In politics, there’s certainly a sense in which the best measure of success is elections won vs. elections lost, and so it can be honestly said that the Republican Party is currently more successful than they’ve been at any time since 1928. The rationale for saying this is based on the current balance of power across the board, from Congress, to state houses, to state legislatures.
The 2014 election yielded the highest number of GOP House members since 1928, and the second highest number of GOP senators. There are currently 31 Republican governors. The GOP controls 70 percent of state legislatures and enjoys single-party rule in 25 states.
But, a healthy, successful party can’t be so weak that its supporters can write off any hope of winning a presidential election in April as former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson does this morning in the Washington Post.
Consider: If Republicans had fielded a strong presidential nominee this year, who managed to win a winnable election, the party’s success would have been more comprehensive than any since 1980. The tragedy is not that Republicans are on the verge of self-destruction; it is that they were on the verge of victory, and threw it away.
The thing that Gerson should consider, but does not, is how and why the Republicans are failing to field a strong presidential nominee this year. Because the answer badly undermines his assertion that his party is “brimming with health.”
This singular failure is not a small thing for the GOP. The patient is brimming with health and vigor in every way, except for the missing head. Either of this year’s likely Republican failures would complicate the job of candidates down the ticket and alienate demographic groups that are essential to future national victories.
Let’s review a few recent events. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was supposed to be the ideas guy for the GOP. He was the one who was listening to the Reformicons. But he lost a primary to an unknown tea partying college professor and then saw his preferred Reformicon champions (Jeb, Christie, Walker, and Rubio) fizzle on the campaign trail. These were the folks who at least had some theories about what the federal government should do, and who recognized that a president can’t lead a Party of No. But it turned out that the Republican base is more interested in firing these people than hiring them.
In the midst of their failures, a coup occurred in the House of Representatives, driven entirely by the fact that Republican lawmakers refused to follow the leadership of Speaker of the House John Boehner. Because they wouldn’t back his decision making, he had been forced to govern with a mostly Democratic caucus. The Democrats went along with funding the government even though they had almost no say in how the money was spent, but even this wasn’t good enough for the House Republicans. Rather than be forced out, John Boehner quit. And I don’t think a Speaker of the House would quit if he were leading a party that is brimming with health.
That the Republicans have had a lot of electoral success lately is indisputable, but the way they’ve achieved this success is not healthy, and that’s why I have to quibble with what Gerson says here:
The second fever [the Republicans need to break] is less common in the United States than in Europe, but it is a particularly vicious strain. This is the claim by right-wing populists that Republicans need to completely reorient their ideology in favor of nativism, protectionism and isolationism in order to appeal to working-class whites. This was the message of Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaigns starting in the 1990s. With Trump, it is back in full force.
The problem? Aside from the fact that protectionism is self-destructive economic policy, and isolationism is disastrous foreign policy, an attempt to pump up the white vote with nativist rhetoric alienates just about everyone else.
I’m sorry, but the problem is not that nativist rhetoric alienates so many people that it makes winning a presidential election impossible. The problem is that racism is wrong. Racism is not healthy. Racism is the cheap way out. It’s a cynical short-cut. It’s the opposite of moral leadership. It’s a form of ethical bankruptcy. It’s shameful, and meritless.
If you have political success that way, it’s the equivalent of getting rich by defrauding a bunch of people. You don’t judge the health and worth of people solely by how much money they have accumulated, and you can’t judge political parties that way either.
And it’s not just racism that’s a big problem. It’s also a strain of anti-intellectualism that makes it impossible to have a rational political dialogue in this country, and that prevents the Republicans from recognizing problems or crafting realistic solutions.
Just yesterday, I wrote about how the Republican base is under immense economic and cultural pressure and is literally smoking, drinking, drugging and suiciding itself to death. When you have a population in those kind of circumstances, how you choose to lead them matters a lot. If you appeal to their dark side, you can mobilize some of the worst human instincts and emotions for your political benefit. That’s what those who “reorient their ideology in favor of nativism, protectionism and isolationism in order to appeal to working-class whites” are doing, and Gerson is correct to call them out for it. But this is the strategy that has worked for the Republican Party in the Obama Era, and it’s why they’ve had enough success that Gerson can say that the party is “brimming with health.”
