What? Did you maybe mean pro-choice Republicans? (which would still be wrong, but perhaps a more understandable error)
And here, 61% of Republicans identify as pro-life
If history is a guide then if Trump loses in 2020 Republicans will declare that Trump wasn’t a “real” conservative and that they need to move further to the right.
Sadly it’ll be the same or worse. An anti-intellectual, anti-education party of racial resentment and proto-fascist politics.
No matter how evil or corrupt the GOP gets, they are guaranteed 60 million votes in a presidential election. The GOP know this (that their voters won’t punish them for evil or criminal behavior) and will go overboard in this behavior now.
It will slide further into right-wing populism, solidifying its gains among white working-class voters. If they are not smart, they will be a permanent minority party with a ceiling of perhaps 45% of the vote but if they are smart they will solidify into an economically centrist (mildly protectionist, welfare chauvinist, anti-credentialist, anti-monopolist) and culturally moderately conservative party (civic nationalist, pro-life, pro-gun) that would be in a position to win over nonwhite voters.
Illegal, much like the Nazi Party is in Germany today, one should hope.
So it’s basically trivial at this point to point out that the republican party is completely divorced from reality. Everyone knows, no real need to go back over it. And it largely comes down to the right-wing media sphere encouraging that divorce with constant lies, smear campaigns, et cetera.
Have those dynamics become better or worse in the past 2 years?
Yeah, that’s what I thought.
There’s no moderating influence on the republican side. There’s no voice (at least, not with any influence) saying, “Hey, wait, this isn’t okay”. Rank and file republicans have about a 90% agreement rate with Donald Trump - given how he’s been so far, how bad do you think things have to get for that to drop significantly? And if things do get worse, why wouldn’t the right-wing filter bubble immediately blame it on the democrats?
Despite what Joe Biden might say, Trump is not some anomaly. He’s the culmination of modern right-wing grift. The party is well and truly run by the folks on the far right. Even so-called “moderate” republicans have to either step in line with Hannity, Limbaugh, and co, or lose power and influence. There’s nobody willing and able to check those influences. Hell, the president recently stood up for an Infowars editor and a bunch of white nationalists on twitter - where’s the pushback from republicans who are, if not moderate, then at least fucking sane? There is none, because the media landscape ensures that if they stand up to the far right, they will get pummeled.
The only thing that will set this right, short of Breitbart and co. ceasing to exist, is if the republicans take such an impossible beating in the next election that it causes the heads at Fox News to say, “whoa, time to tune things down a bit and rein in our worst excesses”. Except that they have a far better line to take should that happen, a line they’ve been pushing for god knows how long: “Voter Fraud”. Hell, now we have Nancy Pelosi talking about how she’s concerned that Trump will contest the election results if he loses. And why wouldn’t the right-wing media go right along with it, just like they’ve gone right along with every other insane, dangerous, stupid thing he’s said in the last 3 years?
This doesn’t get better without getting a whole lot worse. Unless the republican party is completely crushed, unless the political landscape shifts so dramatically that “I read Breitbart” becomes widely recognized as akin to “I read the Daily Stormer”, there’s no incentive to stop. We are sleepwalking towards a fascist dictatorship.
Like, imagine if Trump loses in 2020, and senate republicans, for whatever reason, refuse to go along with him disputing the election results (given Mitch McConnell’s consistent norm-breaking behavior over the past decade and his caucus’s willingness to go along with it, I find this unlikely). What happens in 2024? Is there any reason to believe the far right will tone it down? That we’ll see less insane conspiracy theories attacking the legitimacy of our institutions? That they’ll be less willing to blatantly lie about anything and everything? These conditions that led to Trump have no real reason to improve, so they won’t.
But here’s the scary part. Trump is currently a drag on his party. But that largely comes down to him being grossly incompetent, stupid, self-destructive, obviously corrupt, et cetera et cetera et cetera. What if, in 2024, the person who runs shares Trump’s authoritarian tendencies, but, just to name one obvious example, isn’t so stupidly self-destructive that he’d fire the head of the FBI that’s currently investigating him for ties to Russia, then admit on national television that he fired the head of the FBI because of his handling of an investigation into him. Imagine if, instead of a scandal-prone man who cheated on his pregnant wife with a porn star then paid said porn star to keep quiet, we had just… someone who wasn’t that.
We’re fucked.
I think people are making an incorrect association between perceived competence and the ability to destroy democracy. Most authoritarians are incompetent when it comes to governing a country in ways that produce benefit for the masses; what they’re competent at is in gaining power, and while Trump might not know shit about the Constitution, economics, history, and foreign policy, he knows a lot about power. He couldn’t have been this successful at conning people for so long if he didn’t know something about the human animal and its frailties.
