrats will carry every state in the union into perpetuity...

Hey, if Pubs can have ballot-petition drives for Ralph Nader . . .

 

[unregistered]

 

[JohnnySavage]

Nothing like a big tub thumping, rain dancing, liberal like you advising the Repubs on how to revitalize their party when all they have to do is give the Dem-O-Gags enough rope to hang both themselves and their party.

LaDopelope is on their side. 'nuff said.

 

[The_Trouvere]

Nothing like a big tub thumping, rain dancing, liberal like you advising the Repubs on how to revitalize their party when all they have to do is give the Dem-O-Gags enough rope to hang both themselves and their party.

The United States faces serious economic problems. It may be that the prosperity of the second Clinton term cannot be restored, and that the American people will need to adjust to a permanently lower standard of living. Most Americans hope desperately that President Obama's economic efforts succeed. vetteman and the other wingnuts hope desperately that these efforts fail. They hope, in short, that millions more Americans lose their jobs and homes.

And it may happen. If the wingnuts have their way, the rich will still get richer in a country of growing misery. Lower income white Republicans will have the grim satisfaction of knowing that blacks and Hispanics are even worse off than they are.

 

[KingOrfeo]

The United States faces serious economic problems. It may be that the prosperity of the second Clinton term cannot be restored, and that the American people will need to adjust to a permanently lower standard of living. Most Americans hope desperately that President Obama's economic efforts succeed. vetteman and the other wingnuts hope desperately that these efforts fail. They hope, in short, that millions more Americans lose their jobs and homes.

And it may happen. If the wingnuts have their way, the rich will still get richer in a country of growing misery. Lower income white Republicans will have the grim satisfaction of knowing that blacks and Hispanics are even worse off than they are.

And the conservative movement still won't make a comeback.

 

[unregistered]

 

[The_Trouvere]

What we need in the United States is a real conservative party. That is to say one that tries to conserve much of the status quo. Since the election of 1980 the GOP has been lead by those who desired major changes in the legal structure. Some have been reactionaries who have tried to restore the economic system of last quarter of the nineteenth century, or at least the 1920's. Others have adhered to dangerously radical notions, such as the illusion that it is always a good idea to cut taxes, and that deficits do not matter. Both groups have had a mythical faith in the capitalist marketplace.

A true conservative is pessimistic about human nature and human potential, and skeptical of the value of radical changes, even in a rightward direction.

Dwight Eisenhower was a true conservative. He accepted the basic reforms of the New Deal and tried to make New Deal programs work better with less money. Richard Nixon will be forever judged by the War in Vietnam and the Watergate Scandal. Nevertheless, he was also a true conservative who accepted the basic reforms of the Great Society.

 

[unregistered]

 

[off2bed]

You guys really need to study the Pew Political Typology, particularly the percentage figures. "Social Conservatives" make up only 11% of the population. Add all the other Republican-leaning groups and you still have a minority.

I'm not real impressed with a survey that asked 0.0009% of the adult population. That's nine ten-thousanths of one percent. But as long as it makes you feel good, run with it Orf.

 

[unregistered]

 

[The_Trouvere]

That's quite a pant load there pilgrim, but then again they don't call you Trou for nothing.

If you do an internet search for it you will find that I usually write my own material.

Whenever I borrow from Mein Kampf I attribute it.

 

[The_Trouvere]

More like the private sector, where the real power lies, will tell the government to cut spending and the non productive strata of America will have to find real jobs as their run on the national gravy train will have to be be necessarily shortened. Illegal aliens will find their benefits turned off and their reason for being here slashed into insignificance.

With this statement you verify that what I said about you and your fellow travelers is true. What you dismiss as "the non productive strata of America" is much of the work force. Wages for most Americans stagnated or declined during the last eight years.

I am in favor of cracking down on illegal immigration, but if you think most illegal immigrants spend their days watching television, driving around in welfare Cadillacs, and eating T bone steaks purchased with food stamps, you are mistaken.

 

[JMohegan]

LMAO. Piece today by Michael Tomasky:

That piece misses the distinction between fiscal conservatism and social conservatism.

The Bush II years saw social conservatism on top among Republicans, that's true. But outcomes such as expansion of government, ballooning of the national debt, and TARP/partial nationalization of banks, indicate that fiscal conservatism has not been well represented in our government for quite some time.

 

[KingOrfeo]

A true conservative is pessimistic about human nature and human potential, and skeptical of the value of radical changes, even in a rightward direction.