It’s a cliché at this point to argue that the Republicans are like Dr. Frankenstein. Maybe you prefer to talk about a deal with Mephistopheles. It certainly appears that the deal with the devil brought the Republicans downticket success at the price of presidential viability, although we still have an election to conduct and votes to count before we can say that with absolute certainty.
What we can say already is that the Republicans don’t deserve to win the presidency because they’ve lost the moral credibility to argue that they’ve earned it.
They have a base of voters who are in desperate need of help, but conservatives have no answers for them that don’t involve denying them access to health care, reducing their retirement security, building walls around the country, and expelling or denying entry to millions of people. They’d rather talk about a fictional War on Christmas and transgender people in the bathroom than deal with an opioid epidemic that has grown into a full-blown catastrophe for their supporters.
What’s needed is actual positive leadership. The right needs a leader who appeals to the best human instincts and emotions. And they need this, not because it’s in any way guaranteed to bring them electoral success, but because it’s the right thing to do.
Trangender in the Bathroom, what nonsense! Those stupid birth certicate/bathroom laws!
I asked my very traditional wife what she thinks of someone who looks like a man and having a penis go in the same bathroom with her. She didn’t like it at all. A transgender male is a male. Is she going to ask for his birth certificate when he enters? No. What counts is the sex you are today, not when you were born.
Stupid stupid fundamentalists think transgender people are just in drag.
It seems that fundamentalists fear the predators that already infest their bathrooms and often get supervisory reassignments instead of accountability. Whether it be stores, schools, churches, or offices, organizations don’t want the publicity about predators.
And so an entire class serves as scapegoat to people who really are not like them at all. The same has happened to refugees. Or for that matter users of information services and warranless surveillance.
And it isn’t just fundamentalists using this fallacy to goose election turnout. What the GOP general assembly and Democratic scared rabbits did in House Bill 2 was a GOTV gimmick that had the advantage of empowering people who wanted to discriminate against other people for any reason and in any manner. It was legislative nullification of the 14th Amendment; we’ve seen this from North Carolina before. If the incumbents who voted for this bill get re-elected, the tale is that this is legitimate and the North Carolina public returns to its pre-Luther Hodges antediluvian ooze.
Hmm, recon this might change some votes?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/porn-site-bans-north-carolina-users-due-to-states-anti-lgbt-laws
_us_570bd057e4b0885fb50d9a92
Yeap it sure did
Apr 12, 2016
Governor Pat McCrory has signed an Executive Order to protect the privacy and equality of all North Carolinians. Executive Order 93 clarifies existing state law and provides new protections for North Carolina residents.
Executive Order 93 does the following:
Maintains common sense gender-specific restroom and locker room facilities in government buildings and schools
Affirms the private sector’s right to establish its own restroom and locker room policies
Affirms the private sector and local governments’ right to establish non-discrimination employment policies for its own employees
Expands the state’s employment policy for state employees to cover sexual orientation and gender identity
Seeks legislation to reinstate the right to sue in state court for discrimination
With this Executive Order, the State of North Carolina is now one of 24 states that have protections for sexual orientation and gender identity for its employees.
Sounds good except for this:
“Affirms the private sector’s right to establish its own restroom and locker room policies”
Sounds like a gaping hole.
“The right needs a leader who appeals to the best human instincts and emotions.”
That would require that a Republican leader would have to admit that there is a role for government to help people. Right now that is not part of their scorched earth program. In fact the only R candidate who can take that position is Trump and his followers know it.
In theory it is possible to have a Republican party that looks out for its constituents. Perhaps their proposals on dealing with poverty or opioids or whatever else would be different from that of Democrats. It could be market oriented rather than a complete fuck you. The only problem is the Democrats have taken that terrain. After all, what is Obamacare if not a Republican proposal for health care reform? The last one that sincerely attempted to solve the problem rather than just bullshitting voters.
Such a Republican party would cause (and require) a split, with the angry nativist branch slithering off to some other Godless rock. Then we’d see the natural alignment that Martin’s spoken of (and to an extent predicted) between moderate in both parties. But it would require Republicans to return to their status as the loyal opposition, as they wouldn’t have the mojo to win majorities almost anywhere. They don’t want to go there; which is why guys like McConnell continue to dance with the devil.
