Post-Trump Republican Party

The melding of social conservatism with traditional fiscal and political (as in, the role of government) conservatism has always seemed to me to be a somewhat forced marriage. There is little inherent in political conservatism that requires social conservatism. Just look at the Libertarians, really. The fusion worked in the sixties because it brought together people who were appalled by the social and cultural transformations of the era, those who were worried about the growth of federal power through things like civil rights legislation, the war on poverty, and affirmative action, and those who were alarmed by the transformations of accelerating globalization. Each group could tolerate the others because they were all trying to hold back the tide in some way.

But the tide won, and I wonder now if that alliance isn’t done. The fiscal conservatives aren’t going to back off of global trade or neoliberal economics; they’ve doubled down on that and are making money hand over fist. That in turn means an acceptance of globalization and a rejection of protectionism. The folks who want more limited government have realized that the social conservative agenda actually requires more government intervention, more government control, than the let it all hang out approach. And the social conservatives, seeing all of this, are having trouble convincing the other groups that there’s any benefit other than local election turnout to embracing social stances the majority of the nation rejects.

This election, the bizarre hatred for Clinton has unified these groups to some extent, but that won’t last I think. Eventually the money people on the right are going to follow the money, and if Clinton’s presidency continues the prosperity that Obama left in his wake, I suspect there will be little incentive for the financial elite to rock the boat. The policy wonks on the right will be more disgruntled, but given the inherent moderate tendencies of Clinton I doubt there’ll be that much to get outraged over, and as the states have shown themselves to be batshit crazy when let off the leash, they won’t find much national support for a traditional states-rights approach. The social conservatives will continue to be outraged, but they’ll be so outraged they’ll continue to attract and keep the racists, misogynists, and xenophobes as well as the Moral Majority types, and they will become increasingly cut off from the rest of the country, which is I think about ready to accept that same sex marriage, women in power, gender fluidity, and racial diversity are just part of modern life.

tl;dr the GOP needs to figure out what it stands for. It started as opposition to the Democratic machine that, through power consolidated by slave agriculture, retarded industry and commerce and perpetuated an archaic social order. It transformed in the late 19th and early 20th century into the party of industry, commerce, and finance, and small government in general, but really didn’t spend any time poking its noses into people’s bedrooms. The sixties created a unique point in time where Coolidge Republicans could find common cause with former Southern Democrats, but that alliance seems archaic at this point.

The GOP’s problem… well, they’ve got a few problems, but the one I’m going to talk about… is that they cobbled together a coalition of single-issue voters into a shrinking majority, and now they can’t really get out of it.

On the abortion issue (for example) they grabbed up all the folks on one pole and left all the gradient and the other pole to the Democrats because they wanted the more fervent voters that inhabited that end of the spectrum. But now they cannot grow that group because it is antithetical to any compromise.

Pretty much the same thing with the “2nd Amendment People”. There is LOTS of room for compromise on gun control, but the GOP staked a claim to only the furthest end of the spectrum so that they could “own” the issue and ceded all the rest to the Democrats. Now they cannot expand that base without losing the loyalty of folks like Olaf.

Their tax positions (can’t raise taxes no matter what), their global warming position (can’t admit it exists), their immigration positions (can’t even consider a path to citizenship)… the list goes on and on. Plenty of gray-area in each one but they simply cannot touch it to grow their voter base because doing so would mean they cannot win an election for the next two or four cycles, full-stop.

All of these are great points. I am worried what happens to the “base” of the Republican party though, they of the “from my cold dead hands” variety. I don’t really think there is a place for them in the Democratic party and considering a complete collapse of the GOP which may well happen if they follow Trump unwillingly down the delegitimizing road, they have a real risk of being left behind without a voice. But they’re the ones with all the guns, all the desires to secede, all the militant dog whistling and single issue politics. Do they just “die out”? Or do they take their banishment to the political wilderness as a sign to make things right?

IOW, without the Republican party as a dysfunctional outlet for this subset i wonder what, exactly, they’re going to do when everyone has turned against them.

Is this still a big deal to them though? I was wondering about guys like Grover Norquist, who you used to hear about quite a bit, but who seems to have faded from view. Him and the Tea Party, it doesn’t seem like anyone talks about those guys nowadays. Maybe they’ve all gotten subsumed in the wash of election crap, but it doesn’t feel like the Republicans are catering to this sector any more (is it because they’re securely in the fold? I have no idea).

Anyway, I guess I’m wondering if the Tea Party and its ilk has run its course, and am hoping that some faction will rise that’s more interested in cooperation. Yeah, I’m a dreamer.

God I miss working with those guys.

That’s…a great question. As Tin_Wisdom notes above, once you build a party on extreme positions, you box yourself in. And, you legitimate those extremes which don’t seem like extremes to their believers but rather “truth,” which further makes compromise impossible. And when the issues at hand are seen in literally apocalyptic terms, even talk of compromise becomes heresy.

I don’t have an answer. The hardliners after the Civil War had the leadership of Lee and the like that told them the jig was up, and later they were able to grab the levers of power anyhow after the Union pulled out of the South. The “segregation forever” types were subsumed by the supporters of the new Sunbelt boom and marginalized to the metaphorical backwoods of the region; they were able to get wealthy though and that sort of bought them off. I don’t see any path to either wealth or power for the hardcore types you’re talking about, however. Which is sort of worrisome.

