Do We Need to Destroy the GOP ... In Order to Save It?

Politics & Elections
1

General Westmoreland once famously said, of a Vietnam Village, that “we destroyed that village in order to save it” or words to that effect. It seems the same process is well in effect in the GOP. And this is not the first time it’s happened. A bit of history is in order.

The first iteration of the GOP was the Federalist Party. That party elected President Washington in 1788 and President Adams in 1796. After Adams failed to win reelection in 1800 the party fizzled. The Whigs organized in the early 1830’s as a counterweight to President Jackson. It also flamed out quickly; in the early 1850’s, after Millard Fillmore was unable to fill even Zachary Taylor’s small shoes. The Republican Party organized in or about 1854 in Ripon, Wisconsin, as an idealistic, antislavery party. It’s first standard-bearer, John Fremont, lost the 1856 election. Abraham Lincoln, nominated on the third ballot of a contested convention. did better. The South didn’t enjoy that surprise and bolted the Union.

The GOP has had other, more recent near-death experiences. In 1936, in the midst of the Great Depression with a charismatic and phony FDR as President, Alf Landon managed to collar only Vermont and one other state. I always forget if that was Kansas or Maine but it makes little difference. That wiped out the truly old, laissez-fair Republicans. The corportatist Republicans that replaced them were more or less non-ideological. They managed to elect only Eisenhower in 1952 (and that one as a war hero) and Nixon in 1968 (in a bitter time of disorders, antiwar ferment, crime and racism). Ford was, of course, never elected. That version of the GOP was seen driving away in the smog over Watergate in 1972, made official by the disastrous 1974 elections.

That paved the way for Ronald Reagan and his neo-conservatives. It is significant that Reagan’s roots were as a liberal Democrat. In hindsight, while Republicans pine for the “next Reagan” he was personally magnetic, and that contributed to the size of his two victories. The corporatist Republicans were back in control for Bush I and Bush II’s elections of 1988, 2000 and 2004, as well as the McCain and Romney candidacies.

Now, Ted Cruz, a quality candidate and one of surprising duration given his lack of favor with the relatively lazy and unimaginative Republicans in the Senate and the House appears to have, at best, a narrow path to the nomination. It is hard to fight a demagogue. Since he and his supporters are principled, many of them will no doubt vote for Hillary or cast a blank ballot. I am waffling between those two options. In any event the GOP is headed to a defeat and implosion on the scale of the Federalist, Whig, Depression and Watergate debacles in this country, and Canada’s recent destruction of the Progressive-Conservative Party. The country needs two parties.

I argue that a new or reconstituted party must arise from the ashes, one shorn of the “get along to go along” philosophy of the likes of Boehner and McConnell. This party will be led by bright, young, aggressive leaders such as Cruz, Rubio, Ryan and Walker.

2

So your take on what’s wrong with the GOP today is: “Too much compromise and willingness to work with the other side, combined with not being conservative enough?”

Good luck with that.

3

The other problem is that one of the central pillars of modern conservative ideology is simply wrong: you can’t cut taxes without cutting spending. Sure, conservatives pay lip service to the idea of cutting government spending. But they also know how unpopular actually doing it would be so they don’t follow through. Instead they cut taxes and keep spending the same (or raise it) and the result is always an economic catastrophe that results in the Democrats getting elected.

4

There can be a more positive kind of conservatism. Conservatism can talk about eliminating barriers to growth so that businesses can get to work rather than being bound up, Lilliputian style, in paperwork.

5

The Republican party is having some difficulty in the presidential battle lately, but I hardly think this means that the party is on the verge of annihilation. The presidency isn’t the only political office. They are doing quite well on the state and local level and their control of state offices is growing. Although people pay much less attention to local politics, state legislatures have more impact on our day-to-day lives than the president.

Saying the Republican party is going to die just because it hasn’t won the presidency recently is going overboard.

6

basically yea. Trump is the best way to do it; once the Tea Party hero candidate loses, it will give the establishment GOP an excuse to tell the Tea Party to go home, allowing the GOP to possibly move to the center as Bill Clinton did to the Dems via the DLC.

7

How do you tell the Tea Party to go home? Do you demand that their members not vote in the next primary? How do you identify the Tea Party voters in order to make sure they don’t vote? How do you prevent a candidate who can provide financing independent of the party from running as a Republican?

8

You don’t give into their demands, and give them no one to vote for.

Not saying it’s easy, or even practical. But it doesn’t involve disenfranchising them as much as letting them be a demographic that can be ignored.

For the presidency, at least, it doesn’t seem like a bad idea, since appealing to them makes you less appealing to others. They cause them to lose more than they gain. Far better would be to go after more moderates.

Or, at least, that’s the wisdom I’ve heard. And it’s missing the fact that Trump is not a Tea Party candidate. He appeals only to the angry part of the Tea Party group, which is enough for a lot of them. But he’s not really aligned with them on the issues. He’s appealing to them emotionally, only. And, frankly, that’s probably why he’s doing so well, since he can do that to groups that disagree on the issues.

9

I don’t know. I remember the original Tea Party protests in 2009, before a lot of the astroturf money got in to it. I could discern no coherent message other than rage.

