Rebuilding The GOP
- Thread starter Darts
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I wonder if its useful to let Trump still try to control his base and try to take over the GOP.
He'll keep the GOP out of power and split their vote but the worry would be whether even as incompetent as he is whether he could really start a revolution.
Darts is right about this. With a political system that channels everything into two parties, there are always going to be incentives for one party or the other to make a play for the angry racists. It goes back a lot longer than 20 years.
I think that issue goes back much longer than 20 years.
Four years is a long time in politics, but the Trumps will linger on the political scene for longer than four years. We've seen a lot of Trump style politicians emerging from the GOP, new ones and older ones that were against him in the first place. I think his son will attempt to run at some point and will have the backing of a lot of these die hard Trumpist. Personally I think classical Republicanism is dead, or on it's last legs.
Sure, but going for the angry racist vote was maxed out at 40%, and even then filled out by people like Kathleen who somehow still don't think he's racist.
But if the angry racist vote is a consistent, solid 40% and all the other groups are much smaller, it is easier to find a way to lure a few of Kathleens over to vote for you than to keep together a coalition of multiple small groups that aren't as coherent in their desires. Add in a voting system that lets you win consistently without getting more votes and that lets you veto the other side pretty easily even if you lose and why give up your power base?
I wonder.
Isn't it more likely that there are more people like Kathleen, who hasn't posted here in a while, who are more likely to be like those who are last at the party and shocked when the lights are turned on and they're covered in puke and stale beer and that those people who looked so beautiful aren't?
You'd hope that the ones who went along with Trump believing it was the media and not Trump who was the despot/racist might be thinking twice about who they back.
Though there will be the jcpro's just like there are the dutch ovens, who will disappear and come back with a new name soon enough, there will also be those who will now claim they never backed Trump.
That 40% would be much harder to obtain again, unless Fox/NewsMax and social media double up on their messaging.
Good observation. Anyone in the GOP wishing to earn the Republican nomination will have to follow in Trump's footsteps. Not style wise, but the core points of his platform cannot be dismissed. Border security, peace through strength and no foreign wars, economic revival and America first approach. Immigration will go to hell under Biden, military will be cut, foreign wars will probably continue and the pressure from the left wing of the DNC will lead to economic stagnation. It's not hard to predict Biden's policies and the outcome. Trump will not run in 24(probably not), but, like Obama, he will not exit the stage and anyone seeking the nomination will need his blessings. Right now Cruz has positioned himself at the front, but 4 years is an eternity in politics.
it's easy, though. Look at jcpro above. Right away finding a way to sneak Trumpism back in with a respectable coat of paint. It doesn't matter if it is incoherent - he literally says Trump ran on no foreign wars AND that a problem is that Biden will cut the military. "Peace through strength".
That core sentiment is over-represented in the primaries and as the base of the party. The Kathleens of the world mostly are fine with that as long as they can pretend the main people aren't as wantonly corrupt and anti-democracy as Trump was. The real problem is that the hard core base, which wants those things, isn't going to go for a fake respectability. It is hard to thread the needle. That said, GOPers going over to the Dems aren't going to be as powerful there as they are in the current GOP. The incentive is to therefore just embrace the crazy. It may cost them in general elections, but look at how 2021 turned out. Losing big still left Trump very close to winning. A little more vote suppression and the GOP can overcome that, and even without it a good break puts them back in. The House is gerrymandered enough that they can always be competitive there without huge wins by the Dems. As long as the GOP is the "rural white man's party" they have a huge advantage in the Senate.
You are right that it may be they can't really win full power anymore this way. But that isn't certain, and until they lose consistently for a few cycles they won't change their approach. (And they will try just tweaking it slightly first.)
It took losing 5 out of 6 presidential elections by BIG margins for the Democrats to shift as far to the right as they did in the 90s. Except for Carter - who was pretty conservative and benefited from the country still being mad about Watergate - the Dems lost in 68, 72, 80, 84. without cracking 43% of the vote. They lost in 88 at the tail end of that with 45% of the vote. Losing by 8% was a good showing! It took that kind of beating for them to shift to their third way bullshit (and they overcorrected). It is going to take losing a lot more before the GOP gives up on Trumpism.
I think the rise of the angry white man took off about 20 years ago although it may have started a bit earlier. What are the causes?
1) Loss of manufacturing jobs
2) Competition for college/university admissions and jobs by women, Asians and affirmative action
3) Relative decline in number of white males
4) Other reasons
BTW: I think 40% will vote Red and 40% will vote Blue no matter what. The battle for votes is the remaining 20%. Trump didn't have the personality nor the character to win that 20% plus his handling of COVID was a total fuck-up.
1) Loss of manufacturing jobs
2) Competition for college/university admissions and jobs by women, Asians and affirmative action
3) Relative decline in number of white males
4) Other reasons
BTW: I think 40% will vote Red and 40% will vote Blue no matter what. The battle for votes is the remaining 20%. Trump didn't have the personality nor the character to win that 20% plus his handling of COVID was a total fuck-up.
It's not "Trumpism"- you people are so clueless. It's pure 80s Reagan doctrine and 80s shaped Trump, little wonder that he embraced it because it worked. The difference between Trump and the rest of the Republican field was that be was able to convince the Republican voters that he was the man to implement it.
2) It is not the competition for spots that is an issue, it is that post-secondary education is so expensive that they do not even have a chance to compete for spots.