I have voted for some republican candidates in the past. I tend to agree with their fiscal stuff but am really put off by the social stuff. And I have a problem with the Democratic belief that throwing money at things solves problems. How has that worked in the past?

We need new ideas…new methods. I don’t see either party coming up with those.

People who say that think the constitution is made up of only one thing…the second amendment to it.

Well, one of the parties doesn’t want the government to actually do things (except prevent abortions), so that doesn’t leave many tools to work with in coming up with new ideas. Maybe the current chaos will let some people emerge who can thread the needle of government-encouraged personal responsibility, but I doubt it. Much easier to scream about how bad government is at doing things and just claim the free market would solve it all (you know, the way it did after the fall of Rome).

Where, ironically, Trump is actually worse than Clinton anyway.

Close gun show loopholes vs random search and seizure by the cops.
But that would probably mostly happen to brown people, so it’s fine.

Yup. It’s “Second Amendment for the right people.” thinking.

I mean, that’s what most of it is and I say that as a strong proponent of the 2nd Amendment.

The loons have driven off the cliff. They started out by getting rid of those damned liberals and then purging out the RINO’s and now we still hear talk about “not republican enough.” There’s no way the folks who listen to that kind of talk are going to let sane people win a primary.

As both parties have lurched to the right, I think many old school republicans will fit right in with a Hillary presidency. The “small government” rhetoric aside, Reagan and the Bushes always governed towards the cash. Outside of campaign promises they never tried to act to make the gov-ment smaller. Governing towards the cash certainly seems to be the way of both Obama and the Clintons. The talking points have changed, but the style of governing is similar.

Remember when that damned Kenyon was going to take all our guns and the black helicopters were going to round us all up and put is in death camps? The story is the same, only now it’s about Killary.

Maybe a new social bargain will take place. Perhaps the Dems will grow so large that they will fracture and we will end up with a centrist party that has to deal with the children of Bernie on one side and Donald’s Deplorables on the other.

Something extraordinary will have to happen if the Republican party is to become a national force again. I believe too many groups have been driven too far away to really support a president with that label.

I could be wrong. I remember my father telling me that after watergate the republicans wouldn’t be in the oval office for another 20 years. After 4 years of Jimmy Carter, an old B-list actor become one of the most beloved presidents of my lifetime.

On a tangent to this but related I think, I was listening in the car today to D.O.A.'s “Full Metal Jackoff,” with Jello Biafra from the Dead Kennedys doing the vocals. It was on an album from a 1989 album called Last Scream of the Missing Neighbor. Created during the first Bush’s time in office, at the end of the Cold War but the peak of Reagan-Bush era fear mongering and Ollie North distorted patriotism, the song is a blistering (and long) screed against all the perceived evils of the conservatives then in power.

What’s interesting is that the song’s narrative is an intense, paranoid, and detailed conspiracy theory that matches up very closely to the intense, paranoid, and detailed conspiracy theories we’re seeing from the alt-right Trump-backing portion of the GOP, except that the villains are different. In the left’s version of black helicopters and UN world government, it’s the US government that makes and imports drugs to distribute to the slums so that the poor will explode in orgies of violence, which in turn will allow for martial law and the physical elimination of undesirables. Where the right today fears the Democrats will send storm troopers to take their guns, the leftist version has the same storm troopers dragging you away for minor drug offenses and burning the flag. The song accuses the government of creating the drug crisis, trampling the constitution, and trying to eliminate the non-white and poor. The alt-right today accuses the government of creating global warming and ISIS, trampling the constitution, and trying to eliminate the white and the middle class. Etc.

Give it a listen. In addition to being IMO a great punk song, it’s fascinating how similar the two extremist narratives are.

Good ear. I was always a fan of Jello’s lyrics and his ability to take on the point of view of those that he was railing against. Songs like “Kill the Poor” and “Police Truck” that I thought, at the time, a bit sensationalist. Not so much anymore, as it turns out.

On a side note, reading your post reminded me of a spoken word tour he took that brought him to the University of Georgia in the early ‘90s. It was an entertaining show and I remember Ed Tant, a local columnist for the Flagpole, Athens’ indie music magazine, shouting out “Legalize it!” whenever Jello brought up the subject of marijuana.

I mean they were “dead” in 2004 and then 2 years later controlled Congress without really changing anything.

I’d actually love to see a libertarian party rise out of this, but when you have people like Johnson as the face of it and little to no effort at the state/local level, much less Congressional level, I just don’t see it happening.

It might eventually- Gary Johnson is doing better than Trump among millenials, and if the identity politics Dems really take over the Dems entirely (possible), disaffected millenials might bolt to the libertarians (and move them more towards a left-libertarianism)

The Republicans are pretty much a lost cause among millenials until they rebrand, and then people have to believe that rebranding.

I was at that event, as I was finishing up my Ph.D. at UGA at the time. Ed was also shouting “Fuck Bush!” at every opportunity.

Yeah, good times!

Seriously, wtf was that whole vape thing about that he was tweeting during one of the debates? Is that his crusade now?