Can the GOP Maintain the Status Quo

The same thing is true on immigration. With Latinos making up a larger and larger portion of the electorate, there’s just no way the GOP will be able to continue advocating harsh anti-immigration policies and still hope to win elections.

Unless they can get them on board. It’s worked with other groups. Just assure them they are some of the good immigrants who came to get work, but sometime after they came over, a bunch of lazy freeloaders decide to come live off the system.

These loons are just making noise to keep the attention of the Republican establishment, and maybe get some concessions on the official platform. They’ve been caterwauling about how “hurt adn betrayed” they are since before Reagan even took office; but when putsch comes to shove, they’ll always stick with the Republicans — and the rest of the PoG will always keep them because their other major interest group, reactionary big business, is in the same bind: they’re alienated from the majority too, and they need the Christian Reich’s power at the grassroots to compensate.

Good post Ed. I agree with your idea that “something has to give” in the current Republican platform. I think we will see some evidence of which direction that will take in the next few months. Romney will most likely move a bit more to the center. How he does that may be indicative towards the future.

As far as a third party goes, I think that is a very likely scenario, but that McClusky gets parts of it wrong. He seems to suggest that it will be a party based on the views of the Christian Right alone. He points out there are people currently on the left who support traditional marriage and are pro-life. While he is correct, they are, as he points out–on the left. Those two issues alone have not moved them to the right at this point, what evidence is there to support they would move even further to the right in the future? I do not think that will happen. I am not sure that such a party would be sustainable at the national level.

If a third party were to emerge on the Right, clearly the big winner would be the Democrats. The Republican party would lose a large sum of money and votes with a Christianity based party to compete with. Whether the Republican party splits or not, there clearly has to be some inner changes. As a Democrat, I am not at all displeased with the mess on the right. As an atheist, it concerns me a whole lot more…

I think you’re right. In this latest election cycle, the Republican noise has gotten so crazy nuts that almost all of the traditional republican heroes could no longer win a Republican primary.

I knew things were moving this way the day it was publicized that the nutcases were proclaiming that Colin Powell was no longer to be considered republican.

My own personal opinion is that this election is going to be a wakeup call for the Republican Party, maybe even the catalyst to begin that split. The religious right has had a far larger political influence than their sheer numbers justify on the national political stage, and their views are getting so radical as to seriously jeopardize Republican’s ability to win national elections.

If they are stupid enough to split off into another party, they can kiss their future as a viable major influence good-bye.

It is past time for the Moderate Republicans to take their party back.

Third party? Never going to happen, at least not in America. Oh sure, some may attempt it, but we all know it won’t get anywhere. As for the GOP, they won’t have any problems in the foreseeable future; idiots far outnumber every other demographic, and the GOP does a wonderful job of appealing to them. Why do you think Romney is the leading candidate despite being the biggest waffler since Kerry? Because he’s Not Obama ™, and that’s all they care about.

It’s easy to appeal to stupid people. Just tell them what they want to hear, and if you contradict yourself repeatedly, they won’t notice or care.

Mefferd: If the GOP continues to go in a direction where they will not get on the side of traditional marriage and be willing to fight for it, what do Christians do?

They need to be called out on this shit every time. No one sect gets to pronounce official “Christian” policy.

Why do you think Romney is the leading candidate despite being the biggest waffler since Kerry? Because he’s Not Obama ™, and that’s all they care about.

That doesn’t explain how Romney is scraping out a lead from among all the other Not Obamas running for president. The reason why he’s likely nominee is that result of the fact that he’s got the most money from his corporate backers and the better organization. He’s outspending Santorum in some states by $10-to-1 or more. Plus, he’s got the organization on the ground while Santorum and Gingrich are running half-assed campaigns that have failed to even get onto the ballot in some states.

Finally, Santorum and Gingrich are splitting the fundie vote. If it was just one of them, he could conceivably pull ahead of Romney. And that’s where the big conflict between the two GOP factions is playing out. The corporate conservatives, represented by Romney are winning out because the social conservatives are split between Gingrich and Santorum. Assuming Obama wins in November, the 2016 GOP may be even more contentious. Based on the “whose turn is it” rule, Santorum will be the presumptive nominee and the corporate conservatives will be scrambling to find a candidate to block him.

