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What’s a Party for?
What is a political party? By the intensity of internecine conflict among Republicans, you might conclude that it’s a church. Senator Ted Cruz is among the leading voices of a faction that wants to treat the Republican Party as a confession – singing to the choir, denouncing heretics, and damning sinners to hell.
This appears to be part conviction and part political calculation on Sen. Cruz’s part. He’s fully convinced that a Republican can win in 2016 by energizing the base. “The evangelical vote,” a Cruz strategist told National Journal, “is the largest unfished pond of voters – it’s a frickin’ ocean.” Convinced that dispirited white, evangelical voters stayed home in recent elections but can be roused by a sectarian candidate, Cruz barreled into Washington DC in 2013 spitting fire not just at Democrats but at his own party too. They were all part of the “Washington cartel,” he thundered. Republican leaders were not just weak or ineffective — they were treacherous.
A terrible thing happened on the way to Cruz’s plan to ride popular outrage with his own party to the Republican presidential nomination: Trump offered an even more attractive brew of misdirected anger and indignation. If the Republican Party is now being hijacked by Trumpkins – and I truly pray that it is not — Sen. Ted Cruz is hardly in a position to protest. He helped stack the tinder for this auto da fe.
This is not to say that Republicans have enjoyed unblemished leadership during the Obama years – but that’s not the point. Cruz indicted the Republican House and Senate leadership, and nearly all of his colleagues, for cowardice and cupidity. It was this, and not Cruz’s firm conservatism, that alienated fellow senators. It was all a carefully choreographed prelude to his bid for a great swell of white, evangelical Protestants he hopes to inspire to his standard.
So what is a political party for? The Democrats seem to have long since decided that their party is a coalition of interest groups: blacks, women, gays, Hispanics, Asians, and unions. For the past few decades, the Republican Party has rejected identity politics in favor of smaller government and more individual liberty, more free enterprise, a strong national defense, and traditional values. The party I joined did not seek to vindicate the interests of white people, or the native born, or Christian conservatives. It was open to all who shared its principles.
Trump represents a total collapse of Republicanism in favor of nativism, protectionism (that worked so well with Smoot-Hawley), and American-style Putinism. If he were nominated, he would be soundly defeated. Trump is viewed more unfavorably than any other candidate, including Hillary Clinton. He peddles identity politics for white people, but even most white people disdain that. For what it’s worth, I could not vote for him, for these and many other reasons.
Cruz’s strategy is a bit more subtle, but also includes polarizing the nation – thus his dig at “New York values.” As outlined by National Review’s Eliana Johnson, Cruz’s theory rests upon belief in the “missing evangelicals.” Many pixels have been expended on the subject of voters who stayed home in 2012. When 42.5 percent of eligible voters refrain from voting, millions of African Americans, Hispanics, and others are also on the list of nonvoters.
The case for a wave of previously unmotivated evangelicals flocking to the polls for Cruz is shaky at best. Consider that the last time a Republican won a presidential election (2004), evangelicals comprised 23 percent of the electorate and Bush won 78 percent of their votes. In 2012, they represented 26 percent of voters, and Romney won the same share, 78 percent, but still lost. Besides, the 2012 drop in voter turnout was much less pronounced in the battleground states that really decided the election than in places like Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Arkansas, where an evangelical tide would not have changed the outcome.
Or consider the sobering possibility that evangelicals are not all that conservative. Among evangelical voters today, according to an NBC poll, fully 37 percent support Trump, with only 20 percent backing Cruz. As he watched Jerry Falwell Jr endorse Donald Trump, Senator Cruz saw his theory circle the drain.
The appeal to groups as groups is the bane of modern politics. The resort to shrill appeals to “base” voters on either side is shredding our national unity. To succeed, the Republican Party will have to win the votes of moderates as well as conservatives in states like Florida, Virginia, New Hampshire, Ohio, Colorado, and Nevada. A conservative can do that with a straightforward pitch to Americans as Americans. Anything less is unworthy – and unlikely to be successful.
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It’s true that if you go back to the 1960s and 1930s, they had more successes. The Goldwater defeat was enormous, and saw the Dems make a lot of ground. FDR was bigger. I was referring only to recent political shifts.
Still, if you go back that far, we ended Jim Crow, turned America’s draft army into a vastly more professional force, won the Cold War and defeated the strong form of the Democratic Party’s ideals, and achieved the victories above. I cannot understand the claim that decimating unions was a victory around the edges, for instance. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the massive advances in law and order, but there are many aspects of life that are simply incomparably better thanks to conservatives gains.
Sure. Still, it’s more important to reduce the number of abortions taking place than to get the label right, and we’ve cut the numbers of clinics and such down to the point where abortion is at an all time low within recorded statistics.
I listed this in my comment.
Have you read New Deal Statutes, or statutes from the Reconstruction era? The suggestion that Congress giving discretion to agencies is something new is a myth that I’ve never understood. Back in the days when setting up an agency meant two pages of statute, agencies had very little in the way of Congresssional restrictions indeed.
When are you claiming these are invented? We’re doing decently at passing anti-Kelo laws and such limiting these. It’s still a problem, but it’s going in the right direction.