That might describe "true conservatives," but not modern American movement conservatives. From The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, by conservative British journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge:

The exceptionalism of the American Right is partly a matter of its beliefs. The first two definitions of "conservative" offered by the Concise Oxford Dictionary are "adverse to rapid change" and "moderate, avoiding extremes." Neither of these seems a particularly good description of what is going on in America at the moment. "Conservatism" -- no less than its foes "liberalism" or "communitarianism" -- has become one of those words that are now as imprecise as they are emotionally charged. Open a newspaper and you can find the word used to describe Jacques Chirac, Trent Lott, the Mullah Omar and Vladimir Putin. Since time immemorial, conservatives have insisted that their deeply pragmatic creed cannot be ideologically pigeonholed.

But, in philosophical terms at least, classical conservatism does mean something. The creed of Edmund Burke, its most eloquent proponent, might be crudely reduced to six principles: a deep suspicion of the power of the state; a preference for liberty over equality; patriotism; a belief in established institutions and hierarchies; skepticism about the idea of progress; and elitism. Winston Churchill happily accepted these principles: he was devoted to nation and empire, disinclined to trust the lower orders with anything, hostile to the welfare state, worried about the diminution of liberty and, as he once remarked ruefully, "preferred the past to the present and the present to the future."

To simplify a little, the exceptionalism of modern American conservatism lies in its exaggeration of the first three of Burke's principles and contradiction of the last three. The American Right exhibits a far deeper hostility towards the state than any other modern conservative party. . . . The American right is also more obsessed with personal liberty than any other conservative party, and prepared to tolerate an infinitely higher level of inequality. (One reason why Burke warmed to the American revolutionaries was that, unlike their dangerous French equivalents, the gentlemen rebels concentrated on freedom, not equality.) On patriotism, nobody can deny that conservatives everywhere tend to be a fairly nationalistic bunch. . . . Yet many European conservatives have accepted the idea that their nationality should be diluted in "schemes and speculations" like the European Union, and they are increasingly reconciled to dealing with national security on a multilateral basis. American conservatives clearly are not.

If the American Right was merely a more vigorous form of conservatism, then it would be a lot more predictable. In fact, the American Right takes a resolutely liberal approach to Burke's last three principles: hierarchy, pessimism and elitism. The heroes of modern American conservatism are not paternalist squires but rugged individualists who don't know their place: entrepeneurs who build mighty businesses out of nothing, settlers who move out West, and, of course, the cowboy. There is a frontier spirit to the Right -- unsurprisingly, since so much of its heartland is made up of new towns of one sort of another.

The geography of conservatism also helps to explain its optimism rather than pessimism. In the war between the Dynamo and the Virgin, as Henry Adams characterized the battle between progress and tradition, most American conservatives are on the side of the Dynamo. They think that the world offers all sorts of wonderful possibilities. And they feel that the only thing that is preventing people from attaining these possibilities is the dead liberal hand of the past. By contrast, Burke has been described flatteringly by European conservatives as a "prophet of the past." Spend any time with a group of Republicans, and their enthusiasm for the future can be positively exhausting.

As for elitism, rather than dreaming about creating an educated "clerisy" of clever rulers (as Coleridge and T.S. Eliot did), the Republicans ever since the 1960s have played the populist card. Richard Nixon saw himself as the champion of the "silent majority." In 1988 the aristocratic George H.W. Bush presented himself as a defender of all-American values against the Harvard Yard liberalism of Michael Dukakis. In 2000, George W. Bush, a president's son who was educated at Andover, Yale and Harvard Business School, played up his role as a down-to-earth Texan taking on the might of Washington. As a result, modern American conservatism has flourished not just in country clubs and boardrooms, but at the grass roots -- on talk radio and at precinct meetings, and in revolts against high taxes, the regulation of firearms and other invidious attempts by liberal do-gooders to force honest Americans into some predetermined mold.

 

[The_Trouvere]

That piece misses the distinction between fiscal conservatism and social conservatism.

The Bush II years saw social conservatism on top among Republicans, that's true. But outcomes such as expansion of government, ballooning of the national debt, and TARP/partial nationalization of banks, indicate that fiscal conservatism has not been well represented in our government for quite some time.

Very few Americans are genuine fiscal conservatives. Many favor "limited government" in theory, but they also favor government programs that benefit them. Ronald Reagan figured that out pretty early in his Administration. That is why he never made a serious effort to cut middle class entitlements, business subsidies, and farm subsidies. Bush II's extensions of government spending for health and education were popular with the voters.

Even writers for the National Review acknowledge this from time to time.

 

[Ishmael]

You guys really need to study the Pew Political Typology, particularly the percentage figures. "Social Conservatives" make up only 11% of the population. Add all the other Republican-leaning groups and you still have a minority.

The operative word being 'social'. Neither you, nor the press, have the slilghtest clue what being a conservative is about.

The only difference I can see between you and the Bible thumpers is what part of my life is going to be controlled. The Bible thumpers want to control what I can do in my bedroom, a place they have NO reasonable chance of regulating, and you want to control everyother aspect of my life. All in all, the Bible thumpers are significantly less a threat to individual freedom than you are.

Ishmael