He may well be running, but for 2020 - after this year’s epic failure, he’d be in the best position to act the Responsible Adult who will pick up the pieces. That would be after a period of being its highest-ranking elected leader, always a good position to market oneself from. The party is already looking for the next non-Trump leader, and he might as well try to be The Next One - really, who else would be out there?
I agree with those who are saying that Trump mostly presents a threat to the permanent GOP in that the people who’ve always had influence, don’t have any influence with Trump, and have no idea whether they would even know any of the right people in a Trump Administration.
My heart breaks for them, 
Shouldn’t that have been ‘House’ rather than ‘house’? 
Reminds me of David Broder’s famous Lewinsky-era comment about Bill Clinton:
Now it’s Paul Ryan talking about Trump instead of Broder talking about Clinton.
Someone’s tacking towards center:
[QUOTE=Paul Ryan]
I’m certainly not going to stand here and tell you I have always met this standard. There was a time when I would talk about a difference between ‘makers’ and ‘takers’ in our country, referring to people who accepted government benefits. But as I spent more time listening, and really learning the root causes of poverty, I realized I was wrong.
‘Takers’ wasn’t how to refer to a single mom stuck in a poverty trap, just trying to take care of her family. Most people don’t want to be dependent. And to label a whole group of Americans that way was wrong. I shouldn’t castigate a large group of Americans to make a point. So I stopped thinking about it that way—and talking about it that way. But I didn’t come out and say all this to be politically correct. I was just wrong.
[/QUOTE]
Simon Maloy speculates that Ryan is preparing, not to be this year’s candidate, but for a “Republican Civil War,” and to take leadership of the party after this election.
Maybe. But ISTM that if this is his approach, he’s aiming to take leadership of a different GOP than the one the voters are demanding.
That’s a fine sentiment and all well and good, but when it comes down to it, Ryan and his kind still want to cut, privatize or eliminate Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid because wealthy campaign donors feel they pay too much in taxes. I have referred to Ryan and his kind as “pieces of shit” in the past, and I was right to think about it in that way, and continue to do so. I’m not saying that to be politically incorrect either, I just have been in touch with the truth this whole time. I’m right.
Multiple meanings actually intended this time.
Yeah, pretty much.
The problem the Republicans are going to have to face is that the ‘base’ of their party clearly is not what they thought it was. It was always assumed that the base was very conservative and that the split in the Republican party was between social conservatives, economic conservatives, and economic/social moderates who fell to the center right.
The Trump phenomenon throws all that away. Trump is winning the ‘base’, and he’s not economically or socially conservative. I mean, this is a serial philanderer and vulgarian who supports abortion, and he’s picked up the evangelical vote. How does that work? And yet, he does not remotely fit into the ‘moderate’ wing of the Republican party.
It’s looking to me like the split in the Republican party is now a large group of populist, anti-immigration, nativist types who want closed borders and protectionist trade policies, and then your ‘establishment’ Republicans of which there are varying degrees of conservatism, both economically and socially, but who are generally for reasonable border laws, immigration, and free trade. But if that first group makes up nearly half the party, how do you possibly create a governing coalition out of that?
Rough times ahead for Republicans, I think.
There is a tendency among pundits and academics to underestimate the abject political ignorance of the typical human. Most people don’t have any consistent ideological commitments. They have informed beliefs about a small set of political issues and a set of tribal affiliations.
When people talk about the split among Republicans between social and economic conservatives, they were really talking about a split among the elites and their tribal markers. For most people and as to most issues, the affiliation to a party or a particular group precedes their opinions on the issue, rather than vice versa. That’s why opinion on things like mass surveillance or free trade or healthcare policy or criminal sentencing or Senate procedures or the Clean Air Act or the relevance of deficits can so readily shift with the winds of power. Its because most of the voters have no real opinions on them.
Trump’s ascendancy doesn’t call into question the ideological commitments of the elites, and the base never had any to begin with. What it does show is that decades of rhetoric that corrupt Washington is destroying your family will eventually lead the people subjected to that rhetoric to conclude that anyone associated with Washington power is bad. And, to a lesser extent, that white supremacy and misogyny were more important tribal markers than the GOP previously thought.
