Was viewing the thread about whether or not the Rep. party is aware of the reasons why they lost '12 when I thought about this question…
It seems to me, as a youngin’ in this political world, that the Republican party is so out of touch with general citizens. Then again we have people like Dick Perry in office so I’m not quite sure, maybe I am out of touch. In your opinion, how have the parties changed over time?
Thank you for any feedback.
I was a Republican prior to the 1980 election. I supported limited government, fiscal conservatism and law & order. Then came the Moral Majority, and the close relationship between the party and conservative Christians. Since I am not Christian, and differ from their positions on most social issues (abortion, civil rights including gay rights and women’s rights, separation of church and state, etc.) I no longer felt comfortable as a Republican. I was an Independent for a while, but eventually became a Democrat, and have been at least since Clinton’s election. I still feel that if a party emerged that was fiscally conservative but socially liberal, that would be where I would be most comfortable.
Well, there was a time when the Dems and Pubs both were what we might call tribal affiliations. There were some ideological differences, but each party included liberal and conservative wings. Then came the Southern Strategy, since which we have arrived at a state where ideological divide between the parties is clear, and the GOP is entirely conservative, therefore both irrelevant and useless.
An irrelevant party wouldn’t be doing as well as it is.
Anyway, in response to the OP, both parties have moved to the left on social issues and to the right on economic issues, and will continue to do so. The future is being won by those who favor more freedom, and lost by those who would restrict it.
It’s actually more complicated than that, but if I was going to describe the trends in one small paragraph, that’s how I’d do it. Freedom wins, authority loses.
To delve into the more complicated stuff, we’re seeing a larger partisan divide in large part because we ran out of other people’s money. As long as we could have tax cuts and spending programs and just borrow, borrow, borrow, both parties could work together. Combine the current fiscal picture with bad faith accusations by both sides against one another, and it makes it harder to come to agreements on how to solve our fiscal problems.
What would help is a President who was actually like Obama and Bush promised to be: a uniter. And frankly, the only way I think we get there is for the Presidency to become a less partisan office. The executive branch is tasked with carrying out the law. This is not a political function. Presidents should be mostly above politics. And until we get one who is, we’ll continue to see partisan wafare.
John Huntsman, IMO, had the best chance at being a unifying figure. He was broadly popular, but just couldn’t convince the Republican base to support him. Very sad, because he would have been a fantastic President.
I wish the OP had limited the scope to, say, 10 years, rather some poster’s lifetime. That might have been a more focused discussion.
OTOH, another different thread might be titled “Changes to the Democratic and Republican Party in the last fifty years”
Both worthy discussions. But very different discussions.
But a useless one could. There are countless historical examples. And most of those examples – not by any means all, but most – were on the R side of the spectrum, more or less; and there are practically no historical examples of useful parties on the R side of the spectrum. Certainly not the Republicans (at any time post-Taft), certainly not the Tories (at any time ever).
I was thinking about a time frame yet ten years is a relatively weak sample size don’t you think?
If I were to rephrase I would ask beginning with the time you chose X party, to a time when one left X party for whatever reasons.
Yeah, but usefulness is a matter of opinion. Relevancy is not. Even the Green Party isn’t totally irrelevant, they helped Bush get elected!
Despite the GOP’s recent setbacks, they are still a more competitive party than they were from 1933-1980. Democrats enjoyed 27 years of unified control of the government during that period. That’s off the top of my head, so if it was 25 or 29, don’t kill me!
Contrast that to the 1980-2012 period, where Democrats have enjoyed only four years of unified control, exactly as much as the Republicans. And those weren’t four consecutive years, they were two year periods that resulted in immediate consequences for the majority, and very severe consequences at that.
And those weren’t good years, were they? Looking back, you’ll find things only ever went well in America when Dems/liberals were in control.
Eh, no, I don’t see it that way at all. There were many positive changes, but also a lot of harebrained ideas. The way liberals portray history, it’s all about civil rights and economic justice, but there was also rising crime, rising dependency, an overbearing regulatory state, a permanently politicized judicial branch, an unbearable tax burden, and the attempt to apply many wartime controls to a peacetime economy. And that’s just the stuff whose consequences were felt at the time. Some of the other consequences of that period are yet to be felt, such as the implosion of the entitlement state, and the intentional balkanization of the American people for the Democratic Party’s political benefit.
When I was young, both Parties had broad appeal and were largely “centrist.” Yes, the GOP was the party of the “right” and Democrats of the “left” but there were plenty of liberal Republicans and plenty of conservative Democrats. There were large areas of the country where rural voters supported the GOP and large areas where rural voters supported the Democrats.
I think this system – two largely centrist Parties – worked well. Yes, the country would move to the left when the Democrats were in charge, and to the right when Republicans were in charge, but these were relatively small swings around a large, sane center. These sane politics helped the U.S. to become the most powerful country in the world economically, and to be a shining example of democracy and civil rights worldwide.
