i think this is really romanticizing the recent past, or even the not so recent past. of the republican party. these people–trump, greene, and their followers are merely the logical conclusion of where the party has been gleefully speeding since at least reagan and rush and quite probably since goldwater and nixon. this is no surprise. this is no betrayal or perversion of the reagan legacy. this is the reagan legacy.
edited to replace one windbag for another, i meant rush, not trump in my pairing with reagan.
I would give anything for his immigration reform proposal. It would need some serious reworking, but it is so far ahead of where we are or have any hope of being within a generation. Its’ death was probably the clearest early signal of where we were headed.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I completely agree. All I mean is that policy-wise the stance of the GOP even 15 years ago is unrecognizable today. The immigration bill’s failure was precisely because of the ripening of the Southern Strategy → Gingrich’s leadership → forcing the Iraq war to today’s complete intransigence and abandonment of any pretense of bipartisanship.
I agree. I’ve been saying for a long time that Trump is just a point on an unwavering trajectory that the GOP has been on since Nixon. I’m hoping that he’s the last point on that trajectory, but I don’t know if that is likely.
Is there one beneficial policy that these “principled conservatism” people can point to as the kind of thing they represent? Any major change (marriage equality, climate change, trickle down economics, war for oil etc.) in the last 30 years I can think of conservatives have been on the wrong side of. All I can think of is the original NAFTA in the 90s.
It’s not weird, it’s bad. If you’re going to use shades of a hue to represent something, the legend should say what that something is and also show the range of hues. And if there’s only one shade of a hue on the map, that’s the shade you put in the legend.
So the hypothetical party could run centerist republicans that had been primaried by Trumpests. So the GOP would fight that with various loyalty pledges like the ones used to try to bind Trump and Bernie…
This is pretty preliminary. I’d be curious what their policy position would be. How would they differentiate themselves from the Republican party? I have to assume they would still be anti-abortion, uncomfortable with minorities and immigrants, militaristic, anti-environmental regulation, etc… Sure they may not like Qanon or openly endorse the KKK, but in the end I can’t see them diverging too far from core Republican values.
Since so many Americans are dumb as a post where politics are concerned, I have anxiety that a new “center-right fascists” party will be perceived by the electorate as the new “moderate centrists” middle-ground party instead of just another facet of the right, and they’ll suck up a plurality because people will presume that since there’s now three parties, one must be in the center.
But, in another view, it all reminds me of the Monty Python election night sketch.
The era before the Tea Party had Republicans who used racism as a primary election strategy (welfare queen, states rights ), ignored a pandemic (AIDS), and was overly comfortable with Nazis (Bitburg). The respectable face of Republican politics has been a cover for reprehensible behavior for longer than I’ve been alive. We wring our hands wishing for the old civility of articles by Buckley where he advocated for Pinochet and Rhodesia.
This is me, trying to see how much more principled these guys are NOW, compared to the last few years of putting immigrant children in cages after separating them from their families.
What I’ve been wanting to see for years was all the centrists or moderates or whatever they call themselves split away from both the Republicans and Democrats and form a party that can work with either side but keep things from moving too far one way or another. It wouldn’t even have to be that big a party - just 10% of each house in Congress. As a progressive I wouldn’t be happy about everything that gets done, but not much is getting done now and the right gets away with all sorts of shit. This new centrist party would be able to force compromises that can’t happen right now and could keep the wingnuts on the right in check.
The problem is that they aren’t actually close to centrist or moderate. The actual centre is the crossing over point from capitalism to socialism, the 50/50 balance of a mixed economy combined with mild social progressiveness. That puts the centre somewhere around the centre-left of the Democrats, slightly to the right of Bernie and The Squad.
You can go a lot further to the left than the Democrats before you reach communism, but the Republicans are exploring the far right boundaries of fascism. This new party will be conservative at best. They don’t offer anything desirable, just the threat of “do as we say or you will have to deal with Trump”
