Typical Pubbie posted:

A significant portion of the base despises Trump. It's part of the reason why he polls so poorly against Bernie and Hillary.

It's Time for a Republican Conspiracy posted:

Members of the Republican governing class are like cowering freshmen at halftime of a high school football game. Some are part of the Surrender Caucus, sitting sullenly on their stools resigned to the likelihood that their team is going to get crushed. Some are thinking of jumping ship to the Trump campaign with an alacrity that would make rats admire and applaud.

Rarely has a party so passively accepted its own self-destruction. Sure, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are now riding high in some meaningless head-to-head polls against Hillary Clinton, but the odds are the nomination of either would lead to a party-decimating general election.

The Tea Party, Ted Cruz’s natural vehicle, has 17 percent popular support, according to Gallup. The idea that most women, independents or mainstream order-craving suburbanites would back a guy who declares his admiration for Vladimir Putin is a mirage. The idea that the G.O.P. can march into the 21st century intentionally alienating every person of color is borderline insane.

Worse is the prospect that one of them might somehow win. Very few presidents are so terrible that they genuinely endanger their own nation, but Trump and Cruz would go there and beyond. Trump is a solipsistic branding genius whose “policies” have no contact with Planet Earth and who would be incapable of organizing a coalition, domestic or foreign.

Cruz would be as universally off-putting as he has been in all his workplaces. He’s always been good at tearing things down but incompetent when it comes to putting things together.

So maybe it’s time for governing Republicans to actually do something. Yes, I’m talking to you state legislators, or local committeepersons, or members of Congress and all your networks of donors and supporters. If MoveOn can organize, if the Tea Party can organize, if Justin Bieber can build a gigantic social media movement, why are you incapable of any collective action at all?

What’s needed is a grass-roots movement that stands for governing conservatism, built both online and through rallies, and gets behind a single candidate sometime in mid- to late February. In politics, if A (Trump) and B (Cruz) savage each other then the benefits often go to Candidate C. But there has to be a C, not a C, D, E, F and G.

This new movement must come to grips with two realities. First, the electorate has changed. Less-educated voters are in the middle of a tidal wave of trauma. Labor force participation is dropping, wages are sliding, suicide rates are rising, heroin addiction is rising, faith in American institutions is dissolving.

Second, the Republican Party is not as antigovernment as its elites think it is. Its members no longer fit into the same old ideological categories. Trump grabbed his lead with an ideological grab bag of gestures, some of them quite on the left. He is more Huey Long than Calvin Coolidge.

Given the current strains on middle- and working-class families, many Republican voters want a government that will help the little guy; they just don’t want one that is incompetent, corrupt or infused with liberal social values.

In addition, younger voters and college-educated voters are more moderate than party leaders. According to one of the smartest conservative analysts, Henry Olsen, somewhere around 35 to 40 percent of the G.O.P. electorate is only “somewhat conservative.”

What’s needed is a coalition that combines Huey Long, Charles Colson and Theodore Roosevelt: working-class populism, religious compassion and institutional reform.

Years ago, reform conservatives were proposing a Sam’s Club Republicanism, which would actually provide concrete policy ideas to help the working class, like wage subsidies, a higher earned-Income tax credit, increased child tax credits, subsidies for people who wanted to move in search of work and exemption of the first $20,000 in earnings from the Medicaid payroll tax. This would be a conservatism that emphasized social mobility at the bottom, not cutting taxes at the top.

Maybe it’s time a center-right movement actually offered that agenda.

And maybe it’s time some Republicans took a stand on what is emerging as the central dispute of our time — not between left and right but between open and closed. As the political scientist Matthew MacWilliams has found, the key trait that identifies Trump followers is authoritarianism. His central image is a wall. With their emphasis on anger and shutting people out, Trump and Cruz are more like European conservatives than American ones.

Governing conservatism has to offer people a secure financial base and a steady hand up so they can welcome global capitalism with hope and a sense of opportunity. That’s the true American tradition, emphasizing future dynamism not tribal walls. There’s a silent majority of hopeful, practical, programmatic Republicans. You know who you are.

Please don’t go quietly and pathetically into the night.