The Roberts court has implemented stronger protections for political speech than at any point in American history.
Sure, what Lerner did was criminal. It strikes me as somewhat eccentric to suggest that this is a big deal, but the reduction of union power is not, though.
It’s true that much of the right came to peace with the New Deal, most famously Reagan. Happily, we have a Congress more keen to cut back entitlements than we’ve had since the days of Harding and Coolidge. It’s true that even now we probably aren’t keen to cut off retirement payments to the poor, but if you’re angry about that, I don’t think that politics is going to be a field in which you find much satisfaction.
We’ve been winning for your adult life. The picture of defeat you present precedes that. It’s a shame that we ran Goldwater and a shame that Nixon lost. It’s a shame that Hoover and the Depression coincided.
The America you live in, though, is an America that has untold glories. Americans live longer, are more educated, have bigger houses, have more car, more white goods, and better lives in just about every respect; religion and marriage are the big exceptions, but they’re pretty close to the only ones.
I’ll have to disagree. Current polling numbers put him ahead almost across the board. I predict the election will be Trump winning over Bernie Sanders.
“I think the Senate would be more than justified to just not approve anyone with less than a year to go.”
Btw, what do you think would happen in the general election, if the republican nominee took this stance?
I think Trump can win, but it won’t be over Sanders. The Democratic system of superdelegates means that if you don’t have the backing of the Democratic Party establishment, you just can’t get the nomination. One thing I fear is that, because of the Trump insurgency, the GOP might adopt the superdelegate system itself to crush insurgent candidacies in the future. The GOP has so-called “unpledged delegates”, but they’re not nearly as powerful in the process as the Democrat superdelegates are.
Even if Hillary were indicted… which isn’t going to happen, but even if… then I’d bet the Democrats would probably use the superdelegate system to draft Joe Biden. Sanders is a threat to their Wall Street money spigots.
Where are the political wins?
Us living better is due to technology, not to increased freedom. Those are not “wins” by the right, they are “wins” because the Left is too slow to regulate information technology.
The Left gets its wins, and they do not get rolled back. The loss of private sector unions is off set by public sectors ones.
Your answer that I have been “winning” is like telling my the Falcons not being in the playoffs is not “losing” because they are going to get a new stadium in 2017.
You mean they say they are keen, don’t you? This is the type of talk that is the most difficult to handle. Always, always in the future. The future has come and gone. There’s money to made in DC and that’s their future.
I wondered why I got an alert for this thread.
We live better because we won the Cold War. We live better because of our improved gun rights. We live better because we lack the institutional racism of Jim Crow. We live better because school choice reduces the awfulness of the outcomes for people otherwise confined to hellish schools. We live better because the crime rate has plummeted. We live better because we no longer have to fear union abuses. We live better because we have a border fence, and the men and hardware to make it formidable. We live better because the government no longer has pre-Reagan tax levels. We live better because we are beating the moral atrocity of post-Roe easy and widespread abortions. We live better thanks to a peaceful world with relatively few real tyrants. We live better thanks to American companies being able to sell their products overseas, with freer trade than ever before in history.
Public sector unions haven’t grown and are now being pushed back. They represent a larger portion of unions only because the private sector unions shrank.
I guess if you think of my list as being filled with unimportant things, there’s nothing I can do to fix that. I think of those gains as being pretty darn important, but “important” is hard to define objectively.
They voted for it in the Ryan Plan. They got elected on promises of it. That’s not happened before.
I disagree. Mona seems to think Cruz created this problem by ginning up anger against Republican leadership. I think this is selfishly delusional. It was not Cruz who created the anger. It was the Republican leadership acting with complete contempt for those who gave them their majority. And Mona’s delusion is selfish because she wishes to avert her eyes from her own responsibility as one who has consistently supported the Republican leadership in this regard. Mona’s stance, and that of those like her, are the primary reason for the existence of the Trump phenomenon.
Yes, but always in the future and they don’t and won’t take the long view about things like this nor will they do it if the left makes life too hard on them. And the left will pick off individuals if you break out of the pack so everyone has to move in lock step and compromise rather than fight.
This is the nub — this is what many of us truly believe is the issue with Trump’s rise — serious weakness of resolve and spine in the GOP and the conservative pundit world. And we like Trump because he is the 2×4 club that might wake these people up — or, if not, then help to embarrass them and get them to resign. But, what do Mona and all the “Against Trump” authors talk about: wonky conservative issues and they steer clear of addressing WHY Trump is successful — this seems to terrify them all. The only “why” they seem to be able to agree on is that this slice of the Republican coalition is filled with stupid and/or uninformed people.
So, dripping with condescension these stupid people spend all their time explaining how Trump is not a conservative.
Remember a return to 2008 spending levels? The kindest thing I can say about all of them, including Ryan, is that they no longer speak American. If all of the small print that they miraculously found after the election of 2010 (discretionary only, pro-rated for time remaining, suspect baselines) was supposed to be our fault for not seeing it and therefore shame on us, then get me a new set of “conservative” representatives. Which — Hey! — is where we are today.
Before the new can come in, the old gots ta go. Same with the shrill and tiresome commentariat.