While I’ve been more-or-less a Democratic supporter all my life, I’ve had great respect for many Republicans. Nelson Rockefeller and some of the other New York Republicans were superior to most Democrats, IMO. Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan were three of the greatest Presidents of my lifetime. (Yes, Nixon and Reagan had major flaws, but so did the great Democrats, JFK and LBJ.) Even Goldwater – considered a laughingstock at the time he ran – was an intelligent good-spirited man of great integrity. Ford, Bush-41, Dole – these are all rational centrist Republicans I’d be happy to see as President.
But the Republican Party today has become a contemptible farce bringing shame to the U.S. Whenever I read a Doper discussing a path to GOP success in 2016 I want to ask him to smell the shit, and ask him to first acknowledge how contemptible the GOP has become. Goldwater was the joke candidate of 1964; in 2012 we looked in vain for a GOP candidate to present who was less of a joke than Goldwater. :smack: Bachman, Palin, Perry, Paul were taken seriously as candidates – impossible to imagine unless stupidity (or crackpottery in the case of Paul) has become a virtue. Gingrich – the contemptible immoral man who shut down the government literally because he felt treated rudely on Air Force One – was their intellectual heavyweight. :rolleyes:
Some GOP defenders will claim the Democrats have also gone downhill.
On a goodness scale of 1 to 10, where the parties in the 1960’s and 1970’s ranked 8, the Democrats are now 7 or maybe 6½. The GOP ranks negative 10 or worse.
The GOP proudly announces it wants Obama to fail; many of them imply they are happy to sabotage the economy to achieve that. With tax revenue too low and tax cheating increasing due to IRS audit cutbacks, the GOP wants to cut the IRS budget even further as “punishment.” Would 6th-graders fall for this “logic”? I don’t think so.
There’s a tendency to give something credit based on long-term reputation. If a new Party emerged with the approach to the issues of today’s GOP, it would be greeted with derision. Yet under-informed Americans assume the 160-year old GOP cannot have become as insane as informed rational observers claim.
I want to have full respect for intelligent, sincere, good-spirited conservative thinkers. But if they are unable to acknowledge how contemptible today’s GOP has become, I have only contempt for their thinking.
Wow. According to Freakonomics (and supported by empirical data), “rising crime” ended with Roe v. Wade. The “overbearing regulatory state” 
– is that the one that avoided the 2008 credit crisis?? “Unbearable tax burden” in the country with, by some measures, highest average prosperity??? (The “Intentional balkanization” charge is too absurd for anything but laughter.)
“More freedom” is the left on both social and economic issues. You can only get that the right-wing economic policies are “free” in the sense that Southern plantation owners lost their “freedom” to own slaves in the Civil War.
“I am an aristocrat. I love liberty. I hate equality.”
Or for the opposition party to be less reflexive in their opposition, hmm?
OK, just for funsies, where the *fuck *do you get that from?
The Republican Party has definitely moved pretty far right since I started voting and paying attention in the early 80s. Of course, there was a Moral Majority early on, but the last few years have seen the party really yanked to the right, with too many of the Tea Party types being total idiots and too much of the conservative wing refusing to even deal with the other party.
I largely agree with septimus, except that I think that the present GOP madness is partly Reagan and Nixon’s legacy, so I have to blame them a bit.
Watergate seems to have driven people away from the GOP except for the utterly venal and corrupt, and the party might have died off if not for an infusion of socialcons and theocons. So anyone with honor or shame ended up out of the hard leadership core of the GOP, when it came back.
And Reagan is lionized by the GOP not because he was good for the USA, but because the GOP came back under him. He saved the party from going the way of the Whigs, and as such is treated as something like a Prophet. So his harebrained take on economics (and it was harebrained, I’m sorry) is now dogma from the Prophet’s lips.
G. Norquist’s entire political program is by his own admission an idea he had in junior high, to package politicians like brands of soap; and N. Gingrich’s career seems like that of some kind of virus of hostility; they did a lot of damage to the party as well.
But I can’t say Reagan was that good, because he* supported *those overgrown adolescents. And the party that Nixon left us is one where those were the sort of activist or politician promoted: little shame, less wisdom, anything to win.
There is no such thing, not even in “nonpartisan” elections.
Of course it is. Any chief executive is not just an administrator, but a policymaker.
Huntsman was the only one at an early debate who raised his hand for believing evolution. While maybe not wildly popular, it made him the only I didn’t reject.
The policymaking part of the job is listed in the Constitution: The President is supposed to recommend legislation to Congress.
Other than that, he’s supposed to carry out the laws Congress passes, be Commander-in-Chief, yada yada, and none of those jobs are political.
So aside from recommending legislation, the President should be apolitical. Politics should not enter into the enforcement of the law.
No republic in human history has ever been set up that way, or could be.