This has been true for a long time but now it's obvious and undeniable. You heard some GOPers tell us yesterday that ok, things are a mess but they'll get their house in order and they'll take on the Senate Dems and Obama.
"Will latest wanker stupidity finally convince mainstream media to stop taking them seriously, treat them like the fools that they are?"
But that's just it. How do you defeat the Democrats when you can't even agree among themselves?
The idea of bipartisanship should now be obvious as the illusion it is. The Senate GOP and House GOP can't agree either. But the House GOP can't agree with itself.
Mitch McConnell is a strangely functioning Republican leader and you wonder how much longer this will be allowed.
The irony is that the contagion is in the House but the dysfunctional House may be what does in any hope McConnnell has of keeping his Senate together.
The House GOP is interested in only opposition for its own sake. They are against institutional power of any kind even their own.
I will argue that this is what the modern GOP is and has been for a very long time. Indeed, the Original Sin for the GOP remains the Great Depression-just as before the GD the Original Sin was slavery for the Democrats.
The GOP has never accepted the New Deal and this has put them in the minority ever since. Considering this fact, what you have to say is they've been pretty successful. I mean since 1968 the GOP has achieved a rough parity with the Democrats while being out of step with mainstream American opinion.
The acceptance of the New Deal among the American people is universal. Yet the GOP wins roughly one out of every two elections.
Even now, the GOP in many ways is the dominant party still. Yes, we Dems now dominate the Presidency but the GOP during the Obama years have totally taken over Congress and runs most Governorships and state legislatures.
And the Supreme Court going back to the mid 80s has been conservative.
What's amazing is that they've won elections without winning any policy debates. Belief in the New Deal even among their own base hasn't been touched.
The GOP base doesn't want to see their government benefits cut they want to see the benefits of nonwhite people cut.
In a sense you have to say the GOP has had an amazing run considering it's position on the New Deal is the minority position.
But it's all coming to a head now. The modern-post New Deal-Republican party has never been united on anything except opposition to the Democratic party and its ideas-New Deal liberalism.
But now they can't even elect their own Speaker who is only the third most powerful person in the Free World.
As Daily News Bin notes, even if the Democrats don't win back the House the GOP may need them to help them run it anyway.
http://www.dailynewsbin.com/opinion/democratic-party-may-get-to-pick-the-next-speaker-of-the-house-after-all/22769/
Bruce Bartlett-a former Reagan economics adviser puts it best.
https://twitter.com/BruceBartlett
So what is the future of the GOP? Schism. This is what always comes from purism eventually. Purity brings disunity. The GOP is broken and nothing will put it back together again.
A party is about some sort of minimal consensus. Again, the modern GOP has had this problem since FDR. They have not so much been unified on anything but opposition to the Democrats.
But this vacuum is finally unraveling. The idea of a 'permanent Republican majority'-as they dreamed of during the Reagan years and then again after W won in 2004.
How can you get others to agree with you when you can't agree with yourselves?
Democrats are masochists too though Mike. They don't go out to vote when there isn't a shiny object to keep their attention focused, and the result is the largest Republican majority in the House in many decades. If fucking Democrats would vote instead of whatever the fuck else they're doing on election day, this political cancer called the GOP (beholden to a core of angry hot-headed delusional zealots) wouldn't be nearly so toxic as it is. That's the thing about delusional hot heads: they're incapable of learning. If they get their way and reality reacts poorly to their stupidity, it'll just compound their fury which they'll direct to some other scapegoat to unfairly blame for the destruction they caused. Their utter lack of humility means they can't conceive of the idea that their actions were at all to blame. I don't know, but perhaps this is how "popular" dictatorships get started: an apathetic and ignorant majority, a dysfunctional media determined to split the difference between extremes and call that the "sensible middle," a weak and frightened "establishment" that cynically tells the extremists what they want to hear, and the extremist themselves: a minority of off-the-charts deluded, frustrated and enraged (though high politically engaged and determined) zealots, utterly convinced they're correct and that they are heroes out to restore a mythical "golden era" from the past by reversing modernism.
ReplyDeleteOh don't get me wrong. There are definitely some self defeating attitudes and actions on the part of the Democratic party.
ReplyDeleteMy point here is not to deny the Dems mismanage things a lot.
A big problem with the Democratic party are the large number of 'Emoprogs' who can be sort of like the Tea Party extremists in letting the perfect being the enemy of the good.
There has often been a problem with progressive activists that they are too single issue rather than strategic. They tend to care only about their pet issues rather than the Democratic party. Agreed.
But they are still a party even one that makes some very bonheaded moves sometimes.
Look what's pathetic is that the Dems have played the GOP to a 1-1 tie for 48 years when the public clearly agrees with us ideologically. On the New Deal, etc.
"Look what's pathetic is that the Dems have played the GOP to a 1-1 tie for 48 years when the public clearly agrees with us ideologically. On the New Deal, etc."
DeleteAgreed.
I appreciate your point about the Dems and this has prompted a new post with your name in it. I just started it.
ReplyDeleteHere it is
ReplyDeletehttp://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2015/10/tom-brown-asks-what-about-democrats.html