To be fair, there’s a lot of truth in that description. Roosevelt did put a lot of weight in his personal charisma - he sold his programs personally to the people via his “fireside chats” and such in order to build up his political strength.
And phony? It’s hard to deny that either. Roosevelt often told lies, directly or indirectly, and kept secrets. And this was in both his political and his personal life.
But politically, Roosevelt was vindicated by history. His economic programs really did lead to economic recovery (despite the denial of many modern conservatives). And his military programs were a necessary preparation to a legitimate threat.
I’ve been monitoring this board for awhile now, trying to see if anybody would ever say anything positive about Cruz. I thought he was universally despised. So, the OP had some value to me for that reason. One Cruz fan, color me shocked we have even one.
yes I am since many major Tea Party groups support him, and clearly, the TP wasn’t digging Rubio, Jeb, etc.
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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?
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The GOP reminds them that even non-TP Republicans are more conservative than Dems and the most conservative voters will get. Just how a lot of liberals in the '90s had to accept that DLCers were more liberal than Republicans and as liberal as they were gonna get.
The main thing that the GOP needs in order to save it is to get out of its bubble, gain some humility and recognize that they don’t represent a silent majority. Since Reagan the Republicans have been experts at controlling the narrative, turning the word liberal into a insult , making lower taxes, gun rights, and small government into default American values, and even having a major news Network portray their ideology as undisputed fact. This has led conservatives to the view that they represent the real America and so all that is necessary to win elections is to keep on the straight and narrow and American will line up behind them. So while Republican strategists have come up with a series of recommendations that could improve the Republican image and so their electability, the base doesn’t see any need to make any changes, and just assumes that in the end they represent the True American Majority and so don’t need to moderate their views in order to be elected.
The Democrats suffer to a lesser extent from the opposite delusion, in that even though they do have a strong fairly popular platform They constantly play defense and don’t tout their successes for fear that they will be fighting against the narrative and fail due to being too liberal.
The Democrats on the other hand have to a lesser extend had the opposite delusion. In which they seem to
That debate usually stops the instant it meets resistance. People claiming positive conservatism usually revert back to negative attacks when its pointed out to them that their policies kill people and the environment, and is bad for the poor and middle class
You change party rules to favor establishment candidates. It won’t be easy, but its not impossible. The GOP may need to go back to the backroom deals of yesteryear instead of having primaries. With enough establishment support, Reince Preibus can cancel the GOP primaries and simply put up a GOP nominee. He can say that only approved Congressmen may run as a Republican. That would both disenfranchise the Tea Party wing and piss them off so a non-significant number will leave
This meme of “businesses could do amazing things without the terrible, terrible burden of all that paperwork” is just a bunch of dingo’s kidneys. It’s a fiction, along with the aforementioned “if we cut taxes, we’ll get more money”.
If industry is unfettered by regulation (ie “paperwork or red tape”), they will pollute common resources, they will create dangerous working conditions, they will endanger public health and they will maximize profits above all else. I’m not saying the corporations are bad or evil; they will simply do what they are designed to do; make profit. It’s like saying that brakes on a car are bad, because they slow it down.
Canada’s Progressive Conservative Party dissolved in 2003. After the disastrous election of 1993, the party hobbled along, until it merged with the Alliance Party (AKA the Reform Party, born of Western separatism).
The most recent election torpedoed the most recent incarnation of Canada’s right wing, the Conservative Party of Canada (AKA the Harper Party).
The Republican Party is not going to be destroyed because there’s no party to take its place. The Whigs and Federalists went away because there were third forces that met the needs of voters at the time better and became one of the two big parties. If there was an upstart conservative party gaining a lot of support, something like UKIP in Britain, then I’d worry that the Republican party was probably done for. Since that isn’t happening, the GOP is going to change, but not be destroyed. But it does appear that Bush’s Republican Party is dead once and for all. The question now is whether the party will get back to its Reaganite roots, become a Trump style populist party(with a lot of ugly nativism as a side effect), or evolve in a more libertarian direction(The Tea Party goes “kindler, gentler” over the years). And the only reason there’s even a chance of the third option is because the primary competition to liberalism among young voters isn’t conservatism: it’s libertarianism. So that might be the only place the Republicans can go in the future. Then there’s the unthinkable fourth option: the other liberal party, but the one that promises to administer the state more competently and less corruptly, which is basically what European conservative parties are.
Don’t see how it’s relevant, either. Whatever complaints one may fairly bring against the Democrats, corruption (in the straight-up bribery sense, discounting such things as campaign funding, and speaking fees, and the Capitol Hill-K Street-Wall Street revolving door of employment, on none of which scores Pubs show themselves any better anyway) and incompetence (on which Pubs have an even worse track record) are not (much) among them. A non-conservative, technocracy-oriented GOP could not promise any improvement in those areas, it would have to differentiate itself from the Dems in some other way.
The fact that Ron Paul had such a following among the young. There are no GOP candidates who have been able to pull that off, which means that the only conservatism that young people can be swayed by is the libertarian version. I did not imply that libertarianism is up there with liberalism in terms of popularity among millenials, only that it’s the only competition that can be viable.
