I guess the one figure, that no one has disputed, that spurred this OP is the stat that 99% of Catholic women have used (or, I guess, will use) some form of birth control in the lives, which seems like a tough base for Santorum to appeal to with an argument that “birth control is not okay.” Now, sure, SOME of that 99% will peel off and vote for him, but it seems like Catholic women would necessarily form a large part of Santorum’s base and he’s basically telling a large part of his base that they’re not okay.
Tell me, because I really don’t know. When we talk about “The GOP” or “The Republicans” and we anthropomorphize that, is it accurate? Is there a monolithic or very tightly controlled thought there? Is there a board that decides what “The GOP position” is on any controversial topic? Or do we really mean, “A bunch of the people that identify as and are members of the Republican Party”? As in, “a bunch of the people that identify as and are members of the Republican Party are against raising taxes on the wealthy”?
I see it as unlikely that the party will go away. Simply mathematically speaking, third parties are exceedingly unlikely to gain enough votes to win anything truly significant while a two-party system in entrenched. The most they’ll do is bleed off enough votes to make the greater of the two remaining evils the successor.
So I don’t see the GOP going anywhere, because a serious plays politics politician is going to pick R or D, whichever is closer to his goals. To do otherwise is politically unwise.
The shift in Republican values will occur, to be sure. But that’s because the values of the people calling themselves Republicans will shift. The GOP isn’t an elephant with a single mind, it’s a hydra.
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I guess the one figure, that no one has disputed, that spurred this OP is the stat that 99% of Catholic women have used (or, I guess, will use) some form of birth control in the lives, which seems like a tough base for Santorum to appeal to with an argument that “birth control is not okay.” Now, sure, SOME of that 99% will peel off and vote for him, but it seems like Catholic women would necessarily form a large part of Santorum’s base and he’s basically telling a large part of his base that they’re not okay.
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Sure, but that’s why Santorum is (I hope I hope) not going to win the election. It’s not the demise of the party. Next time, someone who calls himself a Republican but isn’t against contraception will run against Santorum, and possibly win the nomination. It doesn’t mean the Republicans will disband and not run another candidate against the Democrats in the next election, just that the people who attract attention and run under their banner may have different goals and ideas.
This is why the Republican Party of today is so different from the Republican Party of yesteryear. Try explaining to a 7 year old what “Republican” means, and it’s enough to make you tear your hair out!
(And, just to be clear, the same exact things with different examples is true of the Democratic Party. I’m not trying to bash one side, here.)
The birth control issue is a distraction. Was it ever an issue before Obama brought it into the spotlight? No. Don’t confuse what Republicans do while campaigning in a primary with an incumbent Democratic president and what the party might or might not do in the future.
It’s a total loser of a position that Santorum is making central to his campaign, in which, need I remind you?, he is doing pretty well with GOP voters, a large number of whom I have to assume support him on his anti-contraception position.
Of course, that large number is in the GOP itself, not nationally. But Santorum is pretty successful at getting Romney to commit further to the right on social issues to nail down the GOP nomination, which will result for more “flipflopping” accusations in the general election when he tries to disown those positions.
But what does any of that have to do with the end of the GOP?
The GOP has lost the birth control fight - there isn’t a serious policy question here at all about the legality or availability of birth control. Even Santorum has moderated his position on this (he earlier claimed he supported the right of states to ban contraception, now he says he doesn’t).
Gay rights are likely to go the same way, IMO.
Politics pretty much requires an opposition party. And in the current environment it seems much more likely that the GOP remains that opposition with some slight modifications in policy and tone than a new party springing up to replace them (or even more unlikely that somehow everybody just becomes Democrats).
Look at the UK’s Conservative Party if you want to see what a GOP 25 years from now could look like.
Similarly you can find any number of positions (current or historical) on which the Democratic party has modified its views over time.
He’s not making it central to his campaign.
Historicaly, the GOP has often had to deal with some major factional upeavals. In the 1880’s, civil service reform split it between the Stalwart and the Mugwumps. When the Stalwart Chester Arthur became president over the dead body of reformist Garfield, the inevitable conspiracy theories compelled reform none the less.
Anteceding the prospect of the GOP’s tacit approval of abortion, UHC, etc. was the policy of McKinley to always support business interests over labor and consumers. But when Teddy Roosevelt took office, he appropriated many of William Jennings Bryan’s initiatives to benefit the working class; the Square Deal, Full Lunch Pail, food and drug purity, etc. It simply had to be done or the alternative would have been strikes, rioting and assassination, or even worse: the Demorcrats in office.
In 1950, the GOP had to decide if it was going to go back to small-government with Robert Taft, or assume the mantle of world leadership under Eisenhower; which required retention of many Democrat New Deal programs. Taft decided the issue when asked about rising food prices. He was quoted as saying “Eat less meat, and eat less extravagantly,” which cost him the nomination (and confirms what we think when we see Medicare recipients protesting UHC: voters like subsidization, so long as they are the ones being subsided)
If you look at the polling on whether religious institutions should be required to provide health insurance plans with birth control, the country is pretty evenly divided. As long as the GOP keep this as a religious freedom issue, it’s not a losing stand. And remember, we’re still in the primary season. It’s a very popular issue on the right, when it’s a freedom of Religion thing.
