You may be right. Does anyone know: is there any historical precendent (anywhere in the world) for a political party getting as bad as the GOP and then “coming back” and becoming moderate and sensible?
I don’t know the answer to your question. I have a corollary question – is there historical precedent for the kind of two entrenched party system that the USA has? I imagine it makes it harder to change.
I think we used to have the Whigs and the Democratic-Republicans. The Whigs went away and the DRs split, right? 150 years later and that’s where we still are.
My understanding is that the Democratic-Republicans became what is today the Democratic Party, and the Whig Party became, or was replaced by, the Republican Party. (The Republican Party was a new party, many of whose members were former Whigs (e.g. Abraham Lincoln).)
In the mid-19th century, "Radical Republicans" meant something different than it does today: they were the ones who were most fervently anti-slavery and pro-civil rights.
I came in to post something like this, but Kimstu already said it better. The rabid state of the Republican electorate was created by design, through decades of crazy right wing talk radio and Fox news, funding of right wing think tanks, etc. The GOP elites thought they could control it, but it turns out…they can’t. It would take further decades of careful messaging to undo the all the damage.
Which has been, in recent years, a talking point that I’ve seen trotted out by some GOP supporters, when their party and their politicians get criticized on race. “Hey! We’re the Party of Lincoln! We worked to free the slaves, and the Democrats opposed that!” (Also, “Hey! All of those Southern racists who opposed the Civil Rights movement were Democrats!”)
Yeah, that was 160 years ago, and 60 years ago, respectively, and your party today looks very little like it did back then. (Also, most of those “Southern racists” who were Democrats in the 1960s would now be Republicans.)
Agreed. I’ve said it many times in many threads but as long as elected officials have re-election as their number one priority (even at he the expense of democracy itself), nothing will change. Term limits may not be a complete answer but it would be a start. Power corrupts. We are getting dangerously close to absolute power in this country and a substantial fraction of the electorate is just fine with that.
Yes, you put it much better than I did.
When I have encountered MAGAts (for want of a better term), I can’t even say we disagree, because “disagree” implies people understanding the concept of an opinion, and the notion of trying to defend it with objective arguments and/or facts.
Instead, they just throw out crazy stories and if you patiently explain how one can’t possibly be true, they just throw out another.
It’s pretty scary to think of millions of people “thinking” in this way.
Agree that @kimstu nailed it, and I’ll add that your distillation thereof is a thing of beauty.
I’ll add for my long-winded part that somewhere along the way (I mostly “credit” Rush Limbaugh with the initial innovation) it changed from propaganda for ideology’s sake to propaganda for profit’s sake. At which point the folks making monster money from rabble-rousing broke free from the folks attempting to steer a political movement for ideological reasons. A true Frankenstein’s monster story.
And now we get to today, where there is an absolutely sky-high fountain of money to be made by keeping a sizeable fraction of the population frothingly excited about something, anything. As long as they’re engaged and angry, they’ll keep sending in money. Whether via donations, or sales of merch, or simply concentrated homogenous eyeballs sold to conventional advertising, they’re worth trillions. No mere political movement stands a chance against that kind of incentive stream.
This is why I hold out little hope for the Democrats, the so-called moderate or traditional Republicans, nor even the United States as a whole.
The folks making the propaganda decisions and making the serious loot are utterly insulated from the consequences of their actions. And they can always find plenty of fresh e.g. Hannity wannabes to take their place for a pittance of silver (in reality tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars).
Plus of course the freelance rogues such as Alex Jones who recognized the income potential of the zeitgeist early and laughed all the way to the bank. Recent lawsuits notwithstanding, overall he made a real success of first frothing, then fleecing, the rubes. And he is but one of many.
Lastly of course we get to the effect of Russian, Chinese, Iranian, NK, etc., mischief makers in the social media sphere. I see their role as mostly catalytic, forever throwing new shit at the wall to see what sticks, and also to foment and reiterate the “you can’t trust anything as true or permanent” narrative. Those foreign agents have large budgets, but they also know that whenever they do luck into throwing some especially attractive sticky shit, the rest of the Capitalist for-profit propaganda machine will amplify that to the heavens for them.
An irony I’m sure they savor.
I think if the 2000 election had gone to Gore, the GOP would have realized that the path Gingrich had started them on in the 90’s was a first-class trip to Nowhere. Bill Clinton survived the first impeachment in over a hundred years and left office with a nearly 70% favorability. Gingrich and his cronies were left looking stupid; hundreds of millions spent investigating Clinton and nothing really to show for it. They might have slapped themselves on the collective forehead, had a V-8, and gotten back to the business of Actual Governing.
Didn’t happen that way. That may have been the last chance.
One thing that I will note is that the path to righting things again is by setting up better rules.
The Democrats have probably avoided having a similar situation by having superdelegates to ward off populism and, in the last few years, increasing protections against gerrymandering; California established the jungle primary, helping to enfranchise centrists in the party primaries; Maine has added ranked choice voting.
The average voter likes a populist, a good populist knows how to make headlines, the average voter loves headlines, and the average journalist loves writing headlines. It’s a nice little warm blanket of coziness and orgasms. And you’re not going to be able to change any of that.
But, tomorrow, Congress could restore the US Office of Technology Assessment and they could go back to the voice vote. The Republican party’s presidential election process could add in superdelegates, switch to a ranked choice voting system, or otherwise add measures that encourage a more reasonable candidate to come out on top. None of that requires much political push nor does it require public input. These are largely internal matters, decided by the people in power, at the top.
