Only if their doom and gloom comes to light and the Democratic party becomes more socialist than it is… except by their own description, the ideals being pushed by Democrats isn’t really that socialist. Supposedly, and I’ll believe it when I see it, some of those same ideals should be in this new party. But it all based in the mythical idea that Democrats will have a big enough shift to actually leave a void, a sizable one.
Wait, if we’re talking about torching the existing Republican Party and building a new, more rational Conservative party, what happens to all the crazy people who have just been de-partied? Because I don’t see them just going gently into that good night.
Even if you had no shift to the left at all, you still have an existing spectrum of ideas that exist in the Democratic party, today.
It’s simply the case that the difference in ideas within the party is dramatically less than the differences between them and the lunatics left in the GOP.
But if there GOP were to cease to exist, then the difference among members of the Democratic party would become the main differences between voters, and that would serve as the basis for a party division.
Certainly such a division exists, which is why the Democratic party still has primaries.
I don’t care that much. Some portion of them are old, and will die.
They will likely provide the reason for why the GOP won’t become some rational party, necessitating a new party to break off from the Democratic party, as it has multiple times throughout history.
The GOP would cease to exist, but its base of voters wouldn’t, and they’d still likely hold many of those crazy views. I don’t think we can rely on them disappearing, though I grant that it sounds tempting.
That division is supposed to exist. The fact that the Democrats created a diverse party capable of having discussions and differing opinions within the party itself is a sign of a healthy party.
If the Republicans think they can get their party back or a version they can stomach and work with again, and the first step is figuring out how to get all the same voices in the same room, I’d say they misstepped already. The main party out there rubber stamping everything just because Party First is the Republicans, and that’s not a healthy party, it’s a corrupt one, prone to destruct themselves and everyone around them. It should not be used as a model for a new one.
Gotta love the two party system! Because we will always have crazy people, and they have to go somewhere. My bet is that if this new rational party were to rise from the ashes of the R’s, there may be a honeymoon period of fantastically awesome something or other, but all the swirling parts would ultimately coalesce back into more or less what we have now.
I recognize that may sound cynical but really our political process is a jigsaw puzzle with two pieces. There are only so many shapes you can make with that.
I applaud the optimism that there might be a future of the Republican party that isn’t just drawing a line from the far right were they are now to the even-more-far-right incrementally every year.
I don’t see any evidence that the people who vote in the primaries think that moving to the left is their path to victory.
And as long as that is true, you will not get any right-of-center Dems to move.
It used to be that you could have discussions and differing opinions between the parties, while simultaneously governing.
Again, if the GOP goes away, then you’d see a split within the Democratic party. This is just how it works. It’s happened numerous times throughout American history. Otherwise you would end up just having everything decided in the primary election, with the general elections being pointless.
I don’t think that’s going to happen.
The GOP is not going away. There are people in that party right now that want to be in that party. They’re not going to join the Democrats because they’ve been taught, almost since birth, that’s the devil. The new one won’t want them… they’re crazy. Any new party is going to exist alongside the GOP either until those people change, and if they could I imagine they would have otherwise, or the new party gets so frustrated they start catering to their long lost cousins again in order to win votes.
I think you’re approaching this new party as an appeal to the Democrats on the right, but I think what is more likely to happen is it will be an appeal to the former Republicans which were barely Democrats at all which would leave us with three parties, one in a a much stronger position than the other two.
That article isn’t really even attempting to call to Democrats. It looks more like an appeal for what they think are rational Republicans, some of whom are hiding in the Democratic camp but don’t want to be there.
Why are you so certain, given that we’ve seen exactly this happen numerous times already?
Yeah, they’ll just be disenfranchized and cast aside.
Ultimately, this is a choice that is now forced. Their views are incompatible with folks in the middle, as they have made themselves increasingly extreme. Pandering to them will no longer be an electorally viable option. Indeed, it’s already shown to be non-viable, which is why the GOP has taken to cheating and preventing people from voting at all.
Well, it points out that a number of the policy platforms that are presented by that group actually overlap with Democratic platforms, while not really overlapping with Republican platforms at all.
That’s what suggests this would be carving off some portion of right leaning democrats into a new party, rather than changing the GOP, since it shares little if anything with the current incarnation of the GOP.
The same way you’re certain. I am looking at the same set of data and coming to a different conclusion.
The people standing in the retail store screaming at the top of their lungs that they voted for Trump so they don’t have to be civil anymore, the white supremacy, the guns fix everything crowd… they’re not going away, and they’re not all old. The Democrats made it clear those people are not welcome. The GOP catered to them. If this new party is what they claim it will be, they will not be welcome either… and those votes will go somewhere. Except I don’t call it disenfranchised because votes typically don’t go away so those two parties will co-exist for awhile… for how long, well that would be hard to determine, but for the GOP to go away, someone has to absorb them or they stop voting… history shows us the temptation of those votes will be great.
