Someone once something like, “When they look in the mirror, every senator sees a president.” But it doesn’t sound like many of the Senate Republicans believe it. To hear them tell it, everyone hates the Senate and, anyway, senators have no executive experience and aren’t even qualified to run the country. Plus, they’re way too long-winded and inept at retail politics.
Of course, the real problem is that senators like Chuck Grassley and Orrin Hatch take one look at Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, or Marco Rubio and they know they will be obliterated in a national election. Lack of overall experience is one problem. Lack of gravitas is another. Radicalism is a third. Regional deficits are a fourth. Inability to unite the party is a fifth. Being gaffe-prone is a sixth. You have to get pretty far down the list before you get to any particular problem with being a senator. After all, their voting records are just a subset of their radicalism. It’s the policies that they’d propose that are the main problem.
People talk a lot about the Tea Party vs. the Establishment, but the GOP has an Electoral College problem. If your problem is that you’re getting killed in Northern Virginia and the Philly suburbs, nominating a social conservative is a bad idea, and I don’t care if you’re talking about an ex-governor from Arkansas, a current governor from Louisiana, or senators from Texas, Kentucky, or Florida. When the Democrats had an Electoral College problem they overcame it with Democratic governors from Georgia and Arkansas, not Oregon and Vermont. And both Carter and Clinton kept their distance from the fringes of their own party, rather than trying to be the most liberal members in the country.
The problem is primarily that conservatism doesn’t sell as a national ideology. It’s not enough to nominate someone from Wisconsin if that candidate is an extreme conservative. I can almost guarantee you that Sen. Susan Collins of Maine would win more states than Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin.
We are very close to being able to say in public that the 30-year conservative experiment not only did not work it was catastrophic of US domestic and foreign policy. Stick a fork in it. It is a massive failure that has hurt millions of people in the US and in most other countries as well.
And that the “Stay the course, full steam to the right.” crowd have become loony caricatures of the conservative movement as it saw itself in pompous seriousness in the days of William Buckley. Rube-publicans they have become, even the jokers on Wall Street.
Don’t you know that Conservatism can not fail; it can only be failed?
Those nitwits will always find a scapegoat.
Last 30 years? Brother, you need to go back further than that.
What major state or federal policy initiative have American conservatives, fascists, or libertarian proposed since the end of the American Civil War that:
A.) Was or would’ve been opposed by non-communist leftists (socialists like Debs are okay, though) at the time for reasons other than ‘it doesn’t go as far as we’d like’.
B.) Are viewed favorably by moderates and/or liberals of today.
If you like, you can list accomplishments that were undone or heavily modified by future legislation — i.e. Reconstruction or Social Security.
Leftists have a huge list of accomplishments from that period until now that right-wingers opposed then but (when the cameras are rolling, anyway) celebrate now. Minimum wage, abolition of child labor, women voting, TVA, FDIC, ARPANet, the FDA, etc. etc. Contrariwise, in the 150 years since that war ended what do conservatives have on their list of liberal mea culpas?
Teddy Roosevelt’s idea for a national park system, and Eisenhower’s Interstate highway system, were both pretty major, and positive, accomplishments.
Of course, both would stand zero chance of passage today, and both would be denounced in the same kind of overheated rhetoric that the ACA has been. (Can we expropriate any property owned by Cliven Bundy as a new national park, just to find out?)
To me what’s distinctive about the last 30 years, and especially the last ten, is the complete lack of ideas that aren’t based in magical thinking – trickle-down economics, lower taxes create more revenue, more wars create peace, contraception is abortion, gay marriage “destroys” hetero marriage, etc. It’s to the point where the Tea Party isn’t even interested in alternatives – they’re purely reactive, and what they’re ostensibly reacting to (as opposed to the cultural and demographic shifts that are the real source of their bedwetting) are almost always wholly fictional hobgoblins.
Teddy Roosevelt’s idea for a national park system, and Eisenhower’s Interstate highway system, were both pretty major, and positive, accomplishments.
Ah, but were they opposed by liberals at the time? For the latter, the initial vote tallies seem to suggest this, but the final vote for the Interstate Highway Act (after it left committee) of 1956 had only one person voting against it.
I intentionally set up the question in such a way to (attempt to) tease out a positive and non-obvious contribution from conservatism. Even hideously broken ideologies like communism and fascism and libertarianism have managed to one-up post-ACW liberalism from time-to-time. What exactly is or was conservatism’s long-term victory?
Um, who is arguing that there is or was any (exclusively) “long term victory” of conservatism?
There aren’t many here who don’t reject the entire premise of the conservative mindset (conscious or unconscious) and understand that the positions it advocates would uniformly be catastrophic for the nation.
The point is not that the prescriptions of conservatism are basically uniformly bad and braindead, however far back one wants to look. Any intelligent person knows this. Instead, the point is that modern “conservatism” only obtained effective political power upon the election of St Reagan, after its many years in the wilderness. It was during the past thirty years that modern tax cutting, deregulating, war-lovin’ conservatism got to show its stuff and implement its policies. The electorate should be able to see the result(s), yet remains largely blind, or intellectually enfeebled.
