Are we still allowed to bet for Quatloos here? I think we are.
See, that’s where they getcha: in their opinion, this country was founded as a place for people to seek money and power. To them, that is the only real purpose that a Real American™ has.
I just can’t take this effort seriously as a sign of an imminent split. It’s apparently being organized by inveterate fabulist Miles Taylor, who wrote the anonymous Times article about how there was a massive “resistance” within the Trump Administration that turned out to be just him daydreaming from his subterranean office as a mid-level underling at DHS. He’s intentionally vague about what exactly this letter is going to demand or threaten, and I fully expect that it will come well short of declaring or promising a break with the Republican party. Moreover, the recognizable names listed as potentially signing are all out off office, many for decades, and have no influence with today’s Republican voters or officeholders.
I don’t think this is a step toward anything, just an attempt by Taylor to extend his fleeting moment of relevance. A split in the GOP will only come if and when the Republicans experience clear electoral consequence for their actions – something that hasn’t happened yet and is unlikely to happen in 2022.
Like losing the Senate and the Presidency? They are backing the loser and even though he had over 70 million votes he still lost. So the plan is to rig the state elections so that the loser has a better chance of winning again. Pathetic.
I agree with others here that this is a big nothing.
However, let’s pretend it was something – an actual movement to break away from the GOP by Republicans in power who could draw votes. Which would you prefer? A third party or for them to join the Democrats?
I think I’d prefer a third party. Their policies are still all ridiculous (for example, economy is bad? Lower taxes. Economy is good? Lower taxes) and I don’t really want them to influence the Democratic Party’s platform, which I think is much better thought out and backed by evidence.
However, a third party could have the effect of splitting Republican votes, leading to more Democratic victories and a better chance to implement their agenda. If they just joined the Democrats, many voters would still just vote for the Republican, aside from their bad influence on the Dem policies.
What say you? Any Republicans want to chime in?
It could be more significant than you might imagine but they need more people, and they need to create a type of shock event in the form of a mass walkout on the Republican party. If it’s a defection here or a quiet withdrawal into public life there, that won’t work.
But the bottom line is that the Bush Republicans, the RINOs, have to accept that their party is absolutely dead. There is no going back to being a normal Republican party again - ever. It is over. It is dead. It is the modern Whig party. They have to accept that they have allowed the Nazification of their party. The country has perhaps as little as two years for them to come to that realization, or the country may well slide irrevocably into a broken, dysfunctional democracy that either results in outright authoritarianism or civil conflict and potential dissolution of the country as we now know it and see it on the map.
At some point during the Trump presidency I finally realized there wasn’t anything he could do that would turn a significant number of his supporters against him. But I had a glimmer of hope that this would happen after Trump sicced his followers on the legislature back in January. At the time, it seemed as though many Republicans were reeling at their realization that if the vice president wasn’t safe from Trump’s wrath then he could turn against any of them. But the Republicans were quick to forgive Trump.
I don’t hold out any hope that Republicans will turn against Trump any time soon. I don’t know if he’ll be healthy enough to run for office in a few years, but I’m assuming he’s going to play king maker at least.
Politics is an expectations game, and in nearly every downballot race Republicans beat expectations. Yes Trump lost the Presidency, but the other officeholders who won in 2020 have every reason to believe that his presence on the ticket helped them win.
It’s going to take a clear, undeniable repudiation of the Republican brand by voters for the GOP to do any real soul searching or for a significant portion of the party to split. This could come as early as 2022 – expectations (including mine!) are sky-high for Republicans in a Democratic President’s mid-term. If they lose seats it would be almost unprecedented and could push some Republicans to decide that their only hope for survival is to ditch the “R” after their name.
Trump isn’t the threat, but Trumpism is. The fact is the vast majority of the GOP is in favor of white-nationalism and violent opposition to democracy for all Americans. What should be the headline is that only dozens of Republicans threaten to split from the GOP. It’s proof that the GOP is the party for violent racists.