There is also the lack of single-payer healthcare. If you or anyone you love gets sick, you face bankruptcy.
I hope one day soon BLM and Trumpists figure out that they have the same common enemy and if they just dropped the racial angle that they can work together on the real issue; Poor Lives Matter.
Trump didn't follow the Reagan model, other than trying to deregulate and give millionaires tax breaks.
Trump campaigned by channelling the anger of the declining middle class from anger about the system to anger about immigrants and people of colour.
It was a misdirection, taking people who had been cut out of the system by repeated GOP governments and telling them their problems were not caused by billionaires like himself.
I agree! Trump is just the latest in a long line of Goldwater-inspired Republicans. That strain has been there for a generation, based in the white revanchist resentment post the civil rights legislation. You can draw a straight line from Goldwater to Reagan to Trump. It is the same "use the cultural resentment to fuel the plundering of the country by the millionaires". The base has been promised someone who would actually go for it and Trump was more willing to go for it than almost anyone else. The others thought that openly embracing the nativism would backfire but they were wrong.
This goes back way longer than 20 years. This is the Southern Strategy in a nutshell except for #1 getting much worse and #3 if you take it as shorthand for "sense of losing their automatic place as the most important group". But those started well before, but it was probably 12-20 years ago that you maybe people realized it was really happening and wasn't going to turn around.
More or less I agree. There is a shift in coalitions that can happen over time, but the very nature of the system means that there is always going to be some kind of realignment to shift to a balance of two parties. With the current levels of polarization, any candidate who manages to end up as the candidate of one of the major parties is going to get a minimum 45% or so of the vote in a presidential race. I don't see that breaking anytime soon.
That's the "populist" argument. The so-called "Brown-Red alliance". The problem is that the racial angle is much more important than the economic angle to the Trumpists. That's why you get all these arguments about how it should all be about class, not race, and "idpol" is the problem. Herrenvolk democracy is the pitch. It's also why Trump, who saw no need to argue for ideological conservatism, was happy to spout off about how he was gonna protect the common man - even while he told them he was going to sell them out to the rich folk and that wages were too high. His fans understood it as "we will give benefits to the white man once we regain the ability to exploit the women and minorities".
What peace has Trump achieved through strength or any other form? All of that you mentioned was part of his platform message but the fact still remains that his rhetoric and dog whistling on immigration and taking America back to a particular period was meant to appeal to the racist types. How will immigration go to hell under Biden when he and Obama deported more immigrants than any administrations before them? And are you talking legal or illegal immigration? Cuz the Trumpers had an issue with legal immigration, mainly from those south of the border or from the mid east.
Most of his supporters didn't vote for him because of those policies, because if they really cared about them and looked at his business dealings, they would see how much he'd favoured foreign goods like the steel used in his buildings over that which was American made. His daughters fashion line are still being made abroad.
Anyways, Trump Jr will easily beat Cruz or anyone if he decides to run. There was a poll around October of last year asking Republicans/Conservatives who they favoured to take over after Donnie and all 3 Trump kids came out ahead of Cruz, with Don Jr being at the top of it.
Let's not forget that in 2008 when Obama won the Presidency, there was the usual scaremongering about how he would screw up the economy and mess up on the foreign affairs and other matters. But the opposite happened when in a concise manner he successfully steered the economy that was in the biggest recession since the Great Depression. NATO was strengthened and the USA had a great influence globally including the Middle East, and even the likes of Osama Bin Laden was taken down. Moreover, he set the roots for the beginning of a new era of Affordable Healthcare that is revered by a majority of Americans. That is why it has not been repealed although it was on Trump's bucket list to do so. Once again Biden will have to follow in Obama's footsteps to get the economy back on track, but by tackling the root cause called the Covid-19 Pandemic, especially as it was brushed aside by this disastrous Trump regime.
There will be numerous roadblocks by The Republicans to block Trump or his Family members if they try to run for the 2024 nominations. Trump will not be allowed to run if he is impeached for the second time. Ted Cruz has proven to be a true out and out flake. The Republicans will want to distance themselves from him especially as his presence at Trump's most recent rallies will be an albatross around his neck. Will not be surprised if someone like Jordan decides to run!!
There will be numerous roadblocks by The Republicans to block Trump or his Family members if they try to run for the 2024 nominations. Trump will not be allowed to run if he is impeached for the second time. Ted Cruz has proven to be a true out and out flake. The Republicans will want to distance themselves from him especially as his presence at Trump's most recent rallies will be an albatross around his neck. Will not be surprised if someone like Jordan decides to run!!
Holy fuck...you call us clueless and then make a remark like that...Trumpism is daily lies, threats, insults, broken promises...the difference between Trump and the some, not all but some of the Republicans is he appeals to the mentally ill who's vote count's the same as common sense people.
This is the dilemma. The GOP learned post-Reagan that just being massively obstructionist doesn't hurt them. With the realignment complete, there isn't any upside to giving "the opposition" any kind of win. Since they don't care about the US succeeding or government working, they don't mind the damage they cause trying to get back into power. (There may be a 10-15% of current GOP politicians at the national level who do care about governance, but the party has mostly pushed anyone who does out over the years.)
This is a trap of a two-party system. With nowhere else for the people to go, if you can make them think your opponent is doing a shit job, they have no choice but to vote for you if they want to remove those people.