BrandorKP posted:

David Brooks exploded today.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/19/o...collection&_r=0

He's looking back to Buckley kicking to nutters out, by the title reference. (Ha, loving knew it) It's too late though. It's going to be interesting to watch what happens when he realizes that. Bolding mine.


There has been much bullshit flagging the "silent majority of hopeful, practical, programmatic Republicans" Brooks is referring too already. Nobody else thinks they exist anymore.

BrandorKP posted:

quote:

Given the current strains on middle- and working-class families, many Republican voters want a government that will help the little guy; they just don’t want one that is incompetent, corrupt or infused with liberal social values.

BrandorKP posted:

David Brooks exploded today.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/19/o...collection&_r=0

He's looking back to Buckley kicking to nutters out, by the title reference. (Ha, loving knew it) It's too late though. It's going to be interesting to watch what happens when he realizes that. Bolding mine.


There has been much bullshit flagging the "silent majority of hopeful, practical, programmatic Republicans" Brooks is referring too already. Nobody else thinks they exist anymore.

BrandorKP posted:

David Brooks exploded today.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/19/o...collection&_r=0

He's looking back to Buckley kicking to nutters out, by the title reference. (Ha, loving knew it) It's too late though. It's going to be interesting to watch what happens when he realizes that. Bolding mine.


There has been much bullshit flagging the "silent majority of hopeful, practical, programmatic Republicans" Brooks is referring too already. Nobody else thinks they exist anymore.

quote:

In January of 2017 someone will stand at the U.S. Capitol and deliver an Inaugural Address. This is roughly the place where Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan once stood. I am going to spend every single day between now and then believing that neither Donald Trump nor Ted Cruz nor Bernie Sanders will be standing on that podium. One of them could win the election, take the oath, give the speech and be riding down Pennsylvania Avenue. I will still refuse to believe it.

Yes, I know what the polling evidence is telling us about Trump, Sanders and Cruz, but there are good reasons to cling to my disbelief.

First, these primary campaigns will not be settled in February. They won’t be settled in March or April. Sometimes a candidate can sweep Iowa and New Hampshire and cruise to the nomination. But that candidate has to be broadly acceptable to all parts of the party. Trump, Cruz and Sanders are not.

As Jay Cost writes in The Weekly Standard, “This could mean a lengthy nomination battle that stretches all the way to the California primary in June.”

On the Republican side the early primaries and caucuses allocate delegates proportionally. Only 16.2 percent of the delegates over all come from winner-take-all states. That means the delegate-getting war will be a slog.

The first day when any candidate could rack up a big winner-take-all delegate harvest is March 15, an eternity from now. More than half the delegates will be allocated after that date.

Second, Cruz and Trump will go after each other with increasing ferocity over the next many weeks or months. There is a decent chance, given their personalities, that they will make each other maximally unattractive and go down in each other’s death embrace.

Third, the Trump and Sanders turnout problems are real. Trump is doing very well among people who haven’t voted in the past four elections. It’s possible he has energized them so much they will actually caucus and vote, but you wouldn’t want to bet your gold-plated faucets on it. People who don’t vote generally don’t vote.

Sanders is drawing support from nonvoters, too. As Nate Cohn wrote in The Upshot on Monday, Sanders is up in some polls over all, but he trails big time among people in Iowa who caucused in 2008 and among those who are definitely registered to vote.

It’s quite possible that the big story post-Iowa will be how badly these two underperformed.

Fourth, establishment Republicans who are softening on Trump because they think he is more electable than Cruz are smoking something. According to a Pew Research survey, a majority of Americans think Trump would make a poor or terrible president.

Chuck Todd ran through Trump’s favorable-unfavorable ratings on “Meet the Press” on Sunday: Among independents, Trump is negative 26 points; among women, negative 36; among suburban voters, negative 24. Is the Republican Party really going to nominate one of the most loathed men in American public life?

Fifth, America has never elected a candidate maximally extreme from the political center, the way Sanders and Cruz are. According to the FiveThirtyEight website, Cruz has the most conservative voting record in the entire Congress. That takes some doing.

Sixth, sooner or later the candidates from the governing wing of their parties will get their acts together. Marco Rubio has had a bad month, darkening his tone and trying to sound like a cut-rate version of Trump and Cruz.