I know it’s not the primary point of the comment here, but it’s worthwhile to deal with this, yet again.
Obamacare is not a Republican proposal for health care reform. For two of oodles of examples, the GOP wants to destroy Medicaid, not shore it up and expand its eligibility to tens of millions of additional Americans. The GOP wants to destroy regulations of businesses, not sharply ramp up regulations of acute health care and insurance providers.
If the ACA had been a true Republican proposal, it would have gained votes from their Congressional caucuses. It did not, not a one.
“ObamaCare Was A Republican Proposal” is among the most damaging of the Zombie Lies of the Left. Every single person who uses it to support their call for single payer or other reform policies is actively damaging their own prospects.
It was an idea cooked up by the Heritage Foundation to make it look like the GOP had an alternative to HillaryCare. It was like Lucy’s football.
Don’t throw that baseball (HillaryCare), work with us and kick this football (ObamaCare).
It was never sincere in 1993, although it did form the basis for RomneyCare. But RomneyCare is apparently naked Stalinism, just like HillaryCare.
If the “it” in your summary here is the private health insurance exchanges absent many of the regulatory details, I’d give you that.
But the regulatory details in the ACA are very important, and vary greatly from the Heritage Foundation proposal. Heritage’s proposal also sought to gut Medicaid, rather than shore it up and massively expand it as the ACA has done.
Heritage first put its proposal forth in 1989.
http://www.heritage.org/research/lecture/assuring-affordable-health-care-for-all-americans
It wasn’t cooked up in response to HillaryCare; it was picked up by Congressional Republicans as a response to HillaryCare. Not a big difference, I’d concede.
RomneyCare is also much superior to the Heritage proposal. It was signed by Governor Romney after getting worked through and passed in the Democratic-controlled Legislature.
With all the built in advantages for this Republican party, such as small state reps and rottenborough districts, I wonder what the comparative weight of Dem vs Rep vote actually is?
They can totter along in the states for a long time and poison a dozen more Flints, I suspect.
>>The right needs a leader who appeals to the best human instincts and emotions.
Needs him for what? A target and laughingstock?
Has there ever, anywhere in the world, been a right-of-center leader who could be described that way?
If you somehow parachuted such a person into the republican primaries, how many votes would he get? Half as many as Jeb?
Trump voters are absolutely opposed to anything that would resemble “the best human instincts and emotions”. This is a group consisting of people who are a) stupid, b)mean, and c) proud of both those things.
Churchill had his reformer phase. And of course, there was Teddy Roosevelt. Is no doubt those guys were pro-business, either. But they had ethics and a sense of fairness.
New England tends to produce that kind of Republican. Not always, but it’s generally a different strain of Republicanism from the toxic entities the rest of the country suffers under.
Yes. People like Warren Rudman and Lincoln Chafee come to mind. Today, we call such men “Democrats.”
I’d also lump folks like Charlie Baker and even Romney (as Mass governor).
I disagree with them on a lot of issues, but their position is not “burn it all down.”
Angela Merkel, for a contemporary example.
And this is exactly why the GOP is trapped. They have so successfully destroyed their voters’ faith in all of the institutions that make democracy work that there is literally no one left who they would trust to lead them back to sanity.
Right. There would be a huge political price to pay because it would mean carpet bombing their current coalition and trying to build a new one. This will happen when and if the current coalition can no longer win in regions of the country. Then, in those places, we’ll see moderation. Given that California is becoming such a place, it should be the place where we see it first. And I believe that’s exactly what we’re seeing. Business interests abandoned Jack Mobley’s candidacy for the state house in 2014. Since then, business interests have quietly smothered several similar candidacies before they made it out of their cribs.
They have a base of voters who are in desperate need of help, but conservatives have no answers for them that don’t involve denying them access to health care, reducing their retirement security….
Ah, but there is a rather clear ideological basis to all that, isn’t there? Providing that help “creates a culture of dependency”. You, dear reader, may regard that as a bit of cynical manipulation, but there are plenty of people on the political right who actually agree with this culture-of-dependency rigamarole. These are the same people who progressives think are deluded because they vote against their own economic self interest.
Social Darwinism can wear an unsympathetic liberal face, too, that morally scolds or penalizes the individual for failures to his individual self. Smoking, bad diet, drugs, alcohol, etc. And genetic testing is already here.