It says that but their appeal doesn’t match. They’re saying there is overlap, and this only based on the article, but they’re not trying to appeal to that group. They spent most he time talking about Republicans and how they screwed up and got to where they are today. Democrats don’t need to be sold on that. We know. We saw a lot of it happening real time. That’s why someone else above said hey just vote Democrat… they’re not, currently, appealing to anyone leaning right in the Democrat. Just the group left standing there wondering what happened and how they can reconcile.
I admit this is based on what is happening now, and the very new future not like… 20 years from now. A lot can happen in even 5-10 years but today, theirs no reason there is this great infighting in the Democratic party ripe for carving off. It only looks that way i you look at the rubber stamp Republican party which isn’t a great comparison. They trained their voting group to be “loyal” to the party above all else which is why the ones who verbally leave get torn apart by the people that praised them yesterday
But I’m merely suggesting that what has always happened will happen again. You’re suggesting that it won’t, but I’m not understanding why you think it’s different from prior points in history.
Yeah, I don’t think they will. I don’t think anyone will cater to them, for the reason I described above. While it may be tempting to try and harvest those votes by catering to them, the problem that has manifested itself is that catering to them is incompatible with catering to non crazies.
Their views are so extreme, that there is no way to cater to the far right, while simultaneously catering to the middle. So they have created a situation where you must choose one or the other.
There are more votes in the middle, so if you have to choose one or the other, the smart choice is to cater to the middle, because you’ll be more electorally viable than trying to cater to the far right.
Ah, this may be part of the disagreement.
I wouldn’t see this kind of party split as immediately resulting in the kind of hyper partisan hatred that dominates things today. It’s not like you’d get the right wing of the democratic party in their own party, and then suddenly they would have deep ideological divides and hate of the left wing democrats.
See to me, you’re kind of suggesting that history is the reason you believe the parties will change while at the same time kind of overlooking the recent history that shows the GOP more than casually catered to them to the past and if push comes to shove, they’ll run pretty much anyone and sell almost any message to win an election. I find it hard to believe that element will be removed just because a new party might admit that some social safety nets are okay and rallying against everything that might lead to a social good is bad.
This new party is not starting from scratch. The onerous is on them to prove to me, and everyone else, they’re different. Another reasons I say this is because I would be a very rich woman if I got paid every time the GOP said something like there is nothing wrong with our policies, we just have to change our messaging, aka push the same thing but spin, spin, spin.
Your belief and hope in this not yet formed and may not even happen party is going to be a lot greater than mine, so you’re going to approach it with way more optimism than I will. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I’m just not there. I don’t even see most the people talking about the future of the GOP or I guess in this place something not the GOP but a home for former GOP members and maybe some Democrats taking full responsibility for their roles, so it’s kind of hard to believe they’re learning if they can’t even do that too. This article is a little closer to admitting that but this isn’t a single person writing a book or opinion piece or anything of the nature with their name squarely attached to it either.
What would be the platform of the newly risen GOP anyways? Anti-abortion seems a given. Trickle down economics of course. Keep the browns out of the country, yes please. What else? What would make them somehow different than the GOP of the recent past?
Jennifer Rubin (who frankly is unrecognizable from the Jennifer Rubin pre-trump) has a piece about this in WaPo.
The suggestion I’ve put forth over the past few years envisions a coalition from center-left to center-right that favors market economics with a robust safety net; pro-work and pro-economic mobility domestic policies (e.g. expansion of the earned-income tax credit, investment in human capital); robust legal immigration and free trade with ample cushion for those displaced by creative destruction; ethics reform (including an end to cronyism); a values-based foreign policy that recognizes American leadership is necessary to our own prosperity and security; reinforcement of democratic institutions; and emphasis on civic literacy and civic virtue.
She says the new Republican Party wants Obama.
Essentially, yes.
But I think this is long term thinking on what a new party would look like, which also assumes that Democrats move farther left than they’ve ever been historically (akin to European Democratic Socialists.) Not impossible I suppose.
How Republicans break free of the forces that drove them to where they are today though is not at all clear to me.
If there is indeed a center-right Republican Party constituency today, who are they? Which of them in the House or the Senate tried to find reasonably centrist compromises with Obama? Anyone?
If there is not, then why are pundits fantasizing about them? Especially when the Democratic Party has nominated basically centrist candidates in every Presidential election since 1976?
Take out the racism angle and it’s not a bad start for a conservative party that focuses on rural people:
- Pro-gun
- Protectionist Trade Policies
- Expansion of Rural Connectivity
- Protection of Rural Medical Care
- Focus on Agricultural and Energy Workers
Such a party might also find itself becoming anti-abortion to get the Evangelical voters, but that would be a shame… it would be nice to go back to a time where the abortion voters were split between parties.
The above party would be able to make a decent case for courting Hispanic voters if they could make a clean break from the GOP legacy.
You might ask, why protectionist trade? Well honestly, the Democrats have transformed themselves into the Party of Professionals over the last few decades… and that means folks for whom the global economy and free trade have little down-side. This new Conservative party could court the traditional blue-collar factory workers with a protectionist platform and get a fair number of city-dwellers into the party.
Mind you, I would not want to belong to such a party, but I could see it being a good counterweight.
One of my great joys in life is seeing Rubin’s not-so-slow transformation from conservative shill to rabid liberal.