Josh wrote:frigidmagi wrote:
This guy isn't an editor or a writer but I thought this was well written.
Pretty good postmortem that sums it up nicely.
The Republicans are lost in how fast things are moving. Now that any place they're at is a potential open mic and anything they say on any obscure interview has the potential to be endlessly Youtubed, the shit attitudes that they used to stash away came home to roost. Add the purge of the moderates to that and the lowest common denominator of sexist, racist xenophobe was what was left in the leadership.
So now it comes home to roost.
Where does it go from here? Dunno yet. I thought the first Obama shellacking might be a kick in the teeth that would rattle them out of being idiots, but instead they ran with the Tea Party instead.
So now they're reaping the rewards of the Tea Party. Maybe it'll finally start to fade off and I'll quit hearing all the favorable local references, especially when it comes to such and such candidate being a 'Tea Party guy.'
Back in the aftermath of the Dems slaughtering the Republicans in the 2006 congressional elections, as it began to become clear that whoever won the Democratic primary in '08 was extremely likely to become the next President of the United States, back before I had even heard of Barack Obama or Sarah Palin or the Tea Party, I made a prediction. I said that the Republican party had reached a tipping point of incompetence and that the next few election cycles were going to be very unpleasant for them. I said this because the Republicans of 2006 reminded me a great deal of the Democrats of 1980, a party that had simply lost the plot of where the country was, looking back to perceived successes from two decades earlier, not understanding why these lessons did not apply to the situation they found themselves in today. I also predicted that the trajectory that the Republicans would take would mirror in many ways the trajectory the Democrats took throughout the 80s and into the Early 90s. The party's failures would discredit the leadership, resulting in a free-for-all by its constituent elements. This free-for-all would bring forth the extreme wing of the party, a wing not powerful enough by itself to actually seize direct control of the party, but powerful enough to force its agenda upon those who did. Once this happened, the resulting platform would sink the electability of the candidates shackled to it, resulting in defeat after embarrassing defeat, as the extreme right failed again and again to perceive why their lunatic agenda wasn't selling to the entire country.
Now, I'm no prognosticator, and I did not foresee the events that interposed themselves between this moment and that one, specifically the rise of Obama (a man I once bet sixty dollars would never be elected President of the United States), the Great Recession, and the utter implosion of the Bush Administration. These events and the change in the electorate meant that the precise results of the 2006-2012 elections were not identical to those of 1980-1986, but the general trend I think has been played out. Neoconservativism as a doctrine was discredited. The extreme right did rise. Though unable to force its candidates through to the national stage (neither Romney nor McCain were extreme right wingers), it was able to force its agenda on those candidates that
were pushed forward. This shackled the Republican party to a platform which was roundly rejected by large segments of the population. Consequently the Republicans, like their Democratic counterparts in the 80s, though able to make occasionally impressive showings in off-year congressional elections (such as 2010 or 1982), were totally unable to compete on a national scale. McCain was slaughtered in '08 (as would probably any Republican in his place) along with his party. Romney, though he did not get slaughtered, managed to fail to unseat the President despite spending a billion dollars amidst the worst economic climate in seventy years,
and lost the popular vote consolation prize his strategy all-but guaranteed to give him, all while his party lost every competitive Senate race in the country and several more that were not competitive at all. This is all in keeping with what I expected.
So what does history tell us?
What ultimately reversed the tides of ineptitude for the Democrats was the advent of Bill Clinton. Clinton was a very moderate, dare I say 'Conservative' Democrat, with an appetite for power that exceeded his appetite for ideological purity. Over the course of three years, between 1989 and 1992, Clinton and several others dragged the Democratic party kicking and screaming into the center. He abandoned the Nuclear Freeze debate, and the Reagan-era talking points that the Republicans were sure to win. He dropped all pretenses of statism from the party agenda, for which the left wing never forgave him (ironically, this might have come back to bite him in 2008). He focused on turning the page away from the 80s and the Cold War into modern conceptions of governance, and altered the narrative to points like Health Care and Taxation that he knew the party could be strong on without alienating the middle ground. The result was a commanding victory in 1992 that all but destroyed the Reagan coalition and left the Republican party careening in a way they never really stopped.
This, I think, is the Republican party's eventual future.
Not everyone who voted for Romney did so because they hate black people and muslims, believe God causes rape, or think that taxes are the devil's socialist work. Ignoring the accidents of Romney's personal strengths or weaknesses, his excellent performance in the first debate was based around principles that do play well to a majority of Americans. Remember, this was the man who instituted the nation's first universal health care system, whatever the right wing made him say about it once he reached the national scale. The Tea Party, Limbaugh, Rove, and the rest of the usual gang of idiots will all scream that Romney lost because he wasn't ideologically pure enough, but the Republican party is a large place, and some of the people in it are as aware as any of us that the solution to having lost an election is probably not a policy that alienates even more people. It is both a vice and a virtue of electoral politics that lust for power eventually trumps every other ideal. That includes the ideals of theocracy and objectivism. The Republican party will eventually acquire a crop of leaders who want to be in power more than they want to congratulate themselves on the purity of their anti-abortion platform. Once that happens, the party will re-align itself around a new, more modern platform. And once they do that, I expect they will have another lengthy period of success. I might even rejoin their ranks.
