Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Libs to GOP: Better Empty Symbolism or Else!
Suzy Khimm, at Kevin Drum’s, sums up Ruy Teixeira’s latest “recommendations” for Republicans:
A more moderate approach would help with Millennials […]. The party also needs to make a breakthrough with Hispanics, and that won’t happen unless it shifts its image toward social tolerance, especially on immigration.
The GOP’s “culture war nostrums and antitax jeremiads,” Khimm explains, make “white college graduates increasingly see the party as too extreme and out of touch.” She asks: “Will Republicans take this reality to heart and make more than just cosmetic changes to the face of the party?”
And so in one breath Repubs are lampooned for their political superficiality and warned that their only hope is ‘shifting’ their ‘image’ and ‘moderating’ their ‘approach’. Gee, thanks, guys. It’s true, of course, that particular policies can create big, gauzy public impressions. And it’s also true that Republicans, like Democrats, are guilty of some over-reliance on rhetoric. But what liberal strategists like Teixeira are really suggesting — reread that tip on immigration — is an end to solidly conservative policies plus a turn to more liberal nostrums and jeremiads. Support for more moderate policies? Merely symbolic. Not too many cosmetics but the wrong ones.
Conservatives often complain that the GOP will suck wind if Republicans try to be “Democrat Lite” on substance. If anything, trying to be Democrat Lite on style is a worse mistake. I’m all for regional diversity on the right. But fluff is fluff, especially in tough times, and what voters need and deserve are serious alternatives to failing policies, not emotional flattery. As even granddaddy Dem strategist Bob Shrum has confessed, image is nothing, thirst is everything. To claim that voters thirst above all for image is to impoverish politics right and left.
Published in General
When I read comments like, “white college graduates increasingly see the party as too extreme and out of touch,” I think two things. One, the author of those comments is almost certainly projecting the feelings (as opposed to thoughts) of his/her own social circle, and two, how much the 2008 election cycle resembled a pop-culture fad.
Consider the similarities between, for instance, the last season of the TV show “Lost” and the Obama campaign. Both were ubiquitous at all levels and formats of the mass media, from “news” magazines to comedy talk shows. They were endlessly discussed online, with uncounted fan blogs, most of which were populated by people telling each other how cool they were for being fans of this really cool thing. Millions of people–not least including college students, highly attuned as they always are to cultural fads–got caught up in the excitement, and were reinforced by the media zeitgeist that assured them this was the Greatest Thing Ever.
And then the finale aired, and the show was revealed as a pretty but empty edifice, and after a bout of celebration, the fans looked around and said, “is this all there is?”
It seems the politics of every other democratic government in the Western world has gradually shifted left until the “conservative” party becomes merely slightly less liberal than the liberal parties. We can expect the same constant pull toward statism in both parties in America. The GOP isn’t doomed to the fate of its European counterparts, but it can remain conservative only by constantly resisting such calls from some of its own members.