The churches that control the Republican Party have always believed that not only abortion but also contraception and indeed all forms of sex besides that between married opposite-gender white people are wrong and should be stamped out by the government. They have never wavered in this belief. All we are seeing is a slightly more explicit statement of this value than usual. It has been “an issue” in conservative dog-whistle circles for decades. The idea of the Republican Party as a base of secret libertarians who just want to lower taxes and leave people alone, or of the fictional “neoconservatives” who only care about foreign policy, is a falsehood perpetuated by people on the other side who gained some value within their own base from stating it. Social conservatism of the sadistic variety is and always has been the Republican rallying point ever since the 1960s realignment.
The OP does bring to mind a question I have often asked myself - why are our national elections so close. I mean, there are electoral landslides, but even in the largest defeats the loser gets 40% of the vote (in a two-way race). It’s rather a miracle, no?
The only way that is possible is if the parties are actually rather nimble at getting themselves aligned around the center of the electorate (or, conversely, moving the electorate towards their respective positions).
The Catholic Church, the largest organization opposing birth control, has never taken a stance that it should be illegal in the US. So, no.
When someone comes in and makes that argument, you can pull this out as a rebuttal. Until then, it’s just a strawman.
An interesting opinion, but not one supported by facts.
That’s a good question, Jas09, and I think the answer is that parties adapt towards the center, in the short run, and in the long run, both parties grow more progressive with time. The GOP as I see it has committed to views that are out of step right now, and right now they’re doubling-down on those positions, which is harmful in the short term. In the long-term, I think they’re going to have to get more progressive, but it may be a while before much of their base comes around to accepting that.
The first.
And I don’t mean to get bogged down in discussions of Santorum’s campaign specifically, just to point out that a successful GOP campaign uses issues that polled much better in the recent past than they do today, and much of their current support is with older GOP voters rather than younger. Being gung-ho anti-abortion, anti-women’s-health, anti-gay-marriage, etc. IOW is still a viable route to the GOP nomination, but it doesn’t look very viable for long.
There’s just too much value in the brand for the GOP to die. It’s a bit like how Coke didn’t die after coming out with New Coke.
Even if things like contraceptives, Terri Shiavo, and perhaps eventually same sex marriage reflect present Republican politicians badly miscalculating in regards to what the people want, the party won’t go away.
Just like the Democratic Party of the early 20th century reflected/represented a dramatically different constituency than the present Democratic Party does.
Now, if we lived in a society with multiple parties competing for different segments of the population, perhaps the present Republicans would die out, since the people they fail to represent would move on. But here and now? No.
If you look at the Republican party in 1865, it bears almost no resemblance to today’s Republican party. Like the Ship of Theseus, a northern, urban, abolitionist, liberal party has transformed into a southern, rurual, conservative white people’s party. But it’s still the Republican Party.
So yes, the future Republican party will have a different party platform than today’s Republican party. In 50 years it might be completely unrecognizable, that’s long enough for the current party stalwarts to have died off and a brand new crop of kids to take over the party.
But whatever happens, no matter how badly the current crop of Republicans ruin the brand, the dessicated corpse of the Republican party (or Democratic party) will still be extremely valuable, much more valuable than some third party. So even if the current crop of idiots run the Republicans off a cliff, the Republican party isn’t going to be finished. What will happen is that reformers will take over the crashed party, and use the already existing party infrastructure to push their own agenda. Eventually some of these reformers will hit upon a combination of policies that appeal to the electorate, and these people will be the core of the new old party.
I agree with this–that’s why I say “the death of a major political party as such” in the OP. I’m not actually claiming that the GOP will cease to exist, if only because of the value of the brand-name. What I’m suggesting is that as long as the generation of old white men who form the GOP base are still around, they’re going to have problems competing for the national vote. When that group begins to die off, literally, in maybe 20 years, the GOP can compete in national elections with a considerably more progressive platform.
I’m not even claiming that they’ll lose every national election over the next 20 or so years–as I said, you get a bad economic downturn (such as we just had) or a bad Democratic candidate, or an exceptionally charismatic GOP candidate, or some combination thereof, and they could pull off a national election in the near future. But I don;t see them becoming a strong national party again until their platform catches up with the voting public, and I don;t see that happening while their core voters are male, and white, and old.
That just doesn’t make sense in light of the elections in 2010 and the seemingly toss-up nature of the presidential election this year.
And, like I said, politicians can change positions surprisingly quickly. If national sentiment turned against the platform of the GOP it wouldn’t take nearly 20 years to change it, no matter what the “old, white” guys think.
By the way, the Republicans control the House, are at near-enough parity in the Senate to threaten to retake control in any given election year and filibuster anything, and very well might win the next Presidential election. As great as it would be for the vile and inhuman ideas of the Republican Party to evaporate from the Earth, there is no reason to believe it is happening beyond wish-fulfillment and thinking one’s own circle of friends represents the whole country. A great deal of Americans do in fact support the sort of caveman nonsense that Republicans are into–don’t have a conversation about homosexuality with a black churchgoer or a guy who works at a dock if you want it to end well. But, those groups vote Democratic for other reasons. As we’ve seen when this sort of issue has been put to a direct referendum, e.g. in California, even places that vote overwhelmingly for Obama for President will, at the same time and with the same electorate, vote for barbarous social ideologies.
Political realignment in America might result in two economically leftist parties, with the larger, far stronger one also being Christian supremacist. Be careful what you wish for.
Yeah, because we all know that old white men and their policies never get any national play.