This is where a third party might come into play. Third parties, like the Reform Party, the Bull Moose Party or the Green Party (with Ralph Nader in 2000), tend to emerge as protests when a large section of the party faithful are unhappy with the establishment’s candidate. They never win and generally don’t last, but they could have a significant impact on the elections in the short term.

Why do you think Romney is the leading candidate despite being the biggest waffler since Kerry? Because he’s Not Obama ™, and that’s all they care about.

Ironically, Romney isn’t even a xian.

If the christofascists were capable of thought, they might see the irony here.

One stop-gap the measure the Party can do, and is doing, in states where they can get away with it, is via old-fashioned gerrymandering.

The Nation ran an article a couple moths ago on this issue. Though they took the “resegregation” angle, overall the mechanism could also be seen as a way for the Repubs to adjust for some of the inevitable demographic changes:

In virtually every state in the South, at the Congressional and state level, Republicans—to protect and expand their gains in 2010—have increased the number of minority voters in majority-minority districts represented overwhelmingly by black Democrats while diluting the minority vote in swing or crossover districts held by white Democrats

http://www.thenation.com/article/165976/how-gop-resegregating-south

Aren’t they already heading toward a third party with the “Tea Party”? And don’t the Tea Partiers self-proclaim they are some kind of silent majority, that they’re everywhere?

C’mon Tea Partiers, put your confidence where your mouth is. Form a real third party!!!

The third-party threat, is, as others have noted here, probably empty. More interesting is the complete takeover of the GOP by the racist fringe.

That’s why they have had such a tough time with the Latino vote. While many children of immigrants skew socially conservative, you just can’t ignore when someone bashes you for not speaking English in your home or says you aren’t really an American, and then makes life tough for your parents by mandating English only laws.

(This line appeals to white ethnics because of several myths about immigrants we love to tell, by the way, and complete ignorance of relatively recent history).

In any case, the work done by many GOP operatives to get Latinos to vote for them was basically shattered in the last two election cycles. The only Latinos now who vote primarily GOP are Cubans and they have a unique position among immigrants (they are the only group I know of that gets effectively automatic asylum, no questions asked).

I honestly don’t see what the big deal is. Homophobia will eventually go the way of racism. It will become verboten to display it openly, though it will still be displayed covertly, and conservatives will pretend that they were never against gay rights in the first place while still dog-whistling to the dwindling homophobe demographic. Gay people will probably still overwhelmingly support the Dems (though it’s amazing how many gay Republicans there are), but pro-gay-rights straights will go back to voting their pocketbooks.

The notion that this is going to tear the Republicans asunder strikes me as very unlikely. They’ll adapt as they have with everything else. Far more serious from a policy standpoint is their messianic complex and complete unwillingness to compromise on anything, leading to a rapid descent into insanity and tribal rage. From an electoral standpoint, it’s their massive deficit of support among the under-30 crowd, which if history tells us anything will remain loyal Democrats for decades to come. Obviously, the gay issue plays into this somewhat, but it’s not their only problem and is far less intractable than, say, their views on taxes or warmongering.

Oh man, a real sizeable third party would be awesome, not only would it split the GOP, but it could even siphon off all the bigots from the Democratic Party and send them packing. I agree with others though that it’s unlikely, at least for there to a be a major third party.

This is still a good thing long term though: They simply cannot keep the anti-gay vote and the young vote at the same time. Even young bigots-in-training don’t tend to be particularly anti-gay these days. Anti-woman, anti-brown people, sure… but not so much anti-gay.

Although it would be awesome to have the Jesus Republicans and the Scrooge Republicans split, wither into irrelevance, and then have the Democratic party split into Democratic and Liberal parties. Have the choice be between Obama and a candidate to his left.

Yeah, yeah, and as long as I’m dreaming, I’d like a pony.

It’s interesting to compare this with what’s going on in Alberta. Albertans have proven incapable of electing a non-conservative government for almost 80 years. Non-conservative parties elect enough members to the provincial legislature to live in hope of winning power but it never happens. But what does change every few decades is the conservative party in power. The voters get tired of the party in power and go looking for a similar sort of party, instead of trying a different flavour of party. The Social Credit Party was first elected in 1935 and remained in power until 1971, when the Progressive Conservatives took over. And now it seems the Progressive Conservatives will be dumped in favour of a new right wing party called the Wildrose Alliance after 41 years in power.

RW Ahrens writes:

It is past time for the Moderate Republicans to take their party back.