Republican governors like Larry Hogan could lead the way on reducing gerrymandering, bringing centrists into the primaries, etc. That is, certainly, harder but it’s something that can be started on and possibly brought into fruition - especially in the more purple states.
Ultimately, the parties don’t matter, just the processes. Establish good, solid processes and you’ll end up with good leaders. Let it be a populist free-for-all and you’ll end up with nuttiness. That’s independent of party. If you put the process in on the Republican side, the nuttiness will wither away over the next few decades.
I think the Republicans also realized after that election: “Hey! We don’t actually need to get the most votes to win!” And they’ve been working that angle ever since.
I see no reason to believe that Republican super delegates would pick a more reasonable candidate.
The problem is that Republicans are outnumbered by millions of voters. If they reduced gerrymandering, they would lose multiple state houses and multiple House delegations. Not the kind of thing they would likely due to themselves, unless they had some kind of suicide ideation.
Depends on how they’re selected and who is doing the selecting. If you (secretly) tell Mitt Romney, Justin Amash, and Adam Kinzinger to pick a group of 12 people and those 12 have half the voting points, I think you’ll be fairly satisfied with the outcome.
Sure, they could do that. And the inmates running the asylum could voluntarily opt to put their straitjackets back on. Seems about as likely.
Hotelier’s Law says that the party will always have 50% of the vote at the end of the day. If you weaken gerrymandering then the party will have to find an alternate mechanism to finding a larger voting base - e.g., creating a more broadly acceptable policy platform. They’ll expand to 50% again and stay there, satisfied.
There’s never any game that you can play to take over the country. We’ve had 250 years of having a two party system and that’s not liable to change anytime soon. If you accept that then the question isn’t whether you can keep your 50% - yes, you can - it’s what the best balancing mechanism is between the two parties, from the standpoint of the health and safety of the nation. Policy is a better balancing nation than machine politics.
In Missouri, John Danforth, the former Senator and Republican moderate (at least before he pushed Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court) is spending a large amount of time and effort to promote John Wood, a January 6 investigator, as an Independent candidate for the Senate.
Wood’s platform is pretty much standard Republican boilerplate, with the notable absence of loyalty to Trump. Wood has no support among Missouri Republicans, and what’s left of Missouri Democrats won’t vote for any running on a Republican platform. Wood will probably end up being the 2022 version of John Anderson.
I’ve brought up the point before in multiple other threads, but I’ll do so again. Part of the problem is that the Republicans married the Christian Conservatives, and that’s where you get a large part of the modern Republican party. The thought was that they’d get strong support from the Christian voting base, which was already primed to follow ideology/belief rather than compromise and good governance, by supporting edge issues important to various Christian sects like abortion.
And almost immediately, any ‘benign’ values ascribed to the new hybrid fell away, and all that was left was ‘more holy than thou’ and ‘God wills it!’. The modern Republican part works more like a religion, in that you follow the various High Priests, who make new proclamations on the faith, and care little if this is the same as it was last week/month/year. Thus the whole ‘Russia is Good,’ 5 different versions of proven events being laid out until they reach their default response of ‘so what if it happened, it doesn’t matter, because I said so!’.
And like a Religion, it actively demonizes (quite literally) it’s enemies and apostates. Cheney keeps coming up for a reason, by Republican standards, she’s better than 99% of those opposing her, but she’s NOT part of the new Religion and must be outcast.
So, honestly, there is nothing left to ‘retake’. The Republican party has mutated into the new thing, and you either join, or you are outcast. Sure, there’s room for a more fiscally conservative, smaller government, centrist party, but they would be their own thing. And since Democrats favor a large tent (at least for now) they can still stay under the ‘conservative’ edge of said grouping rather than go for yet another failed third party option.
If we don’t fall into a perpetual single-party minority rule (not taking bets), my best guess for the future would be another 20-30 years of terrible rule through presidential fiat as congress remains largely deadlocked, and the SCOTUS burrows ever further up it’s own ass into convoluted pretzels of logic to negate anything that does get done. By which point, even the rubes will be out of money and emotional outrage to keep feeding the grift and the Republican party finds itself with nothing left to actually identify with.
Of course by that point, it’ll probably be far too late to enact any meaningful social, environmental or geopolitical change and we’ll all be enjoying the slide into the heat-death of the planet as a tired third-rate nation only respected for it’s nukes. Of course, I fully expect to be dead around then, but I’m glad I don’t have kids and worry for my niece and nephew.
John Adams: ‘Luxury?’ A half million souls in chains… and Dr. Franklin calls it a ‘luxury!’ Maybe you should have walked out with the South!
Dr. Benjamin Franklin: [dangerous] You forget yourself sir. I founded the FIRST anti-slavery society on this continent.
John Adams: Oh, don’t wave your credentials at me! Maybe it’s time you had them renewed!
–1776
The moderates left the party twenty years ago. All that’s left in the Republican party today are various factions of conservatives fighting for control.
Here in western NY, Carl Paladino is seeking a nomination for a Congressional seat. He opposes unions, welfare, public health care, abortions, same-sex marriages, and capital gains taxes. He’s a pro-gun supporter who’s said he’d like to see Democrats killed. He’s openly anti-black and anti-gay. He’s spoken favorably of Adolf Hitler.
I saw an ad today from one of Paladino’s Republican rivals. They were arguing that Paladino doesn’t deserve the nomination because he isn’t conservative enough.
For a few months. But once 9/11 happened*, they would have not only blamed the attacks on Gore (and the Clintons) but also built all future campaigns on conspiracy theories linking Democrats to Al Qaeda.
*Assuming, of course, that a Gore-led intelligence community would not have prevented the attacks. But that’s getting into a next-level hijack.