And now we are being actively (not theoretically) governed by an ever more virulent form of this braindead movement, which is becoming more extreme as a tactic to continue its hold onto power. Failure brings on greater extremism. In the minds of today’s conservatives, desperate times call for ever more desperate (i.e. crackpot) measures…
Ny “did not work” you are implicitly assuming that the goals of the policy were the stated goals and not the hidden agenda. The hidden agenda was the creation of massive income inequality and the policies worked very well.
Exactly. The Conservative Era of the past 30 years has produced nothing but abject failure as far as the eye can see. It has been tried and it failed—miserably. And now “conservatism” has devolved into a spiteful party of paralysis as it continues to control (and wreck) one of the two major parties.
Elected Dems, however, seem not to be able to take the bull by the horns and point out that the Emperor has no clothes. Hell, it frankly seems like none of them will even utter the word “conservative”. This is likely because the word has not been vilified to the level Team Conservative was able to accomplish with “lib’rul”. And very few Dems are willing to commence the attack, given the unfair and biased playing field plutocrats have made of the corporate media.
Anyway, given the simpleminded level of American political discourse, failing to associate “conservative” ideology and policies with universal failure and disaster means that the era cannot end (leaving aside the nationwide rigging of the election game currently underway by Repubs).
Further, the vicious Tea Party turds need to be called crackpots—and given their apparently unshakeable control of the House (and likely soon the senate), we are truly presented with a government of crackpots, yet no elected official will say it. Cruz is merely an Ivy Leagued version of Cliven Bundy, as far as I can see.
I can almost guarantee you that Sen. Susan Collins of Maine would win more states than Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin.
Proof? Do you have any hypothetical PPP polls to prove it? Would Collins win her state in a Presidential election? Would Walker?
The problem is primarily that conservatism doesn’t sell as a national ideology.
Thought experiment: what if the Republican Party stayed or moved further right on social issues like God, guns, gays, etc. and went hard left on economic issues? How viable would a coalition like that be?
Disclaimer: I don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon short of a Pol Pot-style takeover. Two generations of gorging on Nixon-Reaganist prolefeed has pretty much killed off this vein of Bryan/Long-style populism. You occasionally see a vague flicker of the embers such as with Tea Party-derived anti-banksterism, but by and large pretty much any Republican at or above the state level have internalized neo-feudalism.
Well sure, populist economic stuff (New Deal, Great Society, imagine some modern equivalent) would be an electoral winner IF you could get it in front of voters, and run a viable (ie. financed) campaign. Even democratic candidates can’t manage to do that. Republicans, not a prayer of getting something like that past the moneybag gatekeepers.
I’ve wondered that myself. It might actually force me to make hard choices about what I value.
If there was a hard left economic party that was terrible on civil liberties versus an economic party that was full-on libertarian, I’ve already admitted here and elsewhere that I would vote for the hard left economic party. But the social issues crap? I might vote for the neoliberals.
Libertarians already had such a choice of a center-left liberal who was good on civil liberties and social issues versus an authoritarian who supported policies for the rich: Russ Feingold versus Ron Johnson. They picked Ron Johnson. We know where their hearts lie; they’ll neither admit it, nor form coalitions with DFH’s.
Assuming it eschewed it’s open hostility to Blacks and Latinos I believe it would attract a not-insignificant number of Blacks and Latinos as well as a fair number of White Christians. I’m not sure about national viability but the symbol of such a party would have to be the unicorn…
The vast majority of Tea Party groups are NOT anti-banker. They are fanatically anti-regulation; they want the banks to run wild.
If they became able to execute their desired policies, TEA Partiers would blame the inevitable next financial crash on stupid/greedy minorities. The conservatives would have no choice other than to place the colored people and others associated with liberalism in debtor’s prisons or allow them to starve in the streets. This would be done for the betterment of society; mustn’t create a moral hazard, must make people face the consequences of their bad choices.
I am not exaggerating here, not one bit. The conservative movement has worked itself into a fine froth. Only barely disguised genocidal policies will satisfy them now.
I’m old enough to remember the conventional wisdom was that it was extremely difficult for senators to successfully compete for the WH because they took too many votes that would have to be explained. And of course the Kerry (“flip-flopper!!”} candidacy tended to confirm that view. Along with the fact that few senators ever did successfully run for the office.
The phenomenon of (junior senator) Obama has apparently changed that view, and Repub generals are always ready to fight the last war, ha-ha. Hence the new Repub minority frontrunners, Cruz and Rubio, the Braindead Party’s answer to Obama.
And where else have they to look, anyway? We don’t elect House members as Prez. In the states Repubs control their governors cheer on every crackpot rightwing policy imaginable, thus turning their natural candidates into spittle-flecked extremists, ala Perry of Tex-ass and Brownshirt of Kans-ass and Felonius Scott of Florida. Thus the Establishment’s need to resurrect the tired Jeb as some sort of “moderate” Bush, the return of Profile-in-Courage Poppy, I guess. (Was this the deeper reason for the latest award?)