Curtis Gans has some advice for relatively sane Republicans.
In 1967, I conceived of and, with the late Allard Lowenstein, organized a grassroots effort that came to be called “The Dump Johnson Movement,” which intended to provide an alternative to extremism, reverse the upward trajectory of American involvement in Vietnam and remove the principle buttress of that escalation from power. When Sen. Eugene McCarthy provided national leadership for that effort by mounting a challenge in the Democratic primaries, I enlisted in his campaign. When McCarthy began his candidacy, he was unknown to 57 percent of the American citizenry. When I took the train to New Hampshire to help coordinate McCarthy’s campaign there one month before the primary, polls showed only two percent in the state supported his candidacy. The conventional wisdom was that a sitting president could not be beaten within his own party. But we succeeded in making it impossible for Johnson to seek reelection, transforming the Democratic Party’s advocacy from pro-war to anti-war, and creating a permanent majority national popular opposition to the continuation of the war.
Only a similar major grassroots effort in GOP primaries by mainstream Republicans and Republican-leaning independents now can reverse the destruction the right-wing is wreaking to party and country.
The first step on this road is to cease dignifying the far right with the word “conservative.”
Read the rest of it.
What do you think?
I’m not sure that I’d describe the “Dump Johnson Movement” as a resounding success… so yeah, the Republicans should totally try that.
Yeah. I have deep skepticism of any political advice from someone who helped bring us a President Nixon, escalation and extension of the Vietnam war, and 40 years of Democratic dysfunction.
I have enormous respect for much of what liberals achieved in the 60’s and 70’s. But a lot of folks from that era seem incapable of admitting that their Vietnam war protests and organizing were in many ways profound failures.
The Democratic disfunction was already happening. It was inevitable as long as the Democratic party dedicated itself to modernity, inclusiveness, tolerance. If they hadn’t done that, what would be the point of obtaining power?
You are the victim of 40 years of Republican propaganda, my friend.What a bunch of crap.
Yes, theree was a lot wrong with it. It’s easy enough to say. But you have to blame the peace movement for destroying the Democratic Party? You don’t understand what a PoS the Democratic Paty was . You don’t understand that they assassinated our best leaders, JFK, RFK, MLK. Now you’re probably going to tell me JFK spent all his time getting blow jobs from Marilyn Monroe.
Not Marilyn! Say it isn’t so!
I absolutely don’t know what you mean. I was there when it happened. It was a success because Johnson was dumped. It had seemed impossible. I remember hearing Johnson make the announcement that he would not seek reelection. I was so dumbfounded, I could not believe what I had just heard. Do you mean things didn’t turn out rosy right after that? Nothing could have turned out well at that time. They assassinated RFK and MLK. It was a terrible time, I hope we don’t see anything like that again. The peace movement, the civil rights movement, and the music was the only sanity of that time.
Johnson could have beat Nixon. (Well, maybe)
No way Johnson could have beaten Nixon.
The idea that the president of the United States would have declined to run for reelection just because a bunch of DFHs didn’t want him to run doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense. By 1968 Johnson’s unpopularity went far beyond that. Annd that’s also why it also doesn’t make sense to blame the subsequent sad state of the Democratic Party on a bunch of DFH’s and Black Panthers. I would blame it on utter demoralization, caused by the assassinations of the most important leaders, RFK and MLK, Americans being led to think they could win an unwinnable war, a compromised democratic Party, and the very fact that Nixon was elected and proceeded to spread the war to Cambodia. .
It was really the hsock of the Tet Offensive that spelled the end for Johnson. (Incidentally, General Gyap, the brains behind that, died two weeks ago at the age of 102.) After that Gene McCarthy announced he would run against Johnson, and attracted so much support that Robert F Kennedy also declared himself a candidate, and soon eclipsed McCarthy.
There is no question that RFK would have been the next president had he not been assassinated. There is also no question in my mind that that is why he was assassinated, just as JFK was killed for similar reasons.
Hubert Humphrey was the establishment Democrat to succeed Johnson, but he was very unpopular with many because he refused to denounce the war. That’s why he lost to Nixon.
As to Nixon, I won’t even go into that now, but he personally was responsible for prolonging the war several more years, with all that entailed. It was unknown to the public for many years, but Johnson himself did know about Nixon’s underhanded dealings, but could not reveal them because it involved top secret matters. It was a great irony.
Johnson was in many ways a tragic figure, but you cannot rewrite history.
The GOP is trapped. The driving force in the GOP is Fox News, talk radio, and the rightwing internet sites. They not only aren’t in the election-winning business, their business model is more succesful when the Democrats win.