Now... when will this happen? I don't know. It took the Democrats 12 years to pull this transition off, and while much of that is circumstantial elements unique to the 80s, much of it is not. Still, the defeat that the Republicans suffered this time around is different than the one they suffered in 2008, both in type and in reaction. In 2008, the proto-Tea Party was able, with some credibility, to claim that voter apathy was to blame for their loss, because the momentum of the Democrats was so strong, the credibility of the Republicans so ravaged by Bush, and the crop of candidates they fielded so mealy-mouthed, that the proper solution was to "go back to the base" and run to the right. You can agree with that analysis or disagree with it, but it held water for a lot of people at the time, and formed the narrative that followed. Remember Michael Steele's declaration just a month after the '08 election that the Republicans were "done apologizing"? The feeling was that the Republicans lost because they were not sufficiently Republican, and that the public was bamboozled without a fight by the meteoric rise of President Obama.
This time around however, there's no hiding. What just took place was a catastrophe for the extreme right wing. Every race, Senate, President, or otherwise, that the extreme right wing muddied its hands on, was transmuted as if by magic into Democratic victories. Right wing lunatics unseated veteran Republican senators in primaries, only to have their own, very red states, turn on them by double-digit margins once the sheer scope of their extremism was put on display. Richard Mourdock, who unseated six-term incumbent Richard Lugar in the Indiana primary, not only lost a senate seat that had been republican for
four decades, but underperformed in his state's party affiliations by more than 12 points. Obviously, opening his mouth to say that Rape was God's Will had something to do with that, but it's no co-incidence that two different Republican senators had their campaigns imploded by such means. The extreme right, like extremists everywhere, simply do not know how to interact with the rest of the nation. And consequently, elemental errors of messaging and common tact pass unnoticed until they wind up with a billion hits on Youtube. I would wager that every single person that Akers or Mourdock interacts with on a daily basis believe the same things that they do on the subject of rape and abortion. As such, neither of them ever learned that the majority of the country, Pro-Life or Pro-Choice, finds such sentiments to be offensive to the point of inhumanity. Like any ideological fanatic, they do not possess the necessary human empathy to perceive how such statements will be seen by the rest of the world, a trait developed from a lifetime of being the outsider looking in on the political system. There are lefties with similar biases. The difference is that they weren't running for senate this year.
This election's narrative, once several months have gone by, will be, hopefully, the high water mark of the Tea Party. They pushed their agenda as far as it would go and could not bring it any further. Following its amalgamation with the Southern Bible Belt Evangelical Social Conservative agenda, the Tea Party has always been a regionalist right wing nuthouse with a veneer of Libertarianism atop it, and the very Red states with very different definitions of what Red means to them (such as Montana), are having none of it. Their policies cannot shape a national political debate. This has always been true. But now it's in the open.
It would not surprise me if the Republicans manage, following this catastrophe, to pull their shit together enough to field a new form of Republicanism in time for 2016. This would put them ahead of the Democrats in my historical comparison, but macrohistory is never exact. I believe they have a chance to do this because of my read of the next four years of Republican narrative. People are sick of gridlock, posturing, and obstructionism, which is increasingly being seen for what it is. The House, the only institution that the Republicans control, is never seen as doing anything, and often seen as preventing things from being done. The extreme right will try and concentrate on being more obstructionist within the House, which will render it even easier for the Democrats to paint them as out-of touch and crepuscular. Nobody who rises to the forefront in that context has a prayer of national political office.
No, the only Republicans who have a chance at being elected in 2016 will be the ones who do not have the Tea Party stench on them. They will not be Liberals, but fiscal conservatives who return to the notion of simply refusing to care about social issues in a time of exploding national debt. They will present themselves as the adults in the room, as opposed to the Democrats who are patronizing, arrogant, and revolutionary. They will not cite Reagan as a relevant model to follow, understanding that the electors they are courting barely remember who Reagan was, and certainly don't see his policies as relevant to themselves. They will have a history of hammering action through divisive congresses, legislatures, and committees. They will appear curt and polished and resoundingly boring. In many ways, they will resemble the Mitt Romney of 2008. They will never go so far as to attack the Tea Party, but they will act as though it does not exist, regarding it as an irrelevance and a distraction. And should the Republicans regenerate themselves enough to nominate them for President in 2016, they will conclusively, though not impressively, win.
And if they do, then at long last, we will be able to close the book on the crazy period of the Republican Party in the early 21st Century.