Right now the Republican Party seems to be caught in a destructive feedback loop. More moderate members who might compromise with the Democrats are often marginalized or excluded. As a result, the party has shifted to the right, further decreasing the likelihood that there will be moderating voices in the future, and moving the party even further away from the center.
What’s the endgame in all this? Are there any historical examples we can look to to understand how this sort of spiral of increasing extremism is likely to play out in the long run?
And yet almost everyone is predicting that they will gain seats in both Houses of Congress. So, I guess the likely result of this “destructive feedback loop” is political success.
Well, even I agree that just by historical reasons Republicans will gain seats in November, but after that people will see the “quality” of the people they got in. I think that it will not be a pretty sight and it will become a setup to a reelection of Obama and Republicans losing seats in 2012.
Could be, but then the next cycle will bring it back closer to balance. Americans just don’t seem to like to give too much power to any one party. There’s a self-correcting process that goes on, and these cycles repeat themselves.
This is a historical example of what has happened in the last year going back to 1910. Watch the video even if you don’t like the messenger. It was a real eye opener.
That doesn’t have anything to do with the internal politics of the Republicans though. The general public can’t vote for more moderate Republicans if none are being presented because they can’t win Republican primaries against the far-righters.
That graph is very deceptive. The bottom of the graph is -500 which is meaningless. The next mark is at 0. That makes the movements early last century look small, when in reality they may have been large. (A visually small movement upwards away from the 0 line could in fact be a doubling of the money supply, for instance.)
If there was an exponential curve, that would mean the money supply was increasing by the same percentage each year. It’s hard to tell how close the curve is to that because there’s not enough detail on the lower parts. It would be more useful if it was plotted on a logarithmic scale. The only remarkable parts that can really be distinguished are the spike at 2000 and the rise in 2008 that he mentions.
QUOTE=thirdname;12274904]That graph is very deceptive. The bottom of the graph is -500 which is meaningless. The next mark is at 0. That makes the movements early last century look small, when in reality they may have been large. (A visually small movement upwards away from the 0 line could in fact be a doubling of the money supply, for instance.)
If there was an exponential curve, that would mean the money supply was increasing by the same percentage each year. It’s hard to tell how close the curve is to that because there’s not enough detail on the lower parts. It would be more useful if it was plotted on a logarithmic scale. The only remarkable parts that can really be distinguished are the spike at 2000 and the rise in 2008 that he mentions.
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Well since you understand exponential function and totally disregard the lower part of graph just going forward from the spike in 2000 to 2010 what is the percentage of growth?
It’s a Beckian distraction that is supposed to derail the thread.
On topic, I think there will be a swing (eventually) away from the extreme right elements, so that the Republican party will have to re-form itself, or die and be replaced by something else.
You asked for the end game and I gave it to you. I even gave historical precedent. If you want me to blame a political party for it I won’t because there are no political parties anymore that have any real power. Look at the HC bill!
I didn’t mean for the Beckian distraction from debating what happens when a political party hardens it’s position around the demands of it’s base.
In my opinion what happened with the health care bill is a good example. Why did it fly this time and not in the past?. Because Pelosi and the President and the media would not take no for an answer even when more then half the country was opposed to it along with some that voted on it against their own wishes.
The Republicans will make gains in the upcoming election but probably less than they expect. There is a good chance they will lose both Presidential and Congressional elections in 2012. If that happens they will get the message and realize they need to reduce the power of the wingnuts. This doesn’t mean abandoning conservative principles but backing them up with serious thought and selling them in a reasonable way. There are serious conservative writers out there like Ross Douthat and David Brooks and they will become more influential.
Ultimately every political party needs to find a balance between policy wonks, political hacks and ideologues. All three are needed to win elections and run governments. The problem with the Republicans is that their serious policy wonks have become completely marginalized and today even the hacks are being shouted down by the ideologues. This isn’t a recipe for long-term political success but at the same time failure is a great teacher. My guess is we will see a saner GOP 4-6 years down the line.
The amount of money in the system is based on the amount of money that has been lent by the central bank to businesses who want to create new technology. That is a loan, though. The money has to be paid back. But, for each bit of new technology, it opens up many further possible technologies and so even more money is borrowed, which ends up inflating the money supply.
Capping the amount of money simply slows down the rate of technological endeavor to an artificial limit. Not capping it means that it’s limited by the rate at which we can come up with practical seeming advances in human capability.
Would you please quit trying to hijack this thread?
If you want to argue that the Republican Party ISN’T in such a spiral (as** John Mace** did) that’s fine. But I asked a specific question and I’d rather it not turn into yet another health care debate thread.
I’m not certain that there is a good analogous comparison to be made here. Most modern extremist parties that gained power were overthrown eventually and replaced by more extremists. The only thing I can think of that’s even close might be the French Revolution and that’s a stretch.
My prediction: The GOP will gain a few spite seats in November, but not enough to do much of anything. If the extremism continues, the right will fracture into two parties despite the screaming of the leaders to maintain unity against the Democrats. It MIGHT actually be a net gain for the country though as a large third party would force us into a real multi-party system.
I’m not so sure. The Democratic party is currently a better example of a functional two (or three) party system without the Republicans. The Dems have conservative, centrist, and liberal wings that don’t always agree but work together to achieve results. The Republicans, however, as has been mentioned in many threads on this board as well as other blogs and a few news outlets, have marginalized, muzzled, or primaried out their progressives and centrists, strongly encouraging remaining members to walk lockstep behind a far Right (I would say extreme) agenda.
I don’t know if there are any Republicans left with either the will, desire, or authority to pull the party back from the damaging place they’re headed. They’d better hope they win a good number of seats in November because if they don’t, or if the Democrats maintain their numbers for the most part, I’m afraid the Republican’s relevence as a party may be reduced to solely that of annoying thorn in the Democrat’s side, but with no power or good will to cause the Democrats to want to work with them any further, and I truly don’t think that’d be a good thing.
America, as the rest of the world, is trending progressive; Conservatism is its current form can only slow that down, but it can’t stop or reverse it, as much as it may want to. Boldly anachronistic rhetoric on immigration reform for example, such as comes from the more vociferous in the Republican electorate, pandered to by their insanely influential political idealogues in the media, and justified by party apparatchik, is, IMO, simply suicidal in a country with a fast-growing immigrant population.
It’s important to remember that the Republicans aren’t into right-wing extremism for extremism’s sake. As “Wild Bill” Donovan, founder of the OSS, said: “The only rule is to win”. What the Republicans discovered back in the Reagan era was that it doesn’t matter what you believe so long as you remember that the purpose of power is power. To this end the strategy is to employ a doublethink straight out 1984, in which one simultaneously believes in the unquestionable rightness of one’s doctrines while at the same time acknowledging that their purpose to to yield power. Fanatical absolutism is a means, not an end, to this goal. Since the Republicans are not a marginal faction struggling to attain relevance, they don’t need to resort to bombings and assassinations like a terrorist group*. Instead, they practice what I’ve referred to in previous threads as “totalitarianism-lite”: emulating the mindset of a revolutionary one-party state only without the secret police and concentration camps. You can take as a guarantee that the Republicans will never, ever take an ideological stance that would mean losing real world power.
*although if right-wing terrorism ever gained enough popular support that it looked like the wind was blowing the right way… who knows?