It’s unthinkable for us conservatives. We’ve been here before though. Arguably the party of Ike and Nixon actually was that party. They wanted to expand the state a little more slowly than Democrats did, and they wanted to manage it better with less corruption. The Reagan revolution changed all that, it gave conservatives hope in perhaps rolling back some of the liberal agenda as opposed to just regulating it a little better. And it could be that this was just a phase made possible by severe Democratic overreach and corruption leading into the 70s and 80s. The Democrats are a different party now.
That depends on who the Democratic interest groups are. Right now, the party is basically poor people and wealthy liberal elites, which means that good government is a lot more likely than it was under the previous Democratic coalition, which was the poor and unions. Unions brought a corrupting influence and a blase attitude towards the spending of taxpayer money and its use for purely political purposes to benefit the Democratic Party. The GOP was more liberal than it is today because those same types of rich liberal donors who today are staunch Democrats used to like the Republican Party and supported the more liberal Republican candidates. So the party of good government will probably be whichever party the wealthy liberal elite prefer.
Ron Paul had what now? Paul tried three times to do what Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are doing. What Paul found (unlike Sanders and Trump) is that there is no large group of voters who are interested in his message.
That says more about the man than anything else. It’s not like we’ve never had a candidate as liberal as Bernie Sanders in a Democratic primary race. The reason he succeeded where Kucinich, Mosely-Braun, and other liberal gadflys failed was the timing and his opponent. 2016 is an anti-establishment year and the old coot was running against the most establishment candidate ever with questionable progressive credentials in a field cleared for her.
Put Ron Paul running for the first time against Jeb Bush and he gets 35% of the primary vote easily.
Maine used to pride itself as being a bellweather in national elections, and reveled in the saying “As Maine goes, so goes the Nation”. After the 1936 election, the joke was “As Maine goes, so goes Vermont.”
Dunno about that. If we define “good government” in terms of socially beneficial outcomes rather than the mere absence of corruption and incompetence, then good government is impossible without representing the interests of the middle class, the working class and the poor – none of which seems to be a priority for either major party, any more.
The GOP will go on, even if by another name, because it occupies a niche that’s unreplaceable in the political system. There are two poles, liberalism and conservatism, and there will always be a major party representing each of those interests. None of the splinter groups has the capacity to maintain power, except by latching on to the GOP and working for (here’s that phrase again…) incremental change.
Hopefully it’ll be a combination of the second and fourth-essentially a more popularly oriented version of One Nation Toryism.
It also helps that Sanders is running on bread and butter socioeconomic issues and not as a cultural and antiwar radical like say Kucinich which is what has allowed him to break out of the college/elite white cage to appeal to white middle-class and working-class voters. Indeed on cultural issues Sanders is quite liberal but still more or less mainstream (and his stances on guns and immigration suggest a more pragmatic streak in that regard) and on foreign policy he’s a pragmatist, indeed almost a realist who again largely is within the Democratic Party mainstream.
Ron Paul’s support outside the ideological hardcore of libertarians were largely due to his stances on marginal issues such as opposition to the Iraq War, government spying, and War on Drugs rather then any love by Millennials for the destruction of the welfare state. Indeed I would say that most of Ron Paul’s supporters are now favouring Bernie Sanders and Donald TRUMP due to their similar anti-Establishment stances combined with saner socioeconomic views.
I mean it’s true that there always will be certain people who are more “liberal” and more “conservative” but then can have different meanings depending on the context. In contemporary China, for example the “liberals” are the ones who favour more market-driven solutions along with political reform while the conservatives are the ones who favour maintaining the supremacy of the Chinese Communist Party. And as multiparty systems show, politics does not always end up on a liberal-conservative binary. Also for that matter, most reforms in American history haven’t been incremental-they’ve tended to be clustered together at certain periods of crisis and decisive action that resulted in a whole lot of changes at once: the American Revolution, the Civil War/Reconstruction, the Progressive Era, Great Depression/World War II, and the Civil Rights Revolution/Great Society.
I define good government as noticeably less corruption and mismanagement than would normally occur. Due to the incentives in government, it actually takes a great deal of effort and political capital to make that happen, plus deep knowledge of why government tends to have corruption and mismanagement and waste.
Taxpayers have rights too, most notably the right to expect that their money will be spent wisely and with care. When Democrats threw it around like they were partying and didn’t care where it went(as long as it went to causes that would benefit them politically), taxpayers got fed up and there were consequences which are still felt today(ask California’s liberal government).
We’ve been here before though. Arguably the party of Ike and Nixon actually was that party. They wanted to expand the state a little more slowly than Democrats did, and they wanted to manage it better with less corruption. The Reagan revolution changed all that, it gave conservatives hope in perhaps rolling back some of the liberal agenda as opposed to just regulating it a little better. And it could be that this was just a phase made possible by severe Democratic overreach and corruption leading into the 70s and 80s. The Democrats are a different party now.