Before too long Rubio will realize his first task is to rally the voters who detest or fear those men. That means running as an optimistic American nationalist with specific proposals to reform Washington and lift the working class.
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If he can rally mainstream Republicans he’ll be at least tied with Trump and Cruz in the polls. Then he can counter their American decline narrative, with one of his own: This country is failing because it got too narcissistic, became too much like a reality TV show. Americans lost the ability to work constructively to get things done.

Finally, eventually the electorate is going to realize that in an age of dysfunctional government, effective leadership capacity is the threshold issue. That means being able to listen to others, surround yourself with people smarter than you, gather a governing majority and above all have an actual implementation strategy. Not Trump, Cruz or Sanders has any remote chance of turning his ideas, such as they are, into actual laws.

In every recent presidential election American voters have selected the candidate with the most secure pair of hands. They’ve elected the person who would be a stable presence and companion for the next four years. I believe they’re going to do that again. And if they’re not, please allow me a few more months of denial.

HootTheOwl posted:

Is there anyone in this thread who thinks the republicans will actually die and not do what the major parties have done every twenty or so years and just carve off a part of the democrats during a realignment?

quote:

And if they’re not, please allow me a few more months of denial.

quote:

Today, Paul Ryan gave a fascinating speech at Heritage Action, a tea party-allied organization that has fashioned itself as the guardian of conservative purity. The speech called for unity. “To quote William Wallace in Braveheart,” he said, “we have to unite the clans.”

But his speech was actually a repudiation of everything the tea party has done. Not only that, Ryan also took shots at the congressional Republican leadership, and even the current GOP presidential candidates. He didn’t call anyone out by name, but if you understand what’s happening now and the conflict that has roiled the Republican Party for the last seven years, the critique was hard to miss.

Not surprisingly, for much of the speech he blamed conservatives’ own sins on progressives, Democrats, and Barack Obama. That has become a familiar refrain — It’s their fault that we’ve become such monsters! — but when you say that, you’re still acknowledging that the sins exist. Let’s start here:

quote:

“My theory of the case is this: We win when we have an ideas contest. We lose when we have a personality contest. We can’t fall into the progressives’ trap of acting like angry reactionaries. The Left would love nothing more than for a fragmented conservative movement to stand in a circular firing squad, so the progressives can win by default.

“This president is struggling to remain relevant in an election year when he’s not on the ballot. He is going to do all he can to elect another progressive by distracting the American people. So he’s going to try to get us talking about guns or some other hot-button issue and not about his failures on ISIS or the economy or national security. He’s going to try to knock us off our game. We have to understand his distractions for what they are. Otherwise, we’re going to have a distraction this week, next week, and the week after that. And that’s going to be the Obama playbook all year long.”

Yes, the party of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, cares not for “personality.” And look, nobody “trapped” Republicans into “acting like angry reactionaries.” They did that all on their own. But it’s interesting that Ryan cites guns as a distracting hot-button issue that is important only because Barack Obama is forcing conservatives to talk about it against their will. Last time I checked, lots of Republicans thought the gun issue is absolutely vital to maintaining liberty. The same is true of any other hot-button issue you could name, whether it’s abortion or same-sex marriage or something else: the issue might or might not be advantageous to Democrats, but it’s also very important to at least a significant chunk of the Republican electorate. It’s hard to tell where Ryan draws the line between real issues and distractions, but every time you define an issue as the latter, you’re telling some major Republican constituency to shut its mouth.

ShadowCatboy posted:

Paul Ryan issues the most self-delusional call for sanity in the GOP


That's right, it's those wily-rear end Democrats who tricked the GOP into blocking legislation at every turn in order to repeal Obamacare like 100 times. But at least he recognizes that the obstructionism and lack of actual ideas has fractured the party and led to the current situation where Republicans are becoming less and less electable in Presidential Election years.

And this man is absolutely right that the GOP has turned into a clownshow of personality over substance:

Main Paineframe posted:

Face it - personality, appearance, and acting abilities have been the main deciders of American politics since TV became widely available.

FuzzySkinner posted:

I realize with Trump it's all talk and a good portion of his support is because racists love his ideas in regards to immigration.

