There was Alvin Greene. Just what the hell was that all about, anyway?
I really think its just the republicans in the modern era. If I’m wrong, someone is free to explain why.
The issue is republican voters. A huge segment of the republican party now is made up of white nationalist, proto-fascist, brainwashed, wildly ignorant people who don’t respect the constitution. You can’t have a party like that that promotes sane, thoughtful, competent politicians because the politicians those voters pick in the primary are a reflection of themselves.
It is like the criticism rural whites have had about blacks in the ghetto for years. They say ‘government can’t help them, because the people are dysfunctional’. Basically saying that when the people are dysfunctional, then the system they create is dysfunctional. Throw all the government funds and social workers at them you want, if blacks in the ghetto want to be thugs and get pregnant at 14, then they will (their argument, not mine). The culture is dysfunctional because the individuals in it are dysfunctional.
And right now a huge % of GOP voters are dysfunctional. Something like 71% of GOP voters didn’t even believe the accusations against Moore. How can you have a party where 70% of voters just choose to ignore reality when it doesn’t make them feel good, and expect them to make sane, intelligent decisions? It won’t happen. Huge segments of the GOP think climate change is a hoax, creationism is real, America has the best health care on earth, Obama destroyed our reputation, Trump rebuilt it, etc.
GOP politicians are a reflection of their voters. Democratic voters are nowhere near as brainwashed, irrational and hostile to the constitution as GOP voters, hence our politicians are a lot more sane.
I have a strong personal bias towards the democrats and against the GOP but this is my impression of the situation.
Having said that, I think democrats aren’t very good at politics. We pick candidates who suck at running elections and appealing to voters. But our politicians aren’t crazy because our voters aren’t crazy.
IIRC, Fieger was a democrat.
Apologies to BobLibDem for the above post…I incorrectly thought he was referring to Fieger as a whacko Republican candidate. My error.
Carry on…
It didn’t used to be this way. Here were the main contestants of the 1980 Republican Primary:
Reagan
John Connally
John Anderson
Howard Baker
George HW Bush
Phil Crane of Illinois
Bob Dole
That’s five moderates and 2 conservatives. In many states, the combined moderate total exceeded the combined conservative total. But the moderates split the ballot, giving Reagan a big opening when Connally dropped out early on.
Note: I had to use some weasel words. I think you can argue that an approval voting system could have led to a different result, but it’s not a slam dunk.
Corey Robin is working on his 2nd edition of The Reactionary Mind. I look forward to it (not having read the first edition). His take is that Reactionaries have been unattractive and authoritarian for centuries. It seems that they are a growing share of the GOP.
The professional class is a natural fit for a conservative party, but not a reactionary or bigoted one. That class has been trending Democratic since the Southern Strategy was adopted by Nixon. Bill Clinton accelerated this trend.
IMO Wesley really nailed it. To be sure, he’s talking about the most extreme portion of the Rs. But what’s different, as Little Nemo said, is how far off-center & how large a fraction of the total self-identify as fringe.
Also how geographically concentrated the non-fringe is. There totally *is *a principled traditional pro-Corporate Wealth / Strong Foreign Policy wing within the 2017 Rs. But they’re real concentrated in just a few districts. In much of the rest of the country Wesley’s wild-eyed dysfunctionaries reign supreme.
nm (wrong thread)
And, despite being so crazy, the GOP voters are all convinced that they are actually the normal, run-of-the-mill Americans, and are convinced that they are the overwhelming majority of voters.
So, when they do lose an election, they never stop to think that it was because they were too extreme - they always conclude that they weren’t extreme enough, because obviously no one wanted to vote for that “RINO” who just lost the election. They’re convinced that if they find a candidate who isn’t a “RINO”, there will be a massive up-swell of those right-wing voters who all stayed home the last election, giving them a landslide victory.
This is also why they’re so fond of the conspiracy theories about illegal voting - it explains why their “obvious majority” so often gets fewer votes.
When you cater and kowtow to the faith- and emotion-based populace, you’re not gonna wind up with a bunch of principled deep thinkers.