Sin taxes and lottery income are popular in Dem states, too.
Urologist informed me Monday that although a PSA test is indicated, Obamacare changes to Medicare forbid paying for PSA tests for men over 69, contrary to medical association recommendations for an age 75 cutoff and only for routine screening.
Appantly this was to help cover the cost of the subsidy. Thanks Obama.
think your doctor may be misinformed
granted this site may not be updated but it’s a pretty good resource for these things so I think it’s probably accurate.
http://www.cancer.org/healthy/findcancerearly/cancerscreeningguidelines/medicare-coverage-for-cancer
-prevention-and-early-detection
It’s his specialty, urology, so he ought to know. hoping BCBS covers it even if Medicare doesn’t.
I had heard on the radio that routine PSA’s are no longer recommended if one is over 70+x, but hadn’t heard about not paying for it.
Had the DRE, it’s fine. Had a high PSA followed by a low PSA last year. Thought it worthwhile to double check.
Re DRE, don’t know what Rock Hudson saw in it. It’s literally a PITA. Primary care physician will be glad the urologist did it, but I prefer her. She has smaller fingers!
that’s interesting, it might be worth looking into directly with Medicare since I looked and there doesn’t seem to be any info easily available on the web.
PSAs are covered under Medicare Part B every 12 months. W/O Part B you may or may not be charged a fee depending on whether your urologist is willing to accept Medicare’s payment amount.
It is not 1928 exactly. More like 1930 with a Presidential election tacked on. But that was also the 2008 election, but the 2008 election lacked the GOP peak power because of the 2006 election.
We have a crisis that began in 2001 and another that began in 2007. Neither has been dealt with because of business as usual although cosmestically they are looking better than they have in years. In addition, we have known future crisis barreling down on us with the march of folly going in the other direction.
The Republican Party are thus thrice failures and insisting on going in a failing direction on all three in a desperate move to avoid the public realization that 70 years of Republican political alignment has been a huge public policy failure, mitigated only by Republican Presidents and Members of Congress who were not totally true believers in the 1940s realignment, the 1968 doubling down, the 1980 tripling down, the 2000 quadrupling down, the 2010 quintupling down, and the 2016 sextupling down a la clown car.
The Republican Party drew exactly the wrong conclusions from the Great Depression and from World War II. Those fallacies still persist no matter how much Republicans have gullible Democrats following Republican solutions in the name of bipartisanship.
The world in fact does not have to decide between isolation and war nor does it have to decide between markets and socialism. It does have to discover what brings justice, peace, and prosperity. In the increasing mish-mash that social discourse has become after World War II, the thread of that search has become lost in loyalty to traditions and plain old lazy commitment to business as usual. And that’s the good people who have no convictions. Those who seek inordinate wealth, power, status cynically now play us all.
That seventy-year-long mishmash is not without origins. And in a cynical world, success is reduced to working one’s absolute will without opposition. The hubris of all rulers, warned against by the mythologies of the Phrygian kings, ends usually in starvation, destruction, and forgetting. Likewise the story of the essentially Republican-dominated post-war period and the few exceptional Democrats who swam upstream to this tide. Hail, Trump, who is the tribune who turns everything to gold. Hail, Ted, who is the tribune of complete and total virtue. Hail, Kasich, the tribune of the legacy ruling class. Who can resist their absolute will, no?
When the Congress, the Presidency, and the Courts are theirs, the seventy-year success will be confirmed.
And then what?
And then what? The right will have complete control of the trillions of revenue and they will become the dog that caught the car.
The recent failure of the Republican Party to maintain a coalition which can win Presidential elections is beginning to cost the Party control of the Judiciary as well. That change is well underway; it’s why their Senate caucus is taking their debased and indefensible position of denying Garland a hearing. Look at what’s happening to the Senate Judiciary Committee Chair right now:
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/editorials/2016/04/04/editorial-grassley-creates-stal
emate-supreme-court/82612692/
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/iowa-view/2016/04/10/grassley-sky-wont-fal
l-one-less-justice/82794878/
An extreme roll of the dice; that’s what they’ve decided upon. We’ll see if it’s going to come up seven. I doubt it:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/iowa-cafe-pressures-grassley-scotus-nomination
Many signs are suggesting Grassley and many others will suffer a painful collection of debt in November.
