I’d say yes, except that I’m not sure that it can be done without the support of Fox News. And the problem there is that, to convince them, you would need to get them to accept that crapping in your own bed is a bad idea.
If you’re in a position where you have to convince someone that it’s dumb to crap in the same bed that they sleep in…you’re not dealing with someone who is easy to convince of things.
Right wing journalism has become so intensely focused on rejecting anything negative within the Republican party that it’s like a runaway train at this point. When you’ve gone so far, for so long, it’s kind of like being told that the person you love and married has been molesting your own children for the whole time you’ve known them. Some people will hear that, accept that it’s true, and get a divorce; others will simply decide that it’s not true, push the idea out of their mind, and call their own children liars. The right wing media is now entirely populated by people of the second type.
There’s probably no way to come back from that except to have someone at the top of the company - who’s hopefully still at least somewhat sane - to start hiring in better people. But, to do that, he’d have to dump the real bread winners of the network like Carlson and Hannity. And trying to do that, the big names will probably just move to some other network, or start their own. The viewers will all move with them, you won’t have accomplished much, and the head honcho at Fox will need to hire them back or (more likely) will have stopped them from leaving to begin with.
The moderates, really, just need to grab the moderates from the left and the Libertarians, and launch a new party. The Forward Party has, possibly, started this process but it needs to go a lot farther and convince some big names - George W Bush, Michael Pence, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mitch McConnell, etc. to move over.
There are open minded Republicans of sorts. (Cheney, Kinzinger) but I would call neither “moderate”. These two are being run right out of the game. By Republicans.
If there was a moderate Republican, they too would be run out on a rail by the rest of the Captain Insano party.
(Are we at the point where people claim that Mitt Romney is moderate? Thanks, Trump.)
Again, this has been decades in the making. Overturning Roe V Wade (one example) has been in the works for over a generation. Republicans have been working on walking back voting protections for black voters in the south for decades. Trump is well within the mainstream of the party, except that he doesn’t talk in dog whistles.
That was how I was, once upon a time. None of those line items were anything I felt strongly about, and a couple of those items (about the rights of LGBTQ people) I was on the opposite spectrum from them. (For example, I was voting for R candidates even when I voted to approve gay marriage in my state in the same election.) Guns, abortion, climate change, those were just issues that I didn’t care much about.
But the right wing got too radical for me and once I opened myself up to other points of view, forget it. I’m on the left now. They’ve lost me forever.
Exactly this. There hasn’t been a real “moderate Republican” in decades. When the conservative movement was born in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, the die was cast. What we have now is the inevitable result. Nixon might not have been a conservative in terms of policy, but he put the party well on the path to the present.
I think the Republican Party brand is forever tarnished. The GOP will always be associated with QAnon and tiki torches.
If the displaced moderates formed a new party based on being sane conservatives, it I think it would only serve to split the right vote. Which shouldn’t be discouraged. But I can’t see that happening. And it wouldn’t be tolerated by TFG. It would be seen as a challenge that needs to be put down. And his goons would do it.
Will normal political discourse be the offramp from the current state of the American right?
I’ve looked over their site and their so-called platform and as a life-long Libertarian I nothing to attract me.
That may be because I was in the anarchist-lite branch of the party, not the Republican-lite branch. As I’ve said earlier, they will find it far more difficult to get candidates on the ballot than they can possible imagine.
Ergo, they haven’t done what I suggested. Everyone will need to compromise to launch a new party that’s competitive - and that will mean widening and simplifying the platform.
Though, that said, you should remember that it doesn’t need to be a good platform - it just needs to be better than the other platforms.
My job is about 90% maga’s, and they are saying it’s all a show to keep Trump from running in '24. They also seem to believe that since he’s ex-president, he gets briefed on national security so he’s allowed to take the documents. When I bring up that he lost in '20, they all say that he won, and the election was stolen from him.
I live in a CSA of almost 1.2 million, but my job tends to attract people from the outskirts of the metro area. I realize this anecdotal.
When I bring up that he lost in '20, they all say that he won, and the election was stolen from him.
I’m not even hearing the old Republican talking points of needing a businessman to be in charge anymore.
I don’t think there are many moderates left in the Republican party.
I’m going to disagree with many of the posters here on the sentiment that “the GOP has been extreme for a long time”. There are different levels of extreme, and I think it’s a whole different class now. Way beyond what most people thought possible.
And I absolutely think it’s the best chance the moderates may have to regain control of the party. I doubt very much that they will, but that’s a different point. If they don’t try to steer the ship now, the chance will be gone forever. Frankly, it may already be too late. They’ve cultivated a mass of people that will choose to believe a narrative where the other guys are literal pedophiles and satanists, and “don’t believe your lying eyes” about anything that contradicts that story.
It’s too late. A right-wing party that rejects Liz Cheney has no values remaining. All that’s left for former Republicans is helping restore democracy.
Not entirely true. Charlie Baker, governor of Massachusetts, is one, and is immensely popular in the Bay State with all parties. He’d probably make a good President. But he’s pretty much the exception that proves your rule; he wouldn’t stand a chance in any red state.
Honestly, at this point, I have exactly zero respect, sympaty, or, for that matter, concern for so-called moderates in the Republican party. They condemned the party and the country to not only the worst person to ever become president, but also to those who enable him to this day. The Republican party needs to be relegated to the dustbin of history.
And they’ve been training their constituents in ignorance and denial for a long time, beginning at least back in the 1980s with their fantasies about “trickle down economics” and anti-evolutionary “intelligent design” narratives in schools. Critical thinking has been a liability for them, and that’s finally coming back to bite them. (At least to some extent. I’m jumping to no conclusions yet about how much rampant Republican irrationalism and corruption will actually weaken Republican political power.)
The GOP and its media propaganda outlets have for decades been deliberately encouraging their voters to be less informed, less openminded, less self-critical, more credulous about Party-line rhetoric, and more paranoid and distrustful of any other viewpoints. If that has now reached a point where a large number of their supporters are simply no longer functionally capable of rational thought, they really have only themselves to blame.
(Mind you, I’m not trying to claim that Democrats have no voters incapable of rational thought. There are at least some reality-detached wackadoodles in every ideology. But the Democratic wackadoodles are a much smaller percentage of the total, and receive much less approval and encouragement from the party mainstream, than the Republican ones.)