The staff at 538 appears to agree with Wesley.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/can-the-gop-stop-running-toxic-candidates/
[INDENT][INDENT]micah: But when someone identifies as conservative these days, part of what they mean is “anti-establishment.”
clare.malone: Right. Most people don’t think in DW-Nominate scores; they think in terms of where their views fall on our cultural spectrum. And conservatism has taken on new contours — it’s not about economics anymore.
Right? Or, that’s not the motivating factor for voters.
natesilver: I don’t think “conservative” is a good term to describe those characteristics. Among other reasons, because it’s quite a radical viewpoint in some ways.
…
micah: But anti-establishment sentiment seems to correlate so strongly with “conservative,” Nate.
So, it’s like: There’s nothing about old-school conservatism that leads to toxic candidates. But contemporary conservatism is, in part, defined by anti-establishmentism. And that does lead to toxic candidates.
natesilver: Right and then we had a test case — named Donald Trump — who kept all the anti-establishment parts and dropped the movement conservatism. And he did just great. It’s just one data point, but a pretty influential one.
…
micah: I think we’re having a semantics debate and in fact we all agree.
clare.malone: This is what we have to do when we agree!
…
micah: OK, so far we have: Republicans are more prone to nominating toxic candidates because anti-establishmentism has become so core to the party.
But why has anti-establishmentism become so core?
And why can’t they nominate an anti-establishment candidate who nonetheless appeals to a broad swath of a general electorate?
natesilver: Because anti-establishmentism is sort of defined by opposition to established order, and the established order is usually popular.
clare.malone: Conservatism is about, on a simplistic level, reducing government intrusion, allowing people the freedom to think and act as they like, within reason. (If you want to see a version of “think and act as they like, with no bounds of reason,” talk to some folks at a Libertarian convention.)
When the culture is moving at rapid clip toward cultural liberalism — the acceptance of what was not long ago considered out of the norm, such as allowing women to have abortions, gay marriage, the widespread acceptance of premarital sex — then you see more and more candidates capitalizing on an appeal to people who feel more and more like they are in an out group.
micah: Oh god, Clare … your inbox will suffer for that libertarian comment.
harry: It’s also important that Republicans don’t have a sizable group of base voters who are generally pro-establishment. Democrats have that with African-American voters, who delivered the nomination to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
natesilver: Now, in theory, anti-establishmentism could morph into populism, which can be more successful as a long-term, majoritarian political strategy. But that would require Republicans to give up putting so much emphasis on things like tax cuts. [/INDENT][/INDENT]
Can The GOP Stop Running Toxic Candidates?
The top of the article provides a list of past GOP toxic candidates. The bottom discusses just how hard it would be to dig themselves out of this hole. Reality is a cruel mistress.
Elephant in the back of the room: the primary system is nuts and properly isn’t used by any other advanced democracy is a significant way. I’m all for voters choosing their favorite candidate. But the primary is about choosing who will be on the ballot. That’s a different decision.
And first past the post/winner take all/plurality voting adds a level of dysfunction on top of that.
Not that Roy Blunt’s Senate seat is particularly vulnerable, but I expect Jason Kander was hurt, in part, by his ties to Hillary Clinton.
I don’t know about the rest.
Yes, the primary system often leads to extreme candidates. It wasn’t supposed to do that; it was supposed to take the nominating process out of the hands of the party establishments (“smoke-filled rooms”) and put it into the hands of the voters. It didn’t because voters ignored the primaries in droves, leaving the nominating process to the most committed, who were often the most extreme. Although no voting system is perfect (Arrow’s theorem), there are better and worse and I think instant runoff may be the best. But the current system is dreadful.
In Canada, most candidates are nominated by a “riding association” which generally consists of party insiders. But, no candidate is allowed to run under a party label unless endorsed by the party leader. And the party leader can substitute any person he wants, although this happens only rarely. But this has the consequence that the party leader can essentially dictate to each member of parliament to vote or risk being thrown out of the party and denied reelection. I don’t like that aspect, but it does get things done that the prime minister wants. That’s how we got decent health care in 1970, for example. You pays your money and you takes your choice.