Well, that also depends on liberals/progressives deciding that the ACA, tax credits for renewable energy, tax increases on the wealthy Obama negotiated, CFPB, Lilly Ledbetter, net neutrality, gay marriage, and a host of other issues, are worth defending in the general, whoever the nominee is. Republicans will certainly trade Dem voters succumbing to everything-is-shitism disease, sitting out, and marching later, for complete control of government.
I’m moving from disappointment to anger to fascination about how unappreciated the ACA is. It’s a complex law, and the legislative processes and public discussions which preceded and followed its passage have led to many legends. These are propped up across the political landscape, from right to moderate to left, as false representations of the real deal. People have their POV, and that’s it, no more thinking, no more discovering.
Here’s some info about an important aspect of the Law and its many implementations, at Martin’s other gig:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2016_04/cost_control_measures_in_obama060234.php
What is it about this Law in particular that drives so many people so far away from the facts?
If we keep the Presidency in 2016, it’s a permanent part of our health care policies, so in some ways all the grousing won’t be relevant to its existence soon. The grousing sure does make it difficult to improve, however.
And of course it needs improving! Unfortunately, disrespecting it and mischaracterizing it from the left places real obstacles in front of our common fight for better policy here.
I help consider and interview candidates for my State Legislature. As the years have gone by, I have become more and more unpersuaded by the many candidates and incumbents who say “we should have single payer.” I think it’s a cheap way out of answering the difficult questions of how we administer our health care system. It’s a happy answer that attempts to to hide their lack of knowledge, and it works to fool people distressingly often.
The ACA allows States to ask for a waiver from the Federal government to experiment with their health programs funds with help from Washington money. No guarantee they’ll be granted the waiver, but States have the ability to ask for the Feds to help fund a single payer system, as Vermont attempted to do from 2011 to 2015. The effort failed, in a State where the politics and relatively friendly market conditions should have made it as easy as any State in the Nation to work through.
This frequently forwarded idea that single payer would be easy peasy is wrong on the politics and the policy. Sure, it would be desirable to shrink or eliminate the private health insurance and pharmaceutical industries. But the political hurdles are mountainous, and it would be absolutely possible to jimmy together a Federal or State “single payer” system which does not improve on the current system, in whole, a system which would solve some problems and save some money but could create brand new problems and lose money in new ways. People don’t want to consider or believe that, but it’s true.
To be clear, it is possible for the U.S. to implement a public health care system which is an improvement on the status quo, as the ACA improved on the previous status quo. Just saying that corruption, money and lack of political will are not the only problems in the way.
The proof is in the performance.
We started off with certain mortality statistics in the population that were embarrassing for a developed nation. Maternal/Child mortality certainly was one.
“Despite having the most expensive health care system, the United States ranks last overall among 11 industrialized countries on measures of health system quality, efficiency, access to care, equity, and healthy lives…”(2011)
We are reading about insurance with co-pays too high to be used. If that spreads, how do we improve health outcomes and stats? Especially among growing poverty.
In the circumstances you describe re. unaffordable co-pays, fetal/infant/maternal mortality rates, and all other issues which hit upon potentially legitimate complaints about the ACA, a few things:
Fetal and infant mortality rates have undergone a very slow downward trend throughout this century; I can’t find 2015 data to discover if this has remained ongoing, but it seems extremely likely. These rates have remained higher in the U.S. than they are in other developed nations, so we have work to do. Overall U.S. maternal mortality rates have gone up and down; some are theorizing that new, more specific mortality reporting and data collection brought by the ACA and other Obama Administration efforts have caused us to capture maternal deaths which may have been unclassified or improperly classified in the past. We need to work on this as well.
Re. expenses, anecdote is not data. Where there is data showing that the combination of a particular insurance marketplace and its tax subsidies for customers results in poor affordability for the broad set of customers in that marketplace, how many marketplaces are experiencing this? My understanding is that the answer is “not many.” That said, the law needs tweaking to deal with this. More on this below.
