Maybe, but your party is their home. Until the conservatives kick out the crazies and run proper campaigns they will be seen as wallowing with the pigs. In order to compete the repubs have opened their doors to the religious right , the homophobes ,the gun nuts and other single issue groups. You can not just disown them between campaigns. There are not being brushed with anything. The mixture of weirdness is the paint.
The crazies are in charge there now. The people getting kicked out are the sanes.
That won’t be easy to fix. They don’t even think it’s a problem.
The Cold War, like the Drug War, is bipartisan. Both parties delighted in taking credit for any successes and deflecting blame for any failures. For 90% of the duration, you couldn’t find a major party to denounce the Cold War if you tried.
McCarthy was a blip, as was HUAC. About the only places they actually had any effect that lasted more than a year or two were Hollywood and Broadway, and both of those blacklists were more or less expired by the mid- to late-60s.
Vietnam was a warmer part of the Cold War, and again, it was Democrats who got us into it in the first place. I’m not one of those who blame Vietnam on Nixon…he just did mop-up.
It’s not my party anymore. I cut ties with the Pubbies in 2003. I’ve made a total of two political contributions in my life, both within the last election cycle, both to local Democrats. Also voted for a Blue Dawg Dem in the local House race. I’ve pretty much voted a split ticket going back to the first time I could vote…Reagan’s second term.
The reason conservatism seems to be on the wane today is because people have forgotten what liberalism leads to. We’ve had almost three decades of nearly continuous growth, and we’ve been living basically under a Pax Americana since the Soviet Union collapsed. Under those conditions, people tend to forget that peace requires vigilance and a strong defense, that you cannot become prosperous by punishing the people who create things and rewarding people who don’t, and that politicians are not capable of running complex economies.
This happens every time we go through a period of relative peace and prosperity. After WWII, we entered a period like this. The U.S. avoided going down the path as far as some, but many countries experimented with state industrial policy, protectionism, highly progressive taxes, and unions gained enormous power.
The result was a mess. If you want to see where this leads, look at Britain in the 1970’s. Unions ran amok, there were constant strikes and marches and riots. Welfare ran out of control. Economic growth stagnated.
The problem with liberals today is that not enough of them lived through the 1970’s. But they’ll find out. Unfortunately, it will cost us a lot for them to learn the lesson again.
I highly recommend this web site: The Commanding Heights. It’s one of the coolest E-learning web sites around. Produced by PBS, it’s a history of economic development and globalization in the post-WWII 20th century. It includes videos, interactive timelines, interviews with movers and shakers, etc. It has a direct bearing on the subject of this thread, showing the ebb and flow of various political ideas and their consequences.
The Republican Party can recover if it manages to reinvent itself as a genuine limited-government party. However, to do so would require it to shuck much of its Religious Right baggage.
Hmm, you mean the kind of “Pax Americana” that includes a long-term global war? :dubious:
But of course, that was back when you were trying to boost approval of Bush’s Iraq adventure.
Now that you want to portray the past thirty conservatism-dominated years as some kind of Golden Age of “relative peace and prosperity”, in order to scare people about the alleged spooky doom-laden consequences of liberal policy, you conveniently gloss over those grim and messy war years and sweep them under the rug of the phrase “basically a Pax Americana”.
ISTM that this sort of both-sides-of-the-mouth argument, where the focus is on spinning the “big picture” for one’s current rhetorical purposes rather than on articulating some kind of honest and consistent large-scale ideological and strategic vision, is one of the major reasons that conservatism is struggling right now. Many conservatives seem to have simply forgotten how to debate an issue instead of propagandizing it. (Not that all liberals are immune to that failing themselves, of course, but today’s conservatives seem to be disproportionately afflicted by it.)
If Obama was a politician in another country he’d be a conservative. If British Conservative Party leaders were in America they’d fit quite happily into the Democratic party. Right now on presidential power, foreign wars, lots of other stuff, he’s basically a third Bush term. America is a very conservative country compared to pretty much anywhere else, but that’ll gradually change over the next few decades and America will end up with a GOP that supports socialised healthcare and so on.