Historically, it wasn’t even suppose to do that. It was suppose to avoid a repeat of the 1968 Democratic convention. States would choose their delegates using open procedures and affirmative action: it was about transparency. The unintended consequence was the primary system, which turned out to be the most straightforward and politically safest method on the ground to adhere to the guidelines.
The report was written in less than 9 months.
The actual left is more threatening to capitalism than the right, which is why about as far left the corporate media goes is liberal pablum like NPR, MSNBC, or CNN. There’s no analogues limit as far as going to the right, and such a tendency is useful for moving the Overton window away from the left. This is also why liberals tend to choose fascism over socialism.
This sentence broke my brain. Democrats are the ones writing nostalgic pieces about the lost golden age of moderate centrism. They’re obsessed with compromise, reaching across the aisle, and bipartisan consensus, and they’re praising swell guys like McCain and the Bush family. Moderate Republicans were purged in the Tea Party revolt.
Yeah, I don’t know where Little Nemo lives, but the GOP is decidedly not a moderate party in most of the USA.
Oh, wait, Western New York. It’s his marked location. Well, that explains it.
There are moderate Republicans in other states. But most GOP state parties, as far as I know, have not been moderate in a generation. They are driven by anti-tax maniacs and crooks who want to make money from influence peddling.
Generally speaking Little Nemo is a very astute observer of this stuff.
I suspect what he really meant was more like there are “country club Main street Republicans” and there are “Southern-fried cultural reactionary Republicans”.
For 40+ years now the leadership has tried to attract both groups both by talking out of two sides of their mouth. The fissures have now gotten so far into the open that nobody can still pretend they don’t exist or that they can’t see them.
I am reading a subtext here that asks “Is this normal?”
I suspect, if you live your life in the United States, a vast country with few land borders and not that vulnerable to being pushed around by other nations, you may have a sample size for how political parties behave close to two.
Speaking as someone who has lived in a couple of different European countries as well as the US and followed politics… no, it is not normal. Not for a major party in the developed world.
Trump is in fact closer to normal than the current trajectory of the Republican Party. I can think of several other cases where populist self-promoters have hijacked the machinery of a political party for their own aggrandisement like a virus takes over cell machinery.
But the number of extreme candidates fielded by the Republicans… to me it resembles two things. Either a very fringe minority party whose worldview overlaps only slightly with the voting majoritys, or a very immature democracy where voters have little cultural ballast for judging what a political candidate should be like.
Possibly the biggest problem with the republican party is the average republican voter.
The average republican voter is a young earth creationist, a birther, rejects sexual assault allegations against Trump and Moore, rejects climate change, rejects evolution, and supports establishing christianity as the official national religion. Every single one of those is either a position held by a majority of republican voters, or a position where a solid majority are unsure or agree with the side of the question that is not just wrong but fucking insane (birtherism and evolution, to be precise).
The republican base is made up primarily of people who believe a lot of very crazy, very wrong things. And the more radical one of these people are, the more likely they are to vote in the primary. And they do - for most republican congressmen, the fear of getting primaried is considerably more substantial than the fear of being replaced by a democrat - they’re in safe districts, but they might not quite be radical enough (see also: Eric Cantor, any number of other republicans who lost their seats to a Tea Partier). And as a result, you get a candidate who lost his last elected office as a judge because he believed that he could ignore a supreme court judgment. Or a candidate who knows nothing about governance and may actually have serious, disqualifying mental disorders, but sure is good at stickin’ it to those dems.
There’s more to the story than that, obviously, but that’s a pretty good place to start.
The problem is, that’s a pretty big portion of the electorate, and catering to them is going to turn off a lot of other people. So you’re necessarily going to end up with a situation where one party is, for all intents and purposes, the stupid party. And that’s disturbing.
The important thing to remember is that the Morlocks may have been dumb but it was the Eloi who were getting eaten.