They built it. They knew.
ETA: From the link, let’s hand John Ehrlichmann the mic.
I’m not sure it’s reasonable to assume comments made in the 1970’s have much to do with what the Republican party is today. Electorates change. Most of the people who were voting for Nixon in 1968 are already dead. Reagan expanded the party with ‘Reagan Democrats’, and Perot and Buchanan peeled off a lot of the nativist types.
And a big reason you can’t compare the old party to the new one is that there was a huge percentage of Republicans who were essentially cold warriors, opposed to those peacenik hippies you mentioned. But that coalition may not even exist anymore, since the cold war ended. There’s a lot more isolationism in the Republican party now than there ever was in the 1970’s or 1980’s.
The Republican party today has been largely measured along the axes of social and economic conservatism. The social conservatives are your evangelicals, Moral Majority types, strong catholics, etc. Then there’s supposedly the business class Republicans - free trade, open immigration, focused on what’s best for business. Then there are the libertarians, who are pro-market but not necessarily pro big business. Then there are the blue-collar Republicans who want their social security and Medicare, don’t care much about free trade, and are inimical to open borders.
But if that’s what people thought the Republicans were, they’ve got some explaining to do because that’s not what I’m seeing any more. I think the recession, terrorism, and the border issue have greatly expanded the protectionist, close-the-borders wing of the party, and it’s now the largest faction. And it moves them so strongly that even evangelicals will vote for a person who thumbs his nose at their religious and social values. Nearly half the party seems to be motivated by two issues - closed borders with a big wall, and protectionist trade policies. That’s a disaster for Republicans.
I think this is right. Those of us who make politics a focus (and almost a sport sometimes) tend to forget just how clueless the average voter is about this stuff. Even the analysts seem to forget that.
Yep. And for most people, that’s actually a pretty rational way to do it. If you don’t care enough to study each issue or really pay attention, the next best thing is to figure out which tribe you belong to, and just vote with the tribe.
And for most people, there’s not much of a reason to pay that much attention, as their vote means very little. Economists have puzzled over the issue of why people pay attention at all, since it seems to be a very poor idea from a cost/benefit standpoint. In aggregate voting is extremely important, but for the individual it almost makes no difference at all. You would expect there to be sort of a free rider problem going on, where most people don’t waste their time. After all, most people will go through their entire lives without their vote ever making a difference in a race.
Well, it’s this or nothing for him, isn’t it? He can’t very well have anything to do with that GOP if he holds his elitist economic-libertarian bizcon principles to any degree sincerely, which I suspect he does. All he can do is hope the GOP-that-was will somehow survive all this and the populists will either quiet down or leave.
Unless there’s some unifying principle motivating them to go out to the polls, as I expect the 250-pound orange-haired gorilla to be for Democrats. Republicans don’t have as much to drive them there anymore (except the sheeple anti-establishment rush and more reasoned viewpoints to try to ensure downticket supremacy), although they have historically been a lot more politically active in general.
Sam Stone: I object to your characterization of Social Security and Medicare as “blue collar” issues. After all, Ayn Rand herself famously accepted those benefits toward the end of her life.
But it was Nixon who opened the way for that. There was considerable overlap, I’m sure, between Nixon’s “Silent Majority” and the “Reagan Democrats,” and many of the latter must have voted for Nixon in '72.
But they didn’t keep 'em; those are Trump Republicans now, and probably (with some reluctance) voted for W in 2004.
No doubt – but, at the same time, there is just as much militarism if not more. Trump promises both isolationism in the economic-protectionist sense and full-auto gangbusters military aggression abroad, and both promises appeal to the same voters. And not Trump alone – apart perhaps from Rand Paul, no high-profile Pub this cycle has taken Pat Buchanan’s line that we should just keep our troops home, and stop meddling abroad, and slash the defense budget to something more reasonable than spending more on our military than the next 11 or 12 biggest-spending countries combined. And no significant part of the GOP’s base seems to be demanding that, either. They’re demanding a lot of things the Establishment doesn’t like at all, but not that.