For this exercise, I assume that the Democrats win big in 2020, getting the White House, Senate, and House. Based on that assumption:
Republicans from 2021-2024 are leaderless. The base still worships the ground that DJT walks on. He continues his tweetstorms and blames the party for not supporting him enough and not being worthy of his leadership. Afraid to offend him, Republicans up for election continue to sing his praises and beg for his endorsement. The racist right wing white nationalists take complete control of the party, having the solid support of 30% of the population but are loathed by everyone else. They continue to shrink in numbers in Congress but dominate in some states. In 2024 they find someone just as repulsive as Donald to nominate and he gets his ass handed to him by Vice President Kamala Harris, who runs because President Biden declines to run for a second term. The Republican Party continues in name but all of its members are white nationalists and their influence pales as the nation enters a generation of Democratic rule.
I mean, okay, granted, this relationship is probably true to an extent. But Trump isn’t just a little corrupt, he’s blatantly, obviously, you’d-have-to-be-a-fucking-moron-to-miss-it corrupt. He seems to revel not just in how fucked up what he’s doing is, but how easy it is for him to get away with it. Imagine a candidate with his oratorical skills who was even just a little more careful about not obviously obstructing justice and bragging about it on live TV. Scary, right?
They will slide ever so slightly towards the middle and pretend that Donald Trump never actually existed. The one exception is that the drumbeats for “more tax cuts” will never cease, an appeal to the 35% of the population living in states that will nevertheless give them a chance of having 51 senators.
Young people in the GOP will either force the party to abandon the worst of its socially conservative beliefs and address climate change or they will leave the party. Republicans will not change until they have lost an overwhelming percentage of state legislatures and the United States Senate.
It will be the same as it was pre-Trump and current-Trump. Trump didn’t change the Republican party. They have always been racist, sexist, ignorant, hypocritical, and as we have now seen, treasonous fools.
Trump just made them feel comfortable saying the quiet parts out loud.
They will be in so much fear of losing the Trump demographic that, at best, they will stay right where they are, but what is more likely is that they will panic and swing even more to the rad right.
BTW, if they actually go the other way I will be damn happy to be proven wrong.
Nixon’s line: “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
Replace “president” with “Republican” and there’s the bulk of your modern GOP. I think if Trump ate a live human baby on national TV, he’d not only get away with it, but his supporters would say the Democrats forced him to do it.
Hyperbole aside, if any elected official actually ate a live human baby on national television they would lose their jobs and go to jail or be executed. That’s going way over the line. Have some faith in your fellow human beings.
Also the FCC would shut down the broadcast within seconds.
~Max
Sorry, I thought the hyperbole was obvious. The main thrust of the sentiment though was sincere. Willfully ignoring the faults, deception, and fundamental dishonesty of a candidate/politician because of the R (or D) label is part and parcel of the hyperpartisan political sphere these days for a very large number of people.
This is prime “owning the libs” stuff, here. Ah, well.
Back to the OP:
- I’d predict that the post-Trump GOP will have an Overton Window of policy positions in traditional foreign and domestic areas that I can’t predict until Trump is out of office. Who knows what he’ll manage to cement into GOP orthodoxy? It won’t be logically coherent, that’s about all I can predict.
- I’m more confident predicting that the post-Trump GOP will confidently eschew any pretense of conforming to America’s norms around free and fair elections. My confidence stems from the GOP’s behavior pre- and during-Trump. Whatever they want to do (per point 1, I can’t predict that), they’ll be pretty brazen about cheating to do it.
Agreed. I was rather pleased to hear Fox News on the radio, right after the Mueller report was released: “President Trump did not do the right thing.” I believe it was Bret Baier who said that. It reminded me of the Nixon interview.
~Max
This particular high horse looks silly when there’s currently an active thread in Elections titled “Blue states propose measures to keep Trump off of 2020 ballots (unless he releases tax returns)”
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with codifying this kind of requirement. Demonstrating that you’re not, say, directly profiting from your actions in office. And of course, it doesn’t just affect Trump, it affects any presidential candidate who insists that their tax status is beyond scrutiny, unlike any of the last 50 years of presidents and presidential candidates. It’s such basic shit that it actually kind of boggles the mind that it’s controversial.
As Little Nemo put it in the thread in question:
(Bolding mine.)
Maybe you should be asking yourself why you feel the need to paint basic anti-corruption measures as “cheating”. Like, if I was stuck in that kind of bizarro mental position, I’d have to wonder - where did things go wrong in my reasoning? Why am I defending this? (Maybe it has something to do with this: your best response to why they were obviously bad was to compare a basic anti-corruption step taken by every major candidate in every election since the 1970s to partisan policy proposals.)