Is there anyone in the GOP with enough clout to tell these media organizations to pretty please cripple your business model so we can win elections again?
These people took over the party because they cared more than the ‘sane’ ones. They put in the time and effort the moderates couldn’t be bothered with. Expecting them to do something about it at this stage is just wishful thinking.
I don’t know. I think it’s pretty misguided in at least one way. He wants ‘real’ conservative, rational conservative, Republicans to take back their party from the extremists. But this is his definition of true, rational conservatism:
A) a respect for the institutions of both governance and society, moderation in manner, skepticism about major and abrupt change and a concomitant rejection of extremes.
B) a belief in traditional values leavened by a tolerance for diverse views.
C) support for free markets tempered by understanding the need for constructive regulation of their excesses.
D) committed to human equality and supportive of equality of opportunity without a mandate for equality of result.
E) supporting representative rather than direct democracy and, where possible, a civil approach to political dialogue and a rational approach to public policy.
That’s a perfect definition of the Democratic mainstream. So he wants the Republicans to become Democrats, and to take a stand against the Tea Party.
I haven’t read anything about this, but I think one root cause of the recent Republican extremism is the Democratic party’s drift rightward (or ‘staunch centrism’ if you like). Talk about unintended consequences!
Mainstream Democratic positions are indistinguishable from what Gans calls the ‘essential underpinnings of conservatism’. This puts the Republican party in a bind. They must look ever rightward for votes. Tea Party-esque extremism has been with us forever, but I think this is one reason why they’ve been so successful at taking the wheel of the Republican vehicle.
The Republican party can’t shift toward the center (or even the center-right, really) until there is a vacancy there.
“I haven’t read anything about this, but I think one root cause of the recent Republican extremism is the Democratic party’s drift rightward (or ‘staunch centrism’ if you like).”
I don’t think the causal relationship is that simple. The Democratic party also absorbed a lot of people who left the Republican party due to its increasing craziness. One example is Jim Webb, a Reagan cabinet member. This has also been going on at the ground level with individual voters as well.
If the GOP sheds the Tea Party, it will begin competing seriously for those centrist voters again. At that point, the Democratic party will hopefully realize it needs to start pushing turnout in its base and becoming more liberal as a result.
If the GOP sheds the Tea Party then then you will have a governing party (DNC) and two opposition parties (GOP & TP). It would behoove the DNC to stand pat, reaffirming its own centrism in order to maintain the governing middle. What is more likely to happen than the DNC moving left is a leftist split off from the DNC, so we could end up from left to right with the Greens, the Democrats, the Republicans, and the Libertarians (where the Tea Party would naturally, if not comfortably, go). Eventually, two of the four would be eaten and we’ll have a center-left coalition and a center-right coalition again, but I can not think of any scenario where the Democratic Party moves left due to the destruction of the GOP as we know it.
I can. I think it happen this way: The Establishment GOP won’t kick out the crazies, cause they need the votes, but can always go to the Dems if things get desperate. Sometime in the next four years, the Lunatic Fringe (Tea Party, Dominionists, Confederates, etc.) will finally accept that they’re being used and will leave the GOP. Once the GOP starts acting sane again, the moderates who joined the Dems recently will return to their more natural home. This leaves only more liberal people as Dems and the party moves back to the left.
So for a while, we have a small, mostly southern, far right party, a small center right party, and a larger center left party. We need to take advantage of that time to get as much done as possible before the numbers rebalance. But eventually, the crazies will die off, the moderate conservatives will return to the GOP, the Dems will become more liberal, and we’ll have two healthy parties again.
If it does happen (it won’t) it would be a small, mostly southern far right party, a large center right part, and a large center left party.
Because there are fewer liberals/progressives etc. if you split off the crazies and the rightwing Dems return to their natural home I think the size of the two larger parties would equalize.
So basically no, no chance of actual leftism.
Yes and no. Yes, eventually the two major parties would normalize at about equal numbers. It would take a few years, though, and we should make the most of the time we have. And no, we wouldn’t end up with an actual leftist party because of this split. The Dems would just move to the left by virtue of losing so many center-right people. I do, however, think the Dems will move left based on other factors. An awful lot of the Millennial Generation are socialist by nature. That’s going to have an effect eventually. I would put my money on this country swinging to the centrist/moderate left for the next thirty years, just as it has to the right for the last thirty years. The pendulum is just heading our way.
That’s the way I see it too.
