Outside of a handful of tight states that feel under siege, the Republican Party has no relevance to young people other than as a blocking force. It’s silly to use the Alex Keaton example to predict that teenagers today will turn to the GOP in reaction to a dysfunctional government.
The main thing about the Southern Strategy is that is was a complete revamping of the Republican Party. It took advantage of an opening the Democrats created by going against the interests of its own strongest base in the South. For the Republicans to repeat such a performance, they would have to identify a huge Democratic constituency that feels betrayed and poach them, but there are no large Democratic constituencies available to poach today.
Teenagers may be too young to remember the energy and promise of Obama’s 2008 campaign, and they may be disappointed with the gridlock in Washington that has taken hold ever since the 2010 midterms, but they do not agree with the Republican Party on anything. At best, they may conclude that Congress is inept and ineffectual, but that isn’t a condition that they are likely to endorse.
It should be remembered that the Republican Party became ascendant under Reagan by completely remaking itself, not by somehow winning with the same old arguments. If the GOP were to suddenly rebrand itself in a way that made it the party of choice for New Englanders, it would have the potential to repeat the success it enjoyed in the 1980’s. Short of that, they’re going to become a regional party that gets thumped in presidential elections.
Reagan was the sunny optimistic face that the rich needed to move money from the middle class to them.
He was nothing more than a tool.
But at least he was a smiling tool.
Today’s Republicans have no smiles, just spittle-flecked lips, bulging eyes, and clenched fists.
If you want to sell sociopathic, uncompassionate and un-empathetic policies, it’s best to do it with a smile, like Reagan – or a lying motto like “Compassionate Conservatism,” like W.
Given the open civil war in the Mississippi Republican party, the democrats may win a seat that earlier this year they didn’t dream of winning.
I linked to the tight/loose thing in the other thread not as a simple endorsement, but as food for thought. As marie2 pointed out, although it is evocative, there are real problems with it. It appears to me to be an effort to excuse and legitimate “tight” behavior as being adaptive, whereas in fact I think the author has cause and effect backwards. The tightness comes first, the disease and disasters — better said, the inability to cope with disease and disasters — come after. “Tightness” is simply sadism, neither more nor less nor other.
But the effort to legitimate it is not specifically a sympathetic one; it does not say tightness is better, just that it is a thing and there are reasons for it and therefore there might be a way to coexist with it. The real takeaway is that we have reached a point where we have to make elaborate arguments for coexistence.
…I’m sorry, what was it you were saying about the Middle East?
Short of that, they’re going to become a regional party that gets thumped in presidential elections, but maintains control, or effective control, of Congress for as far as the eye can see.
A generation of stasis is on tap. We’ll find out the hard way if the republic can survive that.
Oh, and they’ll control 35+ Governor’s mansions and state legislatures because nobody gives a damn about midterms and local elections anymore too.
But Dems will run the White House.
All that is going to happen Booman is Republicans will wait it out til the DNC runs out of money. Look at the billionaire map across this country, YOU are outnumbered, I am outnumbered, everyone in the United States is outnumbered. Because Elections are completely for sale.
You can go back to 1979 and people were discussing GOP becomes a regional party, it NEVER happens. People grow up and they switch parties because DNC will not be able to deliver on any of the big dreams it promises. Simply because the wealthy class of America will not allow it.
That’s the secret what GOP does. They just wait til everything falls apart and in shambles and they have their new voting block for the year. But they know, their best weapon is just to wait til everything is in shambles and then hand it over to the DNC.
There will be no progressive rapture for politics. I’ve heard this since was a kid. You don’t have the money, I don’t have the money, our vote is 100% for sale.
No Booman, no. The public knows they will work more hours and live in a more desperate climate ever than before. Because IT is already happening.
P.S. they democrats will have no choice to choose republican policies as well and not be rewarded for it. Same as it ever was.
That’s a good point. After all, nothing in all of recorded history has ever gotten better. Things started out shitty in Sumeria, and it’s been downhill ever since.
We have already established that Money is the measure in this country, Stephen. Once you do that, you can’t turn back.