How much is that lack of affordability linked to other major living expenses, most often housing, which have zoomed up even more substantially than the insurance tab, making health care costs the expense that must be ditched up front for other, more immediate and constant needs? I concede that these details don’t matter for most people; if they believe they can’t afford to bear out-of-pocket health care costs even with the ACA’s substantial assistance, they view the Law as bad or not good enough. Again, the law needs tweaking.
There are parts of the U.S. health care system which are not addressed or insufficiently addressed by the ACA; there are areas where the ACA is not bring the results the CBO estimated it would. (There are also areas where the ACA is working better than the CBO estimated it would, but we’ll leave that aside for now.)
Under functional governance which is responsive to the people, elected officials respond to identified needs to serve their constituents, through direct service to guide them thru their best options, to pass laws or make amendments to laws, or to advocate for more effective regulations of laws. I don’t even have to describe how thoroughly this is not taking place right now, and which Congressional Caucuses are nearly 100% to blame for this.
I believe individuals and groups in the progressive movement need to become better in assigning responsibility in these areas. What I see happening too frequently is progressives taking perceived outcomes like the ones you share here and using them as a wedge to talk about the need for single payer NOW, re-litigating the legislative process which led to the ACA, rehashing all the complaints about money in politics and accusations of pure corruption by Obama et al., and…we end up blaming the Democrats for ACA problems caused almost exclusively by the despicable actions of Republicans.
Oh, and we’ve now labeled top Democrats and the Democratic Party as unredeemable because of claims of corruption, pursuit of filthy lucre, lack of good will, lack of willingness to fight for better policies, belief in bad policies…
Do you see how this commonly followed rhetorical path takes the progressive movement away from winning elections, away from repairing the ACA, away from single payer, away from better health care outcomes, away from a better society?
The ACA delivers a superb way to provide affordable health insurance for people with low incomes in an era of growing economic inequality and poverty rates which have gone down since 2011 but remain unacceptably high. That is the ACA’s broad Medicaid expansion, which has insured many millions of Americans and would be helping many more millions if not for Chief Justice Roberts’ decision to declare the ACA’s essentially mandatory Medicaid expansions an unconstitutionally coercive burden on the States, and the decisions by the two dozen Stupid States who hate President Obama and their residents with low incomes so much that they refused billions of Federal $ to expand their Medicaid programs.
The ACA caps the amount of money people can be forced to pay with an individual or family plan purchased through the Marketplaces:
http://obamacarefacts.com/health-insurance/out-of-pocket-maximum/
https:/www.healthcare.gov/glossary/out-of-pocket-maximum-limit
While these caps, prorated by income, are not set low enough to make all health expenses affordable for everyone, they are set low enough to prevent the catastrophically high charges that people were stuck with before the ACA.
Like I said, it will have to prove itself with numbers.
The first place those improvements should be measurable is in infant/maternal mortality at the lower deciles.
The complete withholding of support in the face of the measurable and identifiable improvements which have been made in many areas of the health care system, from cost controls to care access to quality of services…this withholding of support or reward or praise, in tandem with the leveling of criticisms and poor faith assumptions of the ACA’s authors and regulators, directly damages the possibility that the American health care system will continue to be improved in ways which meet your demands.
The law and its many outcomes are complicated; the political fallout in some areas is extraordinarily simple. We support people attempting to pass and implement positive reforms, or we don’t. They get elected or re-elected, or they don’t. They get sufficient support in their periodic fights on Capitol Hill and in State Capitols across the nation, or they don’t.
The American people will not sustain their support for a single payer healthcare system through a Federal Legislative campaign. There is evidence to show that there is literally zero States where the voters would sustain their support for a single payer program there. We can get there, but we are most certainly not there now.
These things are real. Corruption of public officials didn’t make them so.
Er, system inertia is your justification? You do not think there is a need to document whether ACA is better or worse in actual health outcomes over time on the same population? I am at a loss for words.
Placing several fingers on the scale to frequently create falsely negative general summaries of ACA outcomes, when combined with bad faith historical discussions about how the Law was passed and what motivated and continues to motivate the various actors in all three branches of government…
…these are the things which hurt our movement. Obama and Congress are corrupt and literally don’t care about me, why fight? Walk away, disgusted with everyone.
It’s a problem.
I generally measure the success by how much are peoples lives being fucked up v. improved so I dont really buy your formulation.
Do you think that’s my formulation or the formulation that I am questioning?