As I said to SiDC in another thread, I can easily conceive the Democrats moving left right now, continuing their trajectory post-Clinton. The reason is the GOP extremism. Right now most people on this site vote Democratic not out of ideological allegiance but because the GOP’s views are both insane, and arguably they’re not capable of governing. This gives the Dems room to move left because finally at long last we’ll be able to say to the “centrists and moderate conservatives,” “well where else are you going to go?”
The Democrats are not moving left because of GOP extremism. If Dems are moving left at all, it is because the times demand it. People want and need helpI’m not talking cultre wars here, I’m talking finance, employment, health, education, etc.
The most obvious thing to me is that GOP extremism is the main OBSTACLE to the Democratic Party moving left. And that’s really the whole point of GOP extremism, isn’t it?
One example is Jim Webb, a Reagan cabinet member.
Except Webb, supposedly, was originally a Democrat who switched sides to the GOP sometime around the end of the war, then later became a Democrat again. Remember, he came out against Iraq when the war drums started beating. Anyone have a link to the op-ed he wrote at the time?
I don’t think that defines Democrats. I think what he wants is Eisenhower or Rockefeller. Different age, not to come agan. The last chance was Colin Powell and Cheney threw him away.
Which part doesn’t apply to, say, Harry Reid–or, for that matter, Elizabeth Warren? I think you might be right that he wants a kind of Republican that doesn’t exist, but he can’t even define it in a way that excludes most Democrats.
That’s true – unfortunately.
Why Only Republicans Can Save Us From the Tea Party | Ten Miles Square | The Washington Monthly
If this is the only way to save the Republican party, then only President Obama can do so by soundly defeating the tea party. I don’t think there are enough votes between mainstreme “conservatism” as exemplified by Obama and Tea party jihadists to sustain another party in between in a two party system. Obama is stealthily taking the rug from under “moderate” conservative Republicans by becoming THE defender of the constitutional democratic system apparently so beloved of “true” conservatives.
Another attempt to rebrand. Prior to 2010 the GOP problem was that they were not conservative enough. They elected true conservatives by 2010 and now those conservatives should pushed out and loose the label of conservative. Also, now to get rid of these conservatives that are not conservative the GOP needs another grass roots movement to purge itself. I’m fine with a GOP stuck in an endless cycle of purge and rebrand for the first half of the 21st century.
Let’s be clear about who is meant by the relatively sane Republicans. They are the local business elites, large farmers, lawyers, and politicians who have not followed the siren call of the religious right,
WhiteConservative Citizens Councils, or the John Birch Society. Reagan Republicans.And they are the Wall Street Republicans who have dominated the Republican Party (and still do, as this week attests) since a corporate lawyer for railroad interests was elected President of the United States.
And what would they bring to the political conversation that Allen Simpson, Pete Peterson, most of the lobbying groups, and the commercial media are not already defending?
It seems to me that the fact that the “sane” part of the conservative movement is so deeply entrenched in Congress is the reason that the crazies resort to craziness. They are not in control at all, despite 40 years of promises.
If the conservative movement (the sane guys) really wanted to build a sanity movement, it is very easy to do: pull the plug on Rush Limbaugh, FoxNews, and all of the shock jock talkers. Fire Jim DeMint at Heritage and replace him with Dick Lugar. Take a “good government” page and start cleaning up the money trough in DC. Some Republicans figured that out slightly over a century ago.
But they don’t because the conservatives really don’t want to conserve American democracy; all they want to conserve is their wealth and the government-aided privileges that allowed them to get and retain it.
It’s touching that a guy who “got clean for Gene” wants to help the Republicans in their time of need. But like others have remarked, we wish the Republicans the same success he had. A necessary but catastrophic move because there were more issues swirling than just the Vietnam War. And then there was the part Gans missed about Robert Kennedy almost running away with the nomination until he was assassinated, the crazy insistence of Mayor Daley on beating the hippies, and poor Hubert Humphrey caught in a time he was unprepared for.
The problem with a kick out the “God, Guns, & Gays” crowd strategy is all you’re left with is the “Hey, let’s let the rich run everything” crowd.
That’s a hard sell to working folks which is why they turned to cultural populism in the first place. It’s the tried and true method of getting the peasants to support more power for the aristocracy.
The contradiction at the heart of the Republican Party. Forty years of culture war promises that the Republican Party never intended to keep has blown up in their faces.
Yes that is the stark choice Republicans face.
So the logical thing for the rich is to support the Blue Dogs. If there is only one Party, they will want to control it. And they will have many opportunities. The smell of money is intoxicating to politicians.
I agree, and I’ve been saying this for the last two weeks. If the establishment wanted to, they could cut the tea party down to size. The question hardly even came up until recently, but I’m convinced from what I’ve just seen that there are at least elements within the GOP that do want the tea party out.
