Define rich. In the vacuum of America, who is richer than white people? This has nothing to do with the post, I just had to comment.
What is a Turk? (i could google, but let’s just get my ignorance out in the open; To my credit, I had to write a report on Turkey/Ataturk for a few months and can’t get past that word association). Now that the rest of my post has been thoroughly discredited…
To respond to the original post. I think there is a great divide between “Republican” and “Conservative.” They used to line up pretty well together (ie, Bush 2000 campaign promises). President Bush’s Presidency though, moved those two concepts further apart. No trying to (1) balance the budget, (2) nation building, (3) Education being a federal and not a State issue, (4) for bigger Gov’t powers (not less); to name a few of the divides.
So, someone who represents real conservative ideals will emerge. Why? It’s too easy not too. You get to discredit Bush & Obama at the same time! Obama won’t be able to attack you for “same old Bush policies.”
When you continue to appeal to anti-intellectualism in order to win elections, eventually you end up actually believing the talking points. This leads to a pretty brain dead party. When you have a party doing everything it can to deny global warming and evolution etc., you’re not going to end up with a party that thinks tax cuts are the solution every problem. It can’t be too surprising that there aren’t any Young Turk Republicans.
ahhh, what a risk. I knew what a Turk was, I just thought it had some special association to a republican I had never heard of. I was going to take 6 months off from posting if I had totally misoverlooked something.
Actually you are seeing the new ideas on the intellectual fringes of the Republican Party. For example, Grand New Party, a book by two young writers Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat; the latter is now a columnist at the NYTimes. Here is a nice reviewby David Brooks who is also part of the reformist wing of the party. The problem is that there are very few politicians willing to embrace these new ideas and incur the wrath of Rush Limbaugh, Grover Norquist et al. It’s probably going to take a couple more election defeats for the party to change course.
True, but I don’t think that’s analogous, because of the … uhm… unusual nature of the 2000 election (let’s not go there, please). I just mention it because I don’t think the dems thought they had lost the White House fair and square…
By contrast, there’s no such salve for the repubs this time: they lost the House, they lost the Senate, they lost the White House.
A better analogy from the dems would be the rise of the centrist dems that gave birth to Clinton, back in the 80s, when Reagan and then Bush I had successfully held the White House for 12 years. The centre-right dems did just the sort of soul-searching that the OP is talking about, on issues like gun control, welfare and the death penalty, to move their party more to the centre.
[QUOTE=Northern Piper;11149239Reagan and then Bush I had successfully held the White House for 12 years. The centre-right dems did just the sort of soul-searching that the OP is talking about, on issues like gun control, welfare and the death penalty, to move their party more to the centre.[/QUOTE]
They passed the AWB in the '94 Omnibus crime bill among other things and pissed a whole lot of people off in the process. If there was a serious effort to moderate their gun control positions, does that mean in the previous decades they were more extreme?
Republicans abandoning their talking points didn’t start with Bush the Younger. We’ve had military operations in the middle east, Panama, and Grenada, as well as increasing deficits under George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. Not to mention that George W. Bush was re-nominated and re-elected after it was clear what policies he was pursuing.
Conservatives don’t gain any credibility by claiming that the last Republican president was an aberration.
They haven’t stuck to their talking points for a long time in large part for the simple reason that it’s impossible due to them being mutually contradictory. Small government and enforcing “family values”, for example, contradict each other. Another reason is because actually trying to implement much of what they say they want would be political suicide; actually implementing ( as opposed to making speeches about ) massive cutbacks in government spending means that you have to hurt millions of people who will be extremely angry with you. Most people don’t really want general cutbacks in government; just in the parts that don’t benefit them, personally.
Instead of an ellipsis, why don’t you put in some thoughts to support your assertion, let alone complete your assertion, if you are able. In GD you shouldn’t elide the most important part.
For one, the net based infrastructure that grew up in the late 90’s and 2000’s was quite hostile to the party leadership of the Democrats. Kos, for instance, strongly opposed the DLC. By contrast, the infrastructure of the conservatives on the net has been built to almost unfailingly support the Republicans. Young (or new) leaders in either party will have a very different kind of support for novel ideas from these sources.