Name five moderate congressional Republicans on the national stage who are elected. I can’t. Zero moderates pursued the GOP ’12 nomination.

In fact I can’t find a moderate caucus in Congress which includes Republicans. I can find some congressional Republicans who might be moderate on an issue or three and join some informal caucuses, but even these people are joining their party to obstruct the governance of this country in a way unprecedented since our beginning. Consider the fact that nearly congressional Republicans have signed the Grover Norquist pledge to not raise taxes in spite of the fact raising taxes must be done to get the federal budget into a minimal semblance of order where taxes are at a all-time low in the post-entitlement era.

The near total loss of Republican moderates on the national stage was a primary reason I left the party in 08, because I perceived no feasible way for the party to reform itself. In the last four years the behavior of the party’s leaders and elected officials in the national stage always validate my assertion they are incapable of reform.

I am optimistic the GOP will come to tolerate gays, similar to how they tolerate blacks and women; but I have no confidence moderates will “take their party” back in my lifetime (I’m 52 in family whose members live deep into their 80s and even 90s.) since there are effectively zero moderates operating at the national stage.

One reason we won’t see any moderates in the near future is the mutation of what it means to be fiscally conservative. We used to see people self-identify as socially liberal while being fiscally conservative, perhaps the best recent example of governing this way was CA Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Fiscally conservative didn’t use to mean cut taxes at all costs, in fact by definition it was more focused on balanced budgets and a more business-like approach to governance than it was to low taxes. Now we have Democrats like Barack Obama cutting a 1/2 trillion of Medicare by making it operate more efficiently and Republicans scream bloody murder, where such proposals is what Republicans voters used to fantasize doing in the 1980s (and which Al Gore actually did in the 1990s as VP). Now we have Democrats offering a budget deficit approach which relies on 80% spending cuts and 20% in tax increases, which used to be a far-right approach, and Republicans en masse scream socialism because they signed a pledge not to raise taxes.

Moderates like me are pretty joined at the hip with Barack Obama, and even then we’re frustrated his budget and domestic policies are mostly too far to the right; though I’m happy with his efforts on regulations and cutting business taxes while eradicating subsidies of cash cow sectors like oil and coal. But his budgetary approach amplifies our being an insurance company with an army will only suppress economic growth and corroborates the conservative argument that government puts a damper on growth when the opposite is true for developed economies. Moderates used to support spending initiatives which increased growth, like in education, research, and subsidies of growth industries, I don’t see any of them in the GOP, and not many in power in the Democratic party either.

Poor Republicans. I’m weeping inside–where it counts.

Eventually, they’ll have to embrace the opinions of the majority of Americans on gay rights. When that happens, they’ll convince themselves that they were at the forefront of that battle all along.

And they’ll claim that that Harvey Milk was actually a conservative Christian and his legacy was co-opted by the secular left.

Conservatives in other countries have made peace with gay rights. I see no reason — the Religious Right not withstanding — to believe that conservative Republicans won’t do the same thing here, in time.

The New Hampshire House of Representatives, which is held by a strong Republican majority, has already decided against introducing a bill to repeal gay marriage in the state. Yes, they are mostly Tea Party Republicans, but the overlap between them and the Religious Right is a sizable one, yet they decided that it wasn’t an issue worth going to war over again.

Maybe New Hampshire isn’t typical, but this is the type of thing that will increasingly happen as gay marriage gains majority support in the nation. Perhaps it will be a very long time (decades) before it gains official Republican support, but all that’s really necessary is for the Republicans to stop making it a front line issue. Focus on abortion and fighting against the separation of church and state instead, and the religious right will fall quickly into line, gay marriage or no gay marriage.

Power is the bottom line here. The leaders of the Religious Right can’t say it, but they know they are far better off sticking with a majority Republican Party in Congress than they would looking in from the outside with a rump of a third party, even if that means giving up on one of their (current) core issues.

There will be no third party for theocrats sick of the Republican party’s retreat over gay marriage. The theocrats will simply decide to accept the new reality that the Republican Party as a whole no longer wants to make it an election issue.

Oh, ffs. A third party is not going to be viable until we change our voting system.

Meanwhile, I hope that the Rethugs do make themselves obsolete. With all the ascendant bigotry on display lately, I’ll believe it when I see it.

Ok I’ve just gotta say it –

What has Status Quo done wrong (well apart from ‘Rocking All Over the World’) and why would the Republicans want to defend them?

😉 Dingo