One such is (retired congressman) Steve LaTourette from Ohio, who claims to be a Boehner loyalist. So let’s see if this is real.
Only the Republicans can solve the problem, but the most direct way to begin solving it is for Boehner to throw out the “Hastert Rule”. The teaheads won’t like it. but then, so what? They’re really not as big as they think they are, as we’ve just seen.
Spot on. But Mayor Daley wasn’t crazy or rather he was crazy like a fox. Daley was a medieval baron, a crime family capo. Beating up the hippies (curiosity: were you one of them?) destroyed the Party nationally but was was extremely popular in the Chicago neighborhoods. And beyond that, it was necessary to keep his supreme power as Boss. The DFH’s could not, absolutely could not, be allowed to challenge his power. If they could why then the black leaders could! You see what happened to Fred Hampton. Daley shared the graft with tame black politicians and other ethnic groups. He didn’t make the mistake Jane Byrne did in trying to keep an Irish monopoly. But he never shared power. Maybe, given the environment, he couldn’t like the Roman Emperors.
Nope, I wasn’t there. I was working nightshift at a cannery on the Eastern Shore of Maryland that month. But I started graduate school at Northwestern that fall and heard all about what went down. Also from my uncle in Morton Grove, who would not go downtown to State Street because of his racist fear. Good union guy though.
I lived in the city later in the 1970s and came to understand how the city worked. Classic patronage operation. You deliver the votes; your neighborhood got the good stuff. You mess around; you might not get your garbage picked up.
Rahm tries to do the Mare Daley imitation but he’s got too many rich folks’ hands up his hand puppet. Daley never would do that; the economic PtB had to treat the Mare as an equal.
And Daley never did anything like directly challenge the teachers, well the younger anyway. Also, maybe I’m wrong but both appeared to prefer backroom deals. Rahm appears to relish being a dickhead to those not of the same status, kind of like his buddy Larry Summers.
I think the Tea Party may be in the process of saving us from the Tea Party. Relatively sane Republicans might not get a chance to purge the extremists, since the Tea Party is already committed to purging anyone who’s relatively sane.
Which is foolish, of course, but that hasn’t stopped them yet. If the Tea Party is going to excommunicate all the Republicans who voted to reopen the government, they’re going to lose their influence in Congress. They don’t seem to realize that you have to actually win the revolution before you can start sending people to the guillotine.
Nationally, TeaBaggers are 49% of the GOP’s primary voters. They control GOP state and local organizations. They have their own funding sources and organizations. They have 135 — a majority — of the House seats. They have a blocking minority in the Senate. They have national media companies and organization spreading their message. They are the local and regional activists of the GOP. All of the national figures in the GOP are either TeaBaggers or running scared of being ousted from office by TeaBaggers.
Exactly how and, more important, who is supposed to create Gan’s Right Wing Sanity Movement?
Dude is off in Cloud LaLa Land.
“majority of GOP House Seats”
Dylan Ratigan has the reason that the answer is No, they cannot.
Dylan Ratigan: Those who nominate dictate
At least 3 of those 196 specialize in funding crazies.
I sincerely doubt the Right can build a sanity movement any time soon. They need to lose a whole lot more before they get to the point where they might be willing to develop an electoral strategy that ends the reliance on the Christian Right to do their leg work. The wealthy, elite ‘sane’ Republicans strike me as being fundamentally lazy when it comes to building a true grassroots movement that will do the work to get middle America to vote for their candidates. There’s too much money in outrage politics.
I’ll say it again here – every time since 2006 that the Tea Party/far right has had a setback which would normally lead to self-examination and a rethinking of strategy, every time, their conclusion was that they (or their elected reps) weren’t extreme enough. And we’re seeing that again this week.
At the city, county, and state level, all of the energy and almost all of the people now involved in Republican politics are Tea Partiers of one sort or another. They have a deep bench and control all the precinct, county, district, and state levers of power. Moderates have no bench – their only choice is to use their access to money to parachute people in to the process. But Tea Partiers have access to money, too.
The crazies are going to be with us for a long, long time. The question isn’t how to reform the Republican Party, because only it can reform itself, and that’s not happening for at least a decade. The only question is how to render them powerless. That means taking away their ability to win elections and their ability to obstruct when they lose.
Tea Partiers are not going to leave the Republican Party. Why should they? After decades in the wilderness, they now control it. It’s the “sane” folks who are leaving. In droves.
You wanna get rid of the tea party, repubs? Simple. Stop gerrymandering your districts.