Agreed. There’s a lot of overlap in that Venn diagram. But the same is true of the NRA, yet they remain silent on any issues not related to gun rights. (Most of the time, nobody is perfect.) Plus they also support candidates from both parties as long as they are in line with their gun agenda.
So it is possible.
Certainly that’s the ideal, but I’m not as optimistic as you are that the Republican party will consistently lose. If you want to talk about how mushy-mouthed moderates are, this isn’t really a good thread for it, though, any more than it’s a good thread for me to talk about how wrong-headed even moderate Republicans are.
I want Republicans to lose. But that’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking what it would take for moderate Republicans to take back control of the party from the extremists like you and Debaser. Again, it’d be best for our country if the party were abandoned to y’all and consistently lost all elections, but I’m not much interested in discussing that.
Huh. Look specifically at the government shutdown and the debt ceiling crisis. I’d almost say by definition a moderate is someone who won’t risk torpedoing the economy over re-fighting a lost battle, and almost by definition a Tea Partier is someone who would. Do you disagree on either count?
If you don’t, then I don’t see a peaceful coexistence with the Tea Party.
And, after that, you had your self-kicking too, I presume?
Oh, fuck yeah we did.
Never again!
I wish I could disagree. But I think you’re right.
Right now at least.
My point is it doesn’t have to be this way. It’s possible for the Tea Party to mature a bit and still be aggressive about reducing spending and debt, yet be a bit more sane and less willing to pull extreme stunts like the shut down.
That’s just it. Those are not fiscal issues, they are much, much broader political issues. “Require each bill to identify the specific provision of the Constitution that gives Congress the power to do what the bill does” is not a fiscal issue no matter how much money it might conceivably save. “Stop the “cap and trade” administrative approach used to control pollution by providing economic incentives for achieving reductions in the emissions of pollutants” is not a fiscal issue. “Defund, repeal and replace the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” is not a fiscal issue. Rolling back the Great Society/New Deal is not a fiscal issue.
Fiscal conservatism, as such, is neither political nor constitutional nor even ecoonomic conservatism, it is a much narrower concept; it is concerned neither with cutting taxes nor nor with cutting spending, but only about cutting the gap between the two. Fiscal conservatism has no problem at all with biggummint so long as its books balance.
I think I misunderstood you earlier when you said you stood proudly with them–I thought you meant you approved of stunts like this. I don’t think it makes sense to call Republicans who are for strict fiscal discipline (especially if they focus on that rather than on Norquistianity*) extremists; I think that label applies most appropriately, here, to the shutdowners.
edit: dangit, Google gets ONE hit on that word. One! No trademark for me.
PRSguy swoops in again!
IIRC, Perot’s fiscal message was:
The federal budget deficit is Problem Number One and we need to address it
by raising taxes and cutting spending at the same time.
Now, that’s a fiscal conservative! (Not necessarily a wise or revenue-positive policy, considering the possible depressive effect on the economy of spending cuts and tax hikes, but it is a true fiscal-conservative approach.)
And I’ve yet to hear any Tea Partier say anything like that.
There’s another symptom of this problem: the view that compromise and moderation are inherently unprincipled. They can be, but that doesn’t have to be the case.
The great thing is that you’re getting the best of both worlds! Guys like McCain and Romney get nominated, but then people with your take make it impossible for them to win. Perhaps now that’s starting to trickle down to Congress.
Yes, there is naturally a lot of overlap. But I think you just gave a brilliant (unintended) summary of the problem: the NRA is an organization that basically advocates on one issue and one issue alone, and for advocacy groups, that works. A single-issue Congress is bound to be a disaster.
I don’t. But I also don’t want a party that is chock full of pols who stand closer to the Democrats than conservative Republicans. In that case the pol might as well be a Democrat.
Not only do I not want the moderates to take over the Republican party, I want the moderates to go away completely.
Guys like Nixon, McCain, Romney, Dole, Bush in '92, and even W get nominated because of the ridiculous thing called the primary election. Why on Earth should John Q. Shithead be allowed to pick the party candidate? The party members and leaders should pick the candidates and present them to the public. This is the only way to have candidates who strictly adhere to party platforms.
The NRA works the way it does because it is an industry lobby. Its main benificiaries are a handful of arms manufacturers whose interests are almost perfectly aligned. It is very unclear how you think a populist, grassroots movement could possibly behave like a pressure group that represents a heavily consolidated industry. If its interests were so narrow and tightly defined, it wouldn’t have the power of a social movement in the first place.
Exactly. This is why I think the future of the Tea Party is either oblivion or something like a single issue advocacy group. It’s just a really huge issue, as BrainGlutton points out.
In my state, all of the John Q. Shitheads who picked Romney and McCain in the primaries were registered Republicans.
I don’t think we’re in disagreement. I think we’re just defining terms a bit differently. When I say “fiscal issues” I’m thinking of reducing the size of government. You are right in that it’s not just about balancing the budget. it’s about dramatically reducing what government does and how big it is. But that’s still different than social issues for the most part. Let’s go through your list one by one:
Yes, this is a stretch. But enforcing constitutionality of existing laws goes hand in hand with controlling the size of government. If the tenth amendment was enforced there would be a lot less spending for example.
I’d say the objections the Tea Party has to cap and trade are based in fiscal concerns.
I disagree completely on this one. Repealing the ACA is a definite fiscal issue (aka size of government issue). Similarly if the Tea Party were around during GW Bush’s tenure they would have fought against the Medicare expansion he pushed through. This is a potentially huge growth of government and I would expect the Tea Party to fight it.
Yes, “fiscal issue” isn’t the best label as I said. But this is definitely in line with reducing the size of government which is the goal of the Tea Party.
And “no tax increases” is a fiscal issue, but it stands in direct opposition to “decrease the deficit”. So that one not only doesn’t make the point you claim it does, it can be taken as offering negative support for your point.
pkbites, why is it important to have candidates who strictly adhere to a party’s platform? It seems to me that that’s the sort of thing that leads to people feeling like they’re forced to vote for the lesser of two evils, rather than for someone they actually support.
All it really does is push the political questions back on the party an away from the electorate in general. If there were some kind of mechanism that bound candidates to hew to the party line, it would just mean that there would be more disputes over what the content of the party platform actually is. Nowadays only hacks really seem to care what goes into party platform language, but it would be increasingly important if it were more binding.
So your answer to the question of how moderates can take over the party is, “I don’t want them to!” Do you go into threads about how to bake pizza and tell people that pizza gives you gas?
Talk about non sequitur posts.