Civilization we have progressed greatly all around the world, but our elections are a money making machine farce. The best thing to do is focus on what you can change in your community and not worry what is happening politically in Washington. $ travels faster than good intentions and ideals.
That’s a good idea. The Republicans do seem awfully determined to throttle the federal government, so we might as well just give up and let them.
At any rate, it is established that Money is way too powerful in this country, but not that it’s invincible.
Of course it doesn’t exactly hurt Money’s cause to have liberals and progressives saying “Fuck it, we’ll never win.”
I’m not saying fuck it,Stephen. I’m saying “Be realistic”
No one is going to “Save the little guy” if it means you are labeled a “Socialist”
But we will see a downturn in election numbers like we’ve never seen in this election and the next.
I’m still going to vote this midterm, but it won’t matter. The DNC doesn’t know how to market to the base, they suck at it.
Pretty much the DNC’s way of connecting w/ the people is sending pathetic emails w/ titles like “Our Country has hit a CODE RED” or something like that asking for more money w/ the gimmick of “This is it! We are headed for doomsville”
It never fails… and this is why citizens closed the checkbook. If you have insulting methods to get progressives attention, your funding will hit the dirt.
Cheney & Bush are laughing at all the democrats because they know the democrats aren’t going to do a damn thing about any little distraction the GOP conjures. After all, that was proven w/ Iraq.
This is called being aggressively wrong.
How about this? You’ve made three comments in this particular thread. Can you point to anything in any of them that progressives who aren’t ready to throw in the towel can build on? I can’t. Your “realism” sounds an awful lot like “Fuck it” to me.
This is awesome. David Leonhardt writes this sentence:
And then in the very next sentence is the phrase “largely useless cliché. It’s even hyperlinked so it jumps out at you.
Doesn’t he realize Alex P. Keaton is a fictional character? whatever Alex P. Keaton did was a creation of the writers. Is he going to reference Alf next? (a contemporary of Alex P. iirc; or maybe I just watched the reruns in the same era; but that should count in DLeonhardt’s type of reality)
For six years I taught at a university in a rural area of one of the most “tight” states by that map/analysis, before taking a similar job a few miles down the road from Booman. (Hi, neighbor!)
Even in the heart of the old Confederacy, the kids are all right. Their public education system and cultural environment have completely failed them, but they get that. They get that they need to be (and they want to be) more worldly, more curious, more civic-minded, more environmentally engaged than the world they’re growing up in. They are very sensitive to, defensive about the south’s larger reputation as an ignorant cultural backwater, and they both want to fight that and take great umbrage at the ways we perpetuate those stereotypes. Their only loyalties or sympathies to the Republican party come out of the still-widespread belief that the Republicans are the party of the religious. Even for quite progressive southern youth, faith and religious identity matter, in ways they tend not to matter elsewhere. But they’ve mostly rejected the fire-breathing religion-as-culture-war ways of their parents.
This is a long-winded way of agreeing that even where we would least expect it, the youth basically look and act like liberals. They vote and will continue to vote for Democrats, so long as the candidate avoids obvious cultural faux pas like denigrating southern culture or getting baited into taking the anti-Church side in culture wars that, to southern kids, belong to their parents’ generation.
Have you looked at Reddit lately? The kids seem to be going socialist. If we can’t give them proof that capitalism works, that our government isn’t completely bought and sold to the highest bidder, the pendulum is going to swing completely to the other side.
May not matter much. At the state and Congressional House level, the GOP punches far above its weight class. And the kids that “aren’t going Republican” aren’t impacting that. With several destructive GOP Governors set to win their re-election bids and few GOP House seats expected to flip this November.
The Millennials are the kids who grew up in a time when every child got a trophy just for participating. We make fun of that, but I think it’s highly symbolic of how we raised them. The messages they received were powerful: Everyone is important. We all work together. We encourage the weakest. Effort is more important than winning. Etc. And when you listen to these kids, they are very community minded. They don’t believe the government will take care of them, but that’s OK, because we trained them to take care of each other.
The Republican party has nothing to offer them.
And in the “Beat a Dead Horse” Department, David Leonhart prints this story today over at what we affectionately call “The Grey Lady” :
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/08/upshot/why-teenagers-may-be-getting-more-conservative.html?_r=0