That being said, there's at least a nestle of truth in the fact that at least he seems to be talking about improving the lives of men and women within the US in some respect. The idiot isn't at least rambling on about how he wants to take away people's healthcare or trying to gently caress us over by signing laws that pretty much ship our job's overseas. (We can discuss him being a hypocrite in regards to the latter, sure.)

The thing I've noticed from a good portion of people during this election cycle have been:

-People pissed that "Citizens United" is a thing
-People pissed at Big Banks
-People pissed at how hosed up their healthcare is.
-People pissed that companies get to get out of paying taxes and then ship job overseas.

But the thing is, save for Trump? None of their candidates are discussing this. They're all on the sides of those people I just mentioned. The middle class is beyond angry and is searching for some voice to kind of echo their sentiment.

I'm wouldn't be against listening to conservative/republican/free market solutions to the problems I just mentioned. The problem is? I've never heard any even TALK about the fact that there is a problem, let alone have any sort of action to take care of it.

Honestly...if Trump were smart? After the nomination would be secured he'd try to out-liberal sanders/clinton in the same vain that Richard Nixon did back in the day.

TheImmigrant posted:

Honest question here: What is the point of discussing the Republican Party in a forum where any hint of sympathy for or affiliation with the party would lead to extreme ostracism?

TheImmigrant posted:

Seeing D&D posters discuss the GOP reminds me of a conversation about kinky sex among a group of 50-something committed virgins. The GOP will not die any time soon. Like the Democrats, it will stick with the current formula until delivered an electoral defeat resounding enough to give momentum to a purge, at which point it will reformulate its approach and roll with that.

FuzzySkinner posted:

I realize with Trump it's all talk and a good portion of his support is because racists love his ideas in regards to immigration.

That being said, there's at least a nestle of truth in the fact that at least he seems to be talking about improving the lives of men and women within the US in some respect. The idiot isn't at least rambling on about how he wants to take away people's healthcare or trying to gently caress us over by signing laws that pretty much ship our job's overseas. (We can discuss him being a hypocrite in regards to the latter, sure.)

The thing I've noticed from a good portion of people during this election cycle have been:

-People pissed that "Citizens United" is a thing
-People pissed at Big Banks
-People pissed at how hosed up their healthcare is.
-People pissed that companies get to get out of paying taxes and then ship job overseas.

But the thing is, save for Trump? None of their candidates are discussing this. They're all on the sides of those people I just mentioned. The middle class is beyond angry and is searching for some voice to kind of echo their sentiment.

I'm wouldn't be against listening to conservative/republican/free market solutions to the problems I just mentioned. The problem is? I've never heard any even TALK about the fact that there is a problem, let alone have any sort of action to take care of it.

Honestly...if Trump were smart? After the nomination would be secured he'd try to out-liberal sanders/clinton in the same vain that Richard Nixon did back in the day.

rudatron posted:

both establishments are so loving out of touch with ordinary people.

Tesseraction posted:

Let me answer your stupid question with an equally stupid question: why do you post on this forum if you think it's such an anti-GOP echo chamber?

The more sensible response of course is that one does not need to BE a Republican to discuss the Republican Party. Why? Because it's actually somewhat important because, as you note, they are one of the two mainstream parties. When one of the mainstream parties is undergoing a crisis of identity it is perfectly valid for people to observe things and comment on them, regardless of political affiliation.

TheImmigrant posted:

My comment reflected the reality that your discussion of the GOP makes as much real-life difference as my discussion of the cheesemaking techniques of Bedouin herders.

TheImmigrant posted:

eviltastic posted:

If you can get over the persecution complex long enough to offer an inside perspective, people will read it.

TheImmigrant posted:

Pol Pot, I am not a Republican, and this place is for my amusement. You people so far out of touch with the mainstream that anyone to the right of Mao is a Republican/Nazi/fascist in your eyes. It's hilarious, and keeps me reading.

Now wipe the spittle from your monitor.

