Totally agreed. They’ve become the “Party of ‘No’,” often without offering anything in the way of alternate policy ideas. “We think Obamacare is terrible” – OK, fine, then where’s your proposal? Trump has been saying, “we’re going to replace Obamacare with an amazing, beautiful healthcare proposal” for four years now, and it’s still utterly vaporware.
I think it’s largely a historical thing. There’s a long history of treaties, laws, etc. with preambles or signing statements which don’t carry the force of law.
~Max
I agree with other posters here who argue that good faith argument is more important than specific policy proposals. For that matter, I would welcome a GOP that diametrically opposed all liberal policy positions, as long as they were willing to recognize that a compromise between those two poles was preferable to eternal gamesmanship and obstinacy.
Healthcare is just one example of the issues that could have been, if not solved, at least improved imperfectly if the GOP hadn’t decided about 30 years ago that “compromise” was a dirty word.
And that has nothing to do with what I said in that such things should carry the force of law.
When you have a bill entitled “The feed, clothe, shelter, and provide healthcare for the orphans act”, and the preamble to it says “This bill is intended to ensure that orphans have food, clothing, shelter, and healthcare to orphans.” but in the text of the bill it gives only a pittance to the orphans, but massive kickbacks and tax breaks to the wealthy, then it should be actionable that the legislature has misled the public.
Or, if something changes, and the effect of a bill written in good faith no longer serves its purpose, or is even opposed to the stated purpose, then that should be something that should be correctable through the courts.
I want Republicans to be conservative. We Democrats do a really poor job of being the conservative party-- It’s just not in our skill set. And it’s especially hard to be both the only conservative party in the country and the only liberal party in the country at the same time, as we’ve been forced to be these past decades.
I suppose, it was my mistake to try and answer the question of why things aren’t as you say they should be, when nobody explicitly asked that question. I apologize profusely, and will refrain from further interrupting debate in this topic.
~Max
OK, assuming that we have excised the deplorable tactics of voter suppression, disinformation and actively sabotaging Democratic programs for fear that they might actually help Americans and the Democrats would get the credit.
I see two main reasons why I as a Democrat want the Republican party to remain in existence.
- There needs to be an alternative to keep the Democrats honest.
- There needs to be a place for people who , in good faith, hold opinions and interests are different from mine to have their voice heard.
Starting with the first point: Living close to DC, I have seen what one party rule looks like, and its not pretty. Even though on a policy level I would probably agree with the Democratic city council more than I would a Republican in the same position, I think that having a set of voices in opposition that is motivated to call out the corruption and incompetence of the office holders would be welcome.
To the second point: I recognize that there are people who are pro-life, pro gun, and pro big business, small government etc. and even though I disagree with their views, I recognize that in a representative democracy, they deserve to have their interests heard and represented in government.
The place where I draw the line is at bigotry, White supremacists, anti Islamists, xenophobes and homophobes, do not deserve a seat at the table, and the country would be a better place if they didn’t have it.
I also would want the reformed GOP to reject certain tactics in pursuit of their ultimate goal. In particular those that seeks to harm or inconvenience Americans to no purpose other than to punish them for taking legal actinos that the Republicans oppose.
If they want to outlaw “D&X” as being particularly barbaric, or to have hard limits on the fetal age then they can go ahead and argue it to the American people and the courts. But if they require women to have an unnecessary ultrasound just to make the abortion experience extra unpleasant or to require abortion clinics to satisfy onerous requirements which serve no purpose other than to be impossible to fulfill, that needs to stop.
In my fantasy, they become a centrist party (basically, the current Democratic party, allowing the Democratic party to become the Bernie/AOC party).
In my best hopes for reality, they’d become similar to Ike’s party of the 1950s, plus the same strong opposition to racism and bigotry as the Democratic party. In the best version of reality, the parties would be aligned on civil rights, including injustice in the justice system, leaving the racists (and racist-tolerators) all alone. They’d be aligned on the environment, in general, aside from some small disagreements on the proper regulations and the like (but they’d both agree that climate change is real and needs to be addressed by policy). The real arguments would be about economic policy and foreign policy. Trump has proven that the supposed “family values” voters/evangelical Christian voters don’t really actually care about that stuff, so neither party would need to worry about those issues.
I want them to become humane.
I agree with iiandyiiii’s idea of them becoming the ‘a bit right of center’ party like the Democrats currently are, and let the Democrats actually become the left/progressive/etc party that Republicans always say the Democrats are.
The problem with the original question IMO is that there is really nothing positive in current Republican political stances. They’ll talk about being the ‘law and order’ party, but someone actually in favor of law and order should favor rule of law, which would include things like prosecuting murders committed by police and prosecuting grossly illegal activity like all of the various Trump shenanigans. They’ll talk about being ‘fiscally conservative’, but Republicans are the party that consistently cuts taxes and raises costs. ‘National Defense’ should have them objecting to Russian cyber attacks on our country, but they’re fine with it as long as it gets them elected, and ‘support our troops’ should mean actually supporting US soldiers rather than persecuting minority soldiers. There’s just nothing really to build a ‘what I want to see that would still be identifiably Republican’ position on.