This is spot on. And they believe this because while idiot fuck knuckles like ‘Dr Ron Paul’ doing away with the Fed is great fodder for televised right wing political froth, it’s a potentially disastrous scenario for their neo-liberal economic landscape and they know it. I also suspect that, behind the wall of piety that they’ve put up all these years, they are none too thrilled to realize that the religious crazies have designs on creating a strict God state, and that Republican misrule, under the wrong circumstances, could make that a reality.
But I think the other reason that formerly mainstream Republicans are conflicted is that they don’t know what to do now. The Bushes, the Cheneys, the Frums, the Bill Kristols and Frank Luntzes of the world used to be the gatekeepers of the party. There was order and hierarchy. There were established rules, and there were intellectual Republicans at the top of that order. They were the ones who organized the fundraisers behind closed doors and so forth. These Republicans are, in effect, landlords locked out of their own property. The populist element has taken over the party. This impacts them because, as has been pointed out before, there’s an entire social, political, and ecosystem outside of public office. These are people who use their careers in Washington and elsewhere to get on Boards and executive committees; or get paid handsomely to act as ‘consultants’. They get paid to speak at certain fancy dinners. They do well after leaving office because they’re still involved in the system. But they’re being threatened with exile, and in some cases, worse. The crazies have an entirely different idea of how the country should be run, and it doesn’t necessarily involve winning in the marketplace of ideas. It involves using your administrative, legal, and police power to crush their opponents.
I think this gets to a big part of the issue - I think they think they’re still these huge influential figures to center-right voters. They’re not. There are actually voters who are on the margins between being solid GOP supporters and being capable of voting Democrat or not voting at all. This group of people has never viewed Trump as all that dangerous, in spite of a litany of high-minded, supposedly influential conservative and moderate figures telling them that for the last 6 years. Going back to the 2016 primary, when the cost to oppose Trump to their own values was basically zero almost none of them cared enough to get behind Rubio, Kasich etc.
The other issue is that most of these groups that are trying to save conservatism in America are still refusing to address the biggest single issue right now, which is the GOP’s attack on voting rights.
I believe it is called trickle down economics. And it works. Sorta. For them anyway.
This ^ this ^ and this ^.
Indeed, I wonder if anyone has asked our heroine of the Day, or Kenzinger, or Romney if they object the voting restrictions and other forms of procedural warfare that have been implemented. They aren’t nearly as vocal about that; they’re just vocal about their dislike for Trump as the leader of the party.
It’s conservatism, and specifically American conservatism, itself that is the problem. A country that still actively defers to and reveres a political and economic system that is rooted in the exploitation of people is ultimately incompatible with more modern forms of democracy and understanding of human progress.
There’s no better example of that than Liz Cheney’s father and their neo-con circles, who rather than operating in a world in which countries support human rights across the board, still insisted on living in a world in which they worked with dictators who were allied with their interests and overthrow regimes that did not.
I read somewhere that something like 75% registered Republican voters still believe the election was stolen. Can this party be saved?
I doubt it.
Is it worth saving?
I laughed.
It seems to me there are two kinds of people who object to the presidential election results.
The first kind are the people who were tricked into thinking that the election was stolen. They still believe in the importance of representation through elections, and the will of the people choosing those in power, and because they think that somehow the election was stolen that democracy is under threat. If there was any way those people could be convinced that the election was not only not stolen but that the steal is implausible, and that the election had greater scrutiny and protections than in previous years, I’d have hope for them. It’s probably futile but maybe. Their hearts are in the right place even if their critical thinking skills are lacking.
The second kind are those who just don’t like that “their guy” lost so want any excuse to attack the winning side. They will openly rail about a stolen election even though they know it didn’t happen. Or maybe they are even fooling themselves as a way to cope with how badly it reflects on them that they put faith in a loser.
I see a lot of overlap between the two. I see some hope that at least some of the people objecting do believe in democracy, they just don’t realize that they are strangling it to death by objecting to legitimate election results. That’s all that I can hope for going forward.
Yeah, what does saving the GOP even mean? When wasn’t it a racist movement, bent of preventing people of color from having equal access to the ballot box and prosperity? Certainly not in my life time.
The question is, will the GOP bring down America as it collapses?
Thoughts and prayers, obviously.
I seriously doubt it. Losing seats in the midterm will just prove to them there is fraud going on and they need to enact even more “voting reforms”.