Civil War Watch
| Tue Oct. 28, 2008 8:48 AM PDT
CIVIL WAR WATCH....From the LA Times:
The social conservatives and moderates who together boosted the Republican Party to dominance have begun a tense battle over the future of the GOP, with social conservatives already moving to seize control of the party's machinery and some vowing to limit John McCain's influence, even if he wins the presidency.
In skirmishes around the country in recent months, evangelicals and others who believe Republicans have been too timid in fighting abortion, gay marriage and illegal immigration have won election to the party's national committee, in preparation for a fight over the direction and leadership of the party.
Obviously this sounds crazy to liberal ears, but I guess I can't blame them. After all, the job of a true believer is to believe. And turning elections into culture war battlefields certainly seems to have worked in the past for them.
But times change. Among vast swathes of the young, the culture war has lost its salience. Worse, it's become an albatross, a sign of intolerance and hatred that young voters despise. The results are crystal clear in party ID polling: twenty-somethings have fled the Republican Party in numbers not seen since the Great Depression, and if social conservatives manage to wrest control of the GOP and start shrieking 24/7 about banning abortion and hating gay people, they'll be guaranteeing Democratic dominance among an entire cohort of voters for decades to come.
Which is fine with me, of course. But the adults in the Republican Party better plan on knocking heads very hard and very fast if they don't share my attitude. Sarah Palin isn't the future of their party, she's the future of mine.
Continues Below
Continued From Above
Comments
If the GOP keeps acting like a pack of jackals, they'll end up in third party status real soon.
We have Repugs that want Palin to run in 2012, Repugs that want complete religious control, Repugs that want to blame McCain for ALL of Bush's pitfalls while exonerating Bush/Cheney. The GOP has turned into a cannibal carnage zoo and it is almost to bloody to look at anymore. All the cheap talk about how Obama was palling around with Ayers, when too many voters noticed that the Repugs were palling around with Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed and oilfield companies, (like Ted Stevens) and THAN, we see that Palin wants Stevens to still be elected -THEN changes her mind and wants Ted to resign all in one day. I'm telling you, they are a bunch of Turkey Vultures fighting over road kill ? it's really getting ugly.
If the GOP keeps acting like a pack of jackals, they'll end up in third party status real soon.
We have Repugs that want Palin to run in 2012, Repugs that want complete religious control, Repugs that want to blame McCain for ALL of Bush's pitfalls while exonerating Bush/Cheney. The GOP has turned into a cannibal carnage zoo and it is almost to bloody to look at anymore. All the cheap talk about how Obama was palling around with Ayers, when too many voters noticed that the Repugs were palling around with Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed and oilfield companies, (like Ted Stevens) and THAN, we see that Palin wants Stevens to still be elected -THEN changes her mind and wants Ted to resign all in one day. I'm telling you, they are a bunch of Turkey Vultures fighting over road kill ? it's really getting ugly.
The GOP made a Faustian bargain with the social conservatives wrongly believe they would know their