I want them to be banned permanently much like the Nazi Party in Germany, their leaders and elected officials imprisoned indefinitely without sentence as enemy combatants, their supporters disfranchised for life, and for future generations to learn that they were irredeemably evil.
It would be great if they could drop their childish “small government” fantasies and accept that the country has serious problems which will require serious efforts at governance.
Unless they do that, we can’t even begin to debate differing solutions with them.
I wouldn’t even mind “small government” policies as long as they actually wanted a small functioning government. What they appear to currently want is to destroy the government to prevent it from stopping the wealthy from ass-raping everyone else. Plus they seem perfectly fine with expanding bits of the government they like; Republican administrations have seen greater expansion of the federal government than Democratic ones.
But mostly, as already noted, I want a Republican Party that acts in good faith. This one’s brand is nothing but lies, hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy. Asking what policies I’d like them to propose is like asking whether I want white or brown bread on the turd sandwich they’re serving.
I want you to become the kind of people who find it absolutely unacceptable to support a human being like Donald Trump.
I want you to become the kind of people who realize that it is unacceptable, in the name of “Capitalism”, to let people get sick and die because they have no health care while the Economic Elite hoard more and more and more.
I want you to become the kind of people who decry racist and hate groups instead of incorporating them as significant supporters.
I could go on.
So, the question (at least when posed to liberals) is, “what bad policies do you want them to support that you think are bad”?
For as long as I’ve been alive, the republican party has been the party of big business and social regression. Which is to say that the party actually cared about big business and enriching the already-rich, but catered to social regression to scoop up their electorate (which is primarily composed of social regressives, because billionaires aren’t a very large voting block).
Needlessly to say their big businesses policy goals have been destructive to the economy, and their social regression is of course destructive to society. And this is the entire party definition.
So, keeping in mind that the Republican party can’t help but be awful, I’d say let’s revert to the pre-Reagan republican party. (Yes, pre-.) Definitely let’s roll back Trumpism. Bad policy for the purposes of reckless destructive selfishness is one thing, but bad policy for the purposes of cruelty and fomenting national unrest is quite another.
I want to see them acknowledge that human-caused climate change is a real thing, and that it will get very, very bad if we don’t drastically cut back our fossil fuel consumption. Conservative parties in other countries don’t seem to have a problem with this concept.
I think you’re asking the wrong question. For me, I fully accept that a different party will have different policies. And I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to figure out what positions the other people should have. That’s weird. It also puts the focus in the wrong place.
What I’d like is for them to 1 - have policies and 2 - a willingness to engage in honest discussions around the benefits & costs of polices by both parties.
An example is healthcare. Right now, the Republican position is “not Obamacare.” I don’t know what the Republican vision is for healthcare. I think it probably involves private insurance. But there’s not just a lack of details, there’s a lack of generalities. What I would like is a policy - a concrete statement of the shape that they want healthcare to be, how it is going to be achieved, and a clear statement of its benefits. I will probably disagree with every plank of that policy - but that’s ok. At least there’s a baseline to argue against or to forge a compromise between that policy and the ones that I’m for. I’d further like there to be a certain level of honesty around the policy - what it’s going to cost, what it’s going to promote, how it’s going to work.
Presumably there are still some moderate Republicans out there somewhere. They have been marginalized by Trump sycophants, influential donors, an Internet tendency towards promoting more extreme views and sociopolitical tribalism. But they haven’t disappeared, they just don’t see a place for themselves at the moment in a duopoly political system.
Just re-set to Eisenhower’s GOP, before the party became a slave to the military industrial complex and Southern racists fleeing the Democratic Party.
I think it’s telling that Republicans, conservatives, right-wingers, or whatever exactly they want to call themselves don’t ever seem to be able to put a good foot forward. I posted a thread a good while back asking for decent conservative goals and no one could come up with anything. A few times people would mention stuff like ‘strong national defense’, but that is directly contradicted by what Republicans do when they are actually in power. Some couldn’t even resist coming in to sneer at the idea that open bigotry (like denying human rights to LGBT people) should even be treated as a bad thing - and still not posting any positive policies. The sheer vacuum when it comes to actual concrete policies that aren’t ‘help rich people get even more rich’, ‘hurt traditionally disadvantaged groups’, or ‘vote down anything the Democrats want’ is pretty amazing when you think about it.
I will note that the OP in this thread didn’t give any examples of Republican policies that he thinks Democrats might like to adopt. And I don’t think it’s because he just didn’t want to, I think it’s because of the lack of them.