I guess the real question is - what will their actual values and beliefs be? As opposed to what will they tell the rural folks in order to get their votes. How do they focus on (actually) helping all these rural folks while still catering to their wealthy overlords? I don’t see how they could possibly do both. So much of the pro-gun, pro-racism, anti-abortion, etc, crowd overlaps that I just don’t see how it’ll end up being much different.
Yeah, a whole lot of the items on that list are going to cost a lot of money–money rural folks don’t have. The funding will have to come from somewhere…
See, in my fairy-dust-and-unicorns world where such a party arises, they would actually be the party of the rural/blue-collar people and NOT of the wealthy overlords… presumably those folks would try and find a home with the Democrats.
And yeah, I know, money talks, etc.
Indeed. The Unicorn Party would seek to raise taxes on capital gains and fight for a progressive tax scale similar to the ones implemented in the 1950s and 60s.
You may want to read the article and check out some of the stuff that it’s pointing to, because no, none of that stuff would be in there.
Not sure about the guns, probably reasonably pro-gun, but nothing like the NRA which is irrational.
I don’t see them having any protectionist trade policies at all, given their core values. Protectionist policies don’t actually work, so I can’t see why that would be something for them to do a 180 on compared to more traditional libertarian views.
Unless you are talking about some other future GOP, rather than the guys from the specific article I posted.
Some of this is addressed in the article, but almost laughable, the NRA and guns is not. Some of those others though are. Medical Care would fall under the safety net and public health, free market economy talk would probably hit trade but at the same time they’re admitting there is dislocation hazards which the GOP hasn’t cared about since forever but this new party supposedly will. Trump and his protectionism, tariff anything really shouldn’t have worked for traditional GOP or this new one but… heh.
The new party can certainly address Rural concerns but they’d be in a piss poor shape to do that and ignore everyone else.
I also suspect that the new right wing party would be more in favor of military spending than the left wing.
I think that this is part of the reason why the piece I linked to doesn’t suggest that the GOP is going to be able to fix itself. They won’t.
But that’s exactly why, in the future, it won’t be the GOP. It’s going to be the right wing of the Democratic party.
The GOP’s ideas are a dead end. They don’t work. And they’re too far down that rabbit hole to come back.
But when they die, because of how our system works, you WILL have another party. The system is based on that kind of dualism. It doesn’t need to be as competitive toxic and hyper divided as it is now, but you are gonna have some kind of break into two parties.
As you say, I don’t think the GOP is coming back from where it is. If somehow they do, ok. But I don’t think so.
Similarly, I don’t think that the political scene is going to just become dominated by the Democratic party, forever, with everyone just being happy to ignore their differences in order to fight against the idiot fringe party that the GOP increasingly becomes.
That’s absolutely what the GOP did. But I don’t think it’s gonna work any more. I don’t think their platform of ignorance and division is going to be electorally viable in the future.
What’s more, I think they realize this. That’s why they are doing things to try and keep a majority of control, even with a minority of popular support. But that’s failing too now.
I feel like the GOP is doomed at this point. They managed to do a lot of damage with their last gasp of boomer driven influence, but I think on the outs. And I feel like they have moved so far from the center of the country’s beliefs, that they can’t simply correct for it now.
If 30% of the electorate are right-wing kooks, which party will try to co-opt them by moving toward them? The answer probably isn’t ‘neither’, because that’s a lot of votes.
Please don’t be the Democrats, please don’t be the Democrats…
The wealthy GOP donors aren’t going to just go away. They’re going to want their tax breaks. So whatever the new party represents, it’s going to have to somehow make the rich richer or it’s a no go from the start.
What would be nice would be to have abortion nationwide taken off the table for good, in addition to not allowing states to chip away at women’s rights. And furthermore reinsititute full separation of church and states and kill non profit sttaus of mega rich churches (including Scientology) for abusing the system.
They’ll just have to make do with a slightly smaller mountain of money. They’ll deal with it.
Other countries have super rich folks too, right?
I’ve heard Putin and his friends do quite well :D And of course Saudi royalty is wealthier than your average American.
What has to happen, for both the long term health of the country, and for any kind of non-insane center/right party to emerge is that the GOP has to die and/or split first.
And unfortunately, the numbers just don’t favor that happening swiftly, unless a new fault line emerges.