Among other problems with that argument; there isn’t much prospect for liberalism any time soon in America, only somewhat less conservatism. Obama is no liberal. We’ve have decades of “growth” that have left much of the population behind. The “Pax Americana” has been a long collection of wars and tyranny, often at our instigation. It presumes that liberalism IS “politicians running the economy”; liberalism isn’t communism despite how the Right loves to pretend it is.
And the claim that liberals are into “punishing the people who create things and rewarding people who don’t” is nothing more than the standard class warfare claim that the rich and powerful ARE the “people who create things”. And the people who actually build and design and all the real work are just parasites feeding off the Greatness of their Glorious Leaders.
Historically, this is the most peaceful time we’ve ever seen. Vietnam cost 10 times the number of American lives than did Iraq. The Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was much more violent than the current U.S. occupation. The last century saw two major world wars and many large regional wars. Communism killed tens of millions of people. Cambodia had the killing fields. The Middle East was in constant armed conflict with wars between Iraq and Iran, Arabs and the Israelis, etc.
The current conflict is a ‘long war’. It’s not a global conflagration - it’s an ideological struggle marked by almost constant low-intensity conflict. It’s more akin to the border incursions and picking at the edges of the Roman empire during the Pax Romana period. It’s important, but it’s not the same as filling the skies with bombers and missiles.
Still, what we’re talking about in this thread is the modern American ideological-conservative movement, which coalesced around the Goldwater candidacy in 1964 and triumphed with Ronald Reagan in 1980. About that, some generalizations can be made. From The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, by conservative British journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge:
The question for debate is whether that movement has now marginalized itself permanently or semipermanently, as Tanenhaus contends. I’m sure we haven’t heard the last of it by any means – it is too well-organized, with its grassroots groups and astroturf groups and think-tanks and wholly-owned media outlets and lavish corporate funding – but I think it might well be doomed to see its electoral support slowly but irreversibly declining in every election cycle from here on out.
I hope you realize how telling, indeed disturbing, it is that you felt obliged to include the word “American” in the latter sentence; and would it still be true if you had left it out?
See post #71. The factions you describe are indeed very different and don’t always see eye-to-eye. Nevertheless, they have enjoyed some shared success since the 1970s by a “no enemies to the right” coalition strategy. Now . . . cracks may be appearing in the coalition. That’s not something Tanenhaus comments on, but it is possibly very important. See the defection of paleocon Pat Buchanan, first into the Reform Party and then to his own America First Party; and the emergence of the theocon Constitution Party as, now, one of the three largest third parties in America (sharing that distinction with the Libertarians and the Greens – see here). If the America First Party and the Constitution Party were to merge . . . the result . . . well, actually, the result would be to draw off even more Pubs and further strengthen the Dems.
Wiki seems to think so -
Regards,
Shodan
I personally think this is a reasonably accurate assessment, if you’re using a rather narrow definition of “we”, but it sure is different in tone from your assessment in your earlier post that I linked to above:
My concern is not specifically about which part of your broad-brush rhetoric concerning the “War on Terror” is most accurate, but rather about your apparent willingness to spin your broad-brush rhetoric in whatever direction suits the current conservative talking points.
As I said before, ISTM that this trend appears in a lot of conservative discourse these days: they paint whatever picture happens to serve their purposes of the moment, and to hell with whether it’s consistent with the picture they were painting one or two or five years back. Can today’s movement conservatives as a group still build their arguments on a coherent and consistent vision of what they honestly think are the major political and economic realities of modern times, or have many of them now just fallen back on pushing whichever anti-liberal propaganda button suits their cause du jour?
Are you sure you’re answering the question that BrainGlutton asked? Sam noted that “Vietnam cost 10 times the number of American lives than did Iraq”, which AFAIK is quite true. Then BG asked if that would still be true if the “American” qualifier were removed: in other words, would it be true to say "“Vietnam cost 10 times the number of lives than did Iraq”?
As you noted, the Vietnam conflict involved an upper bound of about 6 million fatalities overall, so for the Iraq conflict to be only one-tenth as costly in terms of lives lost, it would have to involve fewer than about 600,000 fatalities in total.