10

I’m sorry, I don’t understand how this can be done.

Who will be deciding which voter demands to give into? And how will they force any candidates for office to do this?

If a Republican Congressman is being primaried by the Tea Party, how do you force him to just ignore the challenge? What incentive does he have to cooperate? Do you refuse to let any Congressman who does not toe the party line from caucusing with your party, meaning you lose control of Congress?

And in the next presidential election cycle, how do you prevent a non-compliant candidate from running in the primaries? The Republican party doesn’t give people someone to vote for. The candidates step up and run with or without the central party’s approval and often win.

11

In addition to everything else, you have no idea what “Corporatist” means and it destroys a lot of your credibility.

12

No. We need to destroy the GOP in order to throw it away.

13

It’s rare to find an OP with which I find so little to agree with. This is the first attempt I’ve seen to trace Republican genealogy to the Federalists. Not sure if it’s based on anything but it is novel. It isn’t so surprising that Lincoln was chosen at a contested convention, before primaries EVERY convention was contested.

FDR “charismatic but phony”? I’ll take a guy who can defeat the Depression and the Nazis any day. It was Maine and Vermont that voted the wrong way in 1936, as seen here.

I will agree that Ike and Nixon were less ideological than the current crop of Republicans. Of course, that’s damning with faint praise indeed. Reagan may have been charismatic and a neocon, but I don’t think he was exactly lacking in corporatism. Republicans since then have been pawns of big business. I don’t see where Ted Cruz (“a quality candidate” ha ha ha ha ha) is any less so. His economic policies are straight from the Republican catechism, cut taxes, destroy government, fuck the poor. As a running mate, he selected someone with all the corporate credentials- a lack of empathy, incompetence in the business world, and enthusiasm for firing people. She’ll come in handy when it’s time to fire the campaign staff.

If Boehner and McConnell “get along to go along”, I’d hate to see what happens when genuine obstructionists are in power.

If the Republicans are dinosaurs, Donald Trump is the killer asteroid. If he destroys the Republican Party, put his face on Mt Rushmore. We may need two parties, but we’d be better off if the Democratic Party split between the progressive and moderate wings. There is nothing that Cruz, Rubio, Ryan, and Walker do that couldn’t be done better by trained Chimps.

14

This is all the GOP has – broad platitudes, no specifics. “Make government smaller!” “Remove red tape and government regulation!”

When it comes down to specifics, they don’t have anything – Cut social security? Cut medicare? Cut defense? Those are the only ways to make government smaller, but they don’t dare run on those platforms… Government regulation? Having visited some pretty unregulated countries, I’m a big fan of clean air, clean water, etc. Don’t say “remove regulation and stop binding up business with paperwork” – Which regulations are you actually proposing to remove? There are certainly some bad ones, and if we work together we can fix those, but just saying “eliminate barriers to growth” is meaningless.

If you honestly think there is a positive kind of conservatism, tell us exactly what you mean in terms of specific policy.

15

The Tea Party isn’t necessarily going to be that easy to send home. It’s no longer an easy-to-spot enemy. Its insurgents have melted within different factions, with some of the more religious tea party factions siding with Cruz, who is himself a Tea Party candidate, as was Marco Rubio. Others, though, like Sarah Palin appear to have sided with Donald Trump. The Tea Party already died, but it lives on and will continue to exert influence on the GOP until at least the end of this campaign cycle.

I mean no offense, but voters such as yourself and the OP don’t really enough background about the modern republican party’s true origins and what actually made them a pretty successful party.

And by “successful” I mean a party that could appeal to the broader masses. Sure, a lot of you will argue that the congressional mid-terms and governors’ races are evidence of success, and on the surface, it’s difficult to argue with it. But look at what these ‘victories’ have done to your party now? They’ve put it on the endangered species list.

I’ve never been a true believer in the republican party’s philosophy, which has always been slanted toward an extreme decentralization of federal power, but there have been times when it has presented legitimate counter-arguments to the excesses of the federal government. The key is to go back to being that party that presents a true alternative to big government, without being a party that embarrasses itself with its incompetence at governing. It needs to find ways to negotiating more with the opposition without sacrificing its core principles.

16

The dichotomy you draw between “libertarian” and “corporatist” Republicans is a false one. It is possible conceptually, but in fact nonexistent – do you really believe President Rand Paul or Paul Ryan or Scott Walker would be any less of a crony-capitalist than any other Republican president has been? He wouldn’t. Whatever is Halliburton’s equivalent during his Administration would get its sweetheart contracts, and any form of government regulation that forms a barrier to competition to established business interests would remain in place.

17

The astroturf money got in to it six months before the first public use of the phrase “tea party”. It’s been astroturf right from the start.

18

Are you saying Trump is the Tea Party hero? If you are, he is not. Trump is an aberration. If his failure does anything, it will embolden the Tea Party faction of the GOP.

19

The fact that the OP cites Ted Cruz as “a quality candidate” shows exactly how worthless his opinion is on anything.

20

As a principle, there might be some virtue in what you’re saying. But in practice, this usually plays out as deregulation of giant corporations. And those giant corporations then turn around and do a lot more harm to small businesses than paperwork ever did.