Right now, there is a meaningful fault line between the 35% to 40% of the electorate who are hardcore Trumpists, and the additional 5% or so of never-Trump or “weakly-pro-Trump” GOP types. Problem is, the 5% would simply consign themselves to permanent uselessness if they left the GOP due to our first past the post system. They are not big enough as a group, and could not draw enough people from either the right or the left, to be a meaningful player in a first past the post system.
So the GOP is, for the time being, going to remain the Trump or Trump-Equivalent Party. Even if Trump himself leaves the picture, the self-reinforcing, self-deceiving fear and hate driven right wing media machine and all it’s enablers and fellow travelers will remain and the party will continue to believe lies, support false and harmful policies and will generally remain a political cancer until it is removed, or at least permanently weakened.
So instead of any thought of “centrist” options, what we need are people of good faith to vote Dem, win elections, break the GOP’s political power, undo all their cheating gerrymandered BS, fix the tax code, reform all the screwed up laws they passed, pass a bunch of good policies that will actually help people, and get the country back on track while relegating the GOP to a party with at best weak regional power.
As that happens, if the left-right divide in the Democratic party widens and that party later births a new third party, fine. But that’s then.
For now, if you are not voting Dem, you are hurting the country. Period.
I think this group is counting on the moderate and leaning left Democrats to leave or want to leave the party under the assumption that somehow we’ll wake up soon or in some distant future to a full on socialist party and want to do so. I don’t see this happening. Yes, there is infighting. Yes there are some groups demanding more socialism, and to be clear when I say socialism when speaking about Democrats I am talking about socialism in the American system, not the European. And one of the reasons I don’t see that happening is voices are currently heard, from all sides, within the party. Whether your to the right or left, the Democrats have a chance to voice their agenda and push it. We have a diverse group reps and voters. There isn’t this vote with the party or screw off thing that happened with the GOP. I don’t really see it happening either, not on the horizon.
If you believe we should have free trade, you can say that. If you think we should address healthcare in a number of different ways, we don’t need the GOP to fight all day about that either. There’s a lot more holding the Democrats together than what is being suggested by this new unnamed party. Like all good families, we can go at it like the best of us, but at the end of the day, most of us said no to Nazis as kids and didn’t look back.
Indeed – this is the Rational Opposition Party from my own fevered imaginings, not the one from the article I didn’t read.
It’s worth reading. The guys in that group are basically conservatives who believe in science… Including empirical observations regarding economics and social policy.
It’s like, they supported supply side economics because there was a rational basis, especially in the face of keynesian economics failing in the late 70s… But then it didn’t work as they expected. So instead of just pretending that it did, they adjusted their views.
I think that this really is where the conservative movement broke down… At some point, it stopped being about coming up with solutions to the world’s problems, and became about creating a case for why a set of predefined solutions (deregulation, tax cuts) worked, and damn any evidence to the contrary.
Certain aspects of policy pushed them over the cliff entirely, like climate change. At some point, the only remaining argument for not doing anything was, “science is bad and scientists are liars”. Eventually this basically turned into “experts are bad”. At that point, you can’t make rational policy anymore. You are no longer working in the real world.
The world’s a complex place. There is rarely ever a clear path forward in terms of the “right” choice for complex global problems.
But you have to at least operate in reality, based on observable fact. And you have to be willing to admit when your plan didn’t work.
That last bit, I think, is one of the biggest problems with a lot of this stuff… Admitting error is so hard for folks to do, because they feel like it’s going to be used against them. That they’ll just have their noses rubbed in it, forever. And to be fair, in this political reality, this is often what happens. But it’s stupid. At your job, if someone fucks up, you don’t just give them shit about it every day from them on, do you? No, not unless they keep freaking doing it. Environments where people can’t about mistakes and improve are toxic, and breed nothing good.
Heh. There should be a word for a typo that’s more correct than what was intended.
Oops. I’ll leave it thought. It is not the first nor the last time I will use an incorrect word.
How about “auto-correction”?
To me a more realistic one would be a full-on neoliberal, pro-business, ok on civil rights type of party.
That said,I don’t think anyone wants that. Most Americans want either fascism or socialism now. The socialists are sane, the fascists aren’t.
We won’t see a rational opposition party until the GOP is defeated completely. There’s no way for the Republicans to head back - once you go fascist you don’t go back.