The Time Loop Pary posted:

By now everyone who follows politics knows about Marco Rubio’s software-glitch performance in Saturday’s Republican debate. (I’d say broken-record performance, but that would be showing my age.) Not only did he respond to a challenge from Chris Christie about his lack of achievements by repeating, verbatim, the same line from his stump speech he had used a moment earlier; when Mr. Christie mocked his canned delivery, he repeated the same line yet again.

In other news, last week — on Groundhog Day, to be precise — Republicans in the House of Representatives cast what everyone knew was a purely symbolic, substance-free vote to repeal Obamacare. It was the 63rd time they’ve done so.

Mr. Rubio’s inability to do anything besides repeat canned talking points was startling. Worse, it was funny, which means that it has gone viral. And it reinforced the narrative that he is nothing but an empty suit. But really, isn’t everyone in his party doing pretty much the same thing, if not so conspicuously?

The truth is that the whole G.O.P. seems stuck in a time loop, saying and doing the same things over and over. And unlike Bill Murray’s character in the movie “Groundhog Day,” Republicans show no sign of learning anything from experience.

Think about the doctrines every Republican politician now needs to endorse, on pain of excommunication.

First, there’s the ritual denunciation of Obamacare as a terrible, very bad, no good, job-killing law. Did I mention that it kills jobs? Strange to say, this line hasn’t changed at all despite the fact that we’ve gained 5.7 million private-sector jobs since January 2014, which is when the Affordable Care Act went into full effect.

Then there’s the assertion that taxing the rich has terrible effects on economic growth, and conversely that tax cuts at the top can be counted on to produce an economic miracle.

This doctrine was tested more than two decades ago, when Bill Clinton raised tax rates on high incomes; Republicans predicted disaster, but what we got was the economy’s best run since the 1960s. It was tested again when George W. Bush cut taxes on the wealthy; Republicans predicted a “Bush boom,” but actually got a lackluster expansion followed by the worst slump since the Great Depression. And it got tested a third time after President Obama won re-election, and tax rates at the top went up substantially; since then we’ve gained eight million private-sector jobs.

Oh, and there’s also the spectacular failure of the Kansas experiment, where huge tax cuts have created a budget crisis without delivering any hint of the promised economic miracle.

But Republican faith in tax cuts as a universal economic elixir has, if anything, grown stronger, with Mr. Rubio, in particular, going even further than the other candidates by promising to eliminate all taxes on capital gains.

Meanwhile, on foreign policy the required G.O.P. position has become one of utter confidence in the effectiveness of military force. How did that work in Iraq? Never mind: The only reason anybody in the world fails to do exactly what America wants must be because our leadership is lily-livered if not treasonous. And diplomacy, no matter how successful, is denounced as appeasement.

Not incidentally, the shared Republican stance on foreign policy is basically the same view Richard Hofstadter famously described in his essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”: Whenever America fails to impose its will on the rest of the world, it must be because it has been betrayed. The John Birch Society has won the war for the party’s soul.

Like her or not, Hillary Clinton is a genuine policy wonk, who can think on her feet and clearly knows what she is talking about on many issues. Bernie Sanders is much more of a one-note candidate, but at least his signature issue — rising inequality and the effects of money on politics — reflects real concerns. When you revisit Democratic debates after what went down Saturday, it doesn’t feel as if you’re watching a different party, it feels as if you’ve entered a different intellectual and moral universe.

So how did this happen to the G.O.P.? In a direct sense, I suspect that it has a lot to do with Foxification, the way Republican primary voters live in a media bubble into which awkward facts can’t penetrate. But there must be deeper causes behind the creation of that bubble.

Whatever the ultimate reason, however, the point is that while Mr. Rubio did indeed make a fool of himself on Saturday, he wasn’t the only person on that stage spouting canned talking points that are divorced from reality. They all were, even if the other candidates managed to avoid repeating themselves word for word.

quote:

Not incidentally, the shared Republican stance on foreign policy is basically the same view Richard Hofstadter famously described in his essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”: Whenever America fails to impose its will on the rest of the world, it must be because it has been betrayed. The John Birch Society has won the war for the party’s soul.

BrandorKP posted:

More Krugman:

Bolding mine

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/08/opinion/the-time-loop-party.html?_r=0


It's too late. The chances they had to avert the distortions that have taken over the party, they missed.