It seems more like the formulatio.n you are questioning to me.
I’d say that the Republicans have been victims of their own success. Whatever benefits there once might have been to the shrink-the-government/governs-best-that-governs-least/deregulation philosophy, the last of the juice was squeezed out of that orange years ago. The R’s just don’t have any tools in their toolbox to deal with today’s issues.
Well, that depends on how you view today’s problems. If your biggest problem is ensuring Democrats don’t vote, I’m sure you can find more tools in the chest to make that happen.
Gerson is whistling as loud as he possibly can throughout his opinion piece here. Their entire movement has become extremely detached from reality. Much of the stuff their people are writing this year is embarrassing. I desperately hope they experience a successful intervention soon.
I mean, look at that piece in the first link. Sean Trende is said to be a reasonable political analyst on the right. Look what he joins in writing, right off the bat:
“One need only look at fights over voter identification laws, redistricting, food stamp benefits, Obamacare expansion, and a multitude of other battles from the last few years alone to understand the importance of non-federal elections.”
I mean, come on, these items are supposed to represent the agenda of a healthy Party? Trende is blind to the modern conservative movement’s immoral and worthless agenda, and wishes to pluck out our eyes as well.
And this was written in 2015, when these topped the agendas of conservative Governors and Legislatures. This year, preventing Cities from raising their minimum wages and protecting the civil rights of LGBTQ constituents and tourists have been added to the EMERGENCY LEGISLATION mix.
I don’t know that even a November smashing of Trump or Cruz will provide or facilitate the intervention the conservative movement needs. If Trump or Cruz are beaten as badly as it appears they will be, I can easily imagine the TEA Party and Dominionist wings will just pivot from their familiar bleat “the Establishment prevented us from having the candidate we wanted!” to the brand new bleat “the Establishment undermined the candidate we wanted and prevented us from winning!”
teh donald is certainly trying, in sort of an acid trip way.
Republicans are the Sith. Makes sense.
Just heard about this wonderful thing today:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/tennessee-bill-would-let-therapists-reject-gays.html
“The bill was drafted in reaction to the American Counseling Association’s 2014 code of ethics, which warned counselors not to impose their personal values onto their clients. Tennessee’s bill would allow the state’s mental-health professionals to reject clients — for failing to conform to their beliefs — without losing their licenses.”
Their movement is just staggering forward, blindly lashing out now. “Standing athwart history, yelling Stop” would be an improvement in their actions compared to absurd efforts like this.
They are becoming impossible to parody.
I don’t buy any of this. There’s only one thing going on here: TURNOUT.
Gerrymandering plays a role, but it was only possible because of the 42 million 2008 voters who didn’t realize or care that there was an election in the 2010 census year. The 2 senators per state rule is another built-in advantage for the GOP. But a consistent 140m turnout would put an end to the current reign of conservative terror once and for all.
All the back and forth about how strong the GOP is is predicated on turnout levels not changing.
“What we can say already is that the Republicans don’t deserve to win the presidency because they’ve lost the moral credibility to argue that they’ve earned it.”
This is the exact reason the Democrats are in so much trouble this year. They’ve lost the moral credibility to argue that they’ve earned it, because same as Republicans, they cheated, undermining democracy.
When we started this primary cycle I was more than optimistic because we finally had a creditable candidate who had during his rather long political career been fighting for all the things we were already for or should be for as Democrats; the real (new) deal for a change.
It was then like a scene from Pogo where we learn; we have met the enemy and they are us.
This was not supposed to happen. This above candidate was not Hillary and this was Hillary’s turn. Because of their reaction we start to turn over the rocks seeing slimy things crawl out finding Debbie Wasserman-Shultz and David Brock, who they are and why they’re there. This whole thing now starts to turn into the great unmasking. Faced with a real progressive choice we find entire non-government organizations, entire media channels and yes progressive blog pundits only pretending to be progressive. They had all joined the massive shakedown for a variety of reasons, none of those reasons progressive. We even find our progressive economist, Paul Krugman, swimming in the tank. But then it gets worse, much worse.