Although it’s admittedly very difficult to get an accurate estimate of the total Iraq casualties, I don’t think we can be confident that their total number to date is less than 600,000. Estimates from the Lancet study and the ORB both exceed that number.
So if you look at total lives lost rather than just American ones, Vietnam may have been ten times more costly than Iraq to date, but then again it may not. ISTM that BG’s question is in fact not definitively answered, and perhaps not answerable.
On the contrary, the reason so many voters have fallen for these lines for the last 30 years is that they forgot what laissez-faire[sup]1[/sup] led to in the 1930’s, & somehow get cause & effect scrambled & think FDR caused the Depression.
I was a kid in the USA in the 1970’s. My mother raised money for her mission trips c. 1980. I remember some startling levels of inflation, but also relatively cheap air travel & a country with clearly first world living standards. It wasn’t all that bad.
The GOP want taxes low because they don’t accept the difference between redistributive taxes & taxes for the operation of the government. Social Security is not primarily lining bureaucrats’ pockets (despite the fact that FICA runs massive surpluses). It’s going back into citizens’ hands.
But those who don’t get that or reject the idea will always call for lower taxes because to them taxes are always too high. The problem, of course, is that Social Security & Medicare are popular programs–good programs, even. So they pretend that low taxes “help the economy.” Which they don’t.
This might be tolerable if they targeted taxes on workers. But they want to cut taxes on investors & owners, on millionaires & billionaires, while they leave FICA higher than it’s needed to be. But it is not the wealthy investor that produces; it is the engineer, the designer, the seamstress, the welder, the carpenter, etc. The wealthy man is a facilitator, & as anyone who’s worked in academia (where government grants run rampant) can tell you, not the only kind of facilitator possible.
If you want excess money to flow into the hands of capitalists, just as bakers’ children tend to have enough bread; then build a UK-style welfare state, where money is not that important to housing or medical care. Let money just be a kind of economic lubricant.
But if you want money to flow to the deserving, to be a reward for work & productivity, & an indication of one’s importance to the economy–well, the CEO’s with their golden parachutes aren’t that deserving nor that vital. Don’t mistake the kind of “importance” which means one has put himself in the path for the kind of importance which means one is necessary.
[sup]1[/sup](Or whatever we get instead of idealized laissez-faire when the leaders are pretending to be laissez-faire. I don’t expect theorists’ idea of “real” laissez-faire to be more real than the corruption of the Gilded Age.)
BTW, The Nation has an enthralling overview, by Kim Phillips-Fein, of academic/scholarly analyses of the history and dynamics of American conservatism. Tanenhaus is treated briefly near the end:
That sounds like you are telling me that conservatism is ALREADY dead. Only about 10%-15% of the federal budget (not counting this year with the stimulus and all that) goes into non-military discretionary budget items. The three largest items (by FAR) are milkitary spending, social security and medicare.
Over the last few months, self proclaimed conservatives had a chance to stand up next to the democrats and say “we need to cut medicare before it breaks us” and instead they decided to scare the hell out of old people.
Only a Democratic president with a Democratic congress can ever cut these entitlements and rather than support what conservatives have purported to support for decades, they are now the most ardent defenders of just about every dime spent in medicare.
It worked that way for me too but it hasn’t worked that way for the baby boomers.
We all have access to the federal budget. Not countingall this stimulus stuff, how would you balance the budget without raising taxes? We can’t really nationalize the debt (I forgot to include debt service along with military, social security and medicare/medicaid as the three largest budget items) can we? Conservatives of ALL stripes have proclaimed their nundyong support for medicare so that’s out isn’t it? The military could be trimmed a bit but not nearly enough to cover the gap, if we got rid of all non-military discretioary spending, that still wouldn’t cover the deficit. So what would you cut to get to a balanced budget where you wouldn’t have to raise taxes (never mind CUTTING taxes)?
BTW in what way do you want to make the markets freer? It seems to me that a lot of trouble is the result of too much free rein being given to the markets.