A second example: the up and coming Democratic leader Howard Dean went in to the leadership of the DNC and met with a lot of resistance over his novel ideas as to how the organization should practice (e.g. changing the philosophy that the organization should compete for voters in all 50 states), but he was extremely successful. The up and coming Republican leader of the RNC, Michael Steele, has done nothing to suggest that the organization should change its practices, and everything to suggest that they should put forth the same product, albeit in a different package that is off the hook fo’ sheezy. He’s already had to meekly walk back in the face of pressure from Rush Limbaugh.
Now, the vectors of the two parties are very different: Republicans have been sitting at the very boundaries (my goodness one hopes, anyway) of extreme conservative thinking, and have been rejected. They can keep pressing rightward (i.e. propose even more conservative “new ideas”) but that doesn’t seem to be working so far. Democrats on the other hand were becoming the pale shadow of the Republican party, falling in line behind more and more conservative ideas and were failing badly for it. Pushing back to the left has yielded success, so their novel positions should likely continue to tack that direction until they start losing folks in the middle. They’re nowhere near that point in my opinion, but in any even that is the direction that their new ideas will likely take.
If he was, and the party still nominated and supported him, then how do they justify it? Really. They MUST have had someone else they could have put in the White House. Bush was president for eight years. He was a governor before that. He had businesses. He knew people. I have a problem believing that he was just an “aberation”, an “unknown quantity” because people had to know him. He didn’t just appear out of no where.
Hentor I am not so sure that the Dems are tacking Left so much as they are articulating a Middle. The GOP’s leaving that space so completely has given them the chance to claim it as theirs alone. And amazingly they are not squandering the opportunity.
Anyone looking for the formation of a third party is fooling themselves. The dessicated corpse of the Republican Party is still an incredibly valuable property. Anyone who leaves to form a third party is essentially commiting electoral suicide.
The thing is, any politician who wants to run for office can do so without the permission of the national party. And running for office as a Republican is a gigantic advantage compared to running as a Libertarian, or a Conservative, or a Reform party, or an Constitution party, or an America First Party, or whatever.
So a conservative young turk who wants to actually hold office is still going to run as a Republican, even if they don’t agree with most of what the party stands for.
And forcing large sections of the electorate out of your party is no way to run a railroad either. Telling the Republicans that they need to ditch the religious right is silly, because without those voters the party is in even bigger trouble than they’re in now. The key to electoral success isn’t purging voters, it’s attracting voters.
But that’s exactly what they’re doing right now. The message we’ve been hearing is “You don’t agree with Rush? HERETIC! You are no longer a Republican! Leave the party!” Currently 68% of Republicans self-identify as conservative, and I bet that’ll be more in a year.
The point being, I think, that the means that the Republican Party is using to retain those Religious Right voters is NOT attracting new voters and is, in fact, losing them voters.
I do not think that the issue is forcing out the RR, but the RR and tea partiers each trying to force everyone else (and each other for that matter) out.
That said it seems that many GOP centrists will actually be the ones to have a chance to prove they can win (or not).
So they are there, quietly positioning themselves, knowing that in individual elections that vast swath of independents and disaffected Republicans will vote based on the individuals and that even in Illinois a Kirkwill beat a Burris (if Burris somehow wins the primary). As the general elections get close, and certainly after the primaries are over, you’ll likely see these moderates use Rush to create Sister Soulja moments to try to win over the middle in these centrist states. If it works you’ll see a place for centrists within the GOP. If they all lose then the exclusionary voices of the far right will become all the louder.
Quite right and this shouldn’t be glossed over. Douthat, who is 29, Salam, who is 28, are two of the Young Turks (Douthat, of course, writes and Op-ed for the NY Times, while Salam is involved in theamericanscene.com with Jim Manzi and Conor Friedersdorf). But there are also folks like David Frum (48, which isn’t that young, but not old either), who wrote “Comeback” and now runs NewMajority.com, and Patrick Ruffini at NextRight.com, etc.
On the paleo-conservative side, you have people like Daniel Larison, who have been outspoken against this big government, interventionist Republican Party.
Of course this hasn’t translated yet into electoral success. There are a few moderate Republicans who may be able to make inroads… but probably in 2016 and not 2012 (as Gov. Huntsman wisely surmised).
The Republicans’ problem isn’t just that they lost the White House and Congress. They can blame both of those on Bush. Their big problem, which the Dems didn’t have in 2001, is that demographics has turned against them, and it is getting worse. The GOP is getting increasingly male, white, and old. And they are kicking people out of the coalition.