We find what we thought was a democratic process inside our own party was no more. The Establishment hadn’t had to worry for a very long time but they were prepared for the eventuality of a genuine progressive grassroots movement taking their bought power from them. The system had been rigged in favor of the Establishment with enough Super Delegates to make any challenge virtually impossible. If that’s not bad enough we find their master, Big Money, had already done its work. No less than 33 State Democratic organizations were laundering money funneling it back to Hillary’s DNC and Hillary’s Victory Fund even though she’s not the nominee yet. This is neoliberalism turned into a cash cow taking large sums of money from the worst players. Of course, with all that money, most of the Super Delegates are already bought and paid for. After all, no one wants to find themselves on the wrong side of the cash register. What could go wrong?
Now we come to what I will call the Big Snag. Both major parties have been leaking with Democrats getting the worst of it. Thanks to DLC/Bill/Hillary neoliberalism became bipartisan. Suddenly it looked like there was no real difference between the parties with most all politicians looking only to feather their own corrupt nest. The people who became disgusted with this became Independents. The Big Snag is that neither party is big enough to win national elections without winning the Independents.
What makes this worse for Democrats is that it never occurred to them that anything was actually wrong with neoliberalism, with their conventional wisdom telling them Independents are just some pool of voters looking for some Third Way solution to be had for a mere swing to the right when they are in reality a group of really pissed off people best described as populist whether it’s authoritarian or humanitarian.
This problem is magnified by the Democratic Establishment because of nervous overreach showing everyone who wanted to look, the ugly slime underneath those rocks. The Super Big Snag is trying to convince enough of these pissed off populist Independents to vote for you if you’re Hillary. Now Gaius Publius for a look ahead:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/04/gaius-publius-a-look-ahead-neither-party-can-win-without-winn
ing-independents.html
Leaders of both parties, for example, broadly believe in the current military style of policing. Both believe in a justice system that coerces defendants into plea bargains, guilty or innocent. Both believe in the “importance of Wall Street to the economy” and that big financial institutions should be defended, not broken up. Both parties have offered and enacted a long and strong diet of lower taxes, spending austerity, war and more war. We’ve had these policies, delivered in a fully bipartisan way, for decades.
Partisans and leaders of both parties believe, in the main, that the status quo needs a tweak, but should be kept in place. Today’s independents, in contrast, are done with that.
Above is a quote from the article.
I think Hillary trianglulates for sane Republicans–she has much more credibility there, imo. They could elect her without Sanders people.
Certainly Hillary triangulates with Conservatives except they hate her more than they hate Obama.
She won’t lose all the Sanders supporters but her behavior and the behavior of her surrogates could increase that number. Still, even if all the Democratic Sanders supporters voted for her she could still lose unless she wins Independents, the Big Snag. If you’re looking for an electability issue that could lead to a landslide, Bernie wins a lot of Independents.
Both parties are into claiming that Social Security is broke and needs to be “reformed,” both advocate for deregulation and privatization, both support charter schools, and workers need to become entrepreneurs (like Uber drivers).
It would seem that the polarization process has left the GOP with virtually no positive domestic agenda (I mean, beyond tax-cutting and then shambolic budget destruction). It seems their governing priorities are discriminating against LGBT and punishing women for having reproductive organs.
The House refuses to approve $2 Billion the CDC requested to deal with Zika. Why? Their mulish ideology apparently.
My sense is that collectively the Republican party, particularly politicians in office, see the role of government as a proxy for an angry god, and the only proper activity of government is to punish the weak, the poor, the other, for being so wicked as to not be worthy of divine election to the wealthy, the powerful, (the white). That is, the only admissible activity of government is to ratify and enforce a divine order which just so happens to be plutocracy and white (male) supremacy. Anything else threatens or at least insults that order and is a sacrilege.
Adding, the punishing seems to be doing a lot of libidinal work here. Yeah, we’d like to punish (or bomb) the “right people”, but simply knowing that punishment is happening, or bombs are dropping, is very important. That’s how “leaders” show their virtue. Serious reporters and journalists agree with that as well.
So, government (that is, collective democratic action) cannot solve or address any real-world problems. To think that is to be an ivory-tower elitist, a moonbat, and ultimately it is to question a divine order of inequality and injustice that must obviously be a priori perfect. If God wants to solve a problem, he will send his son, the CEO Jesus, to implement free-market solutions which preserve our liberty and freedom. But government can and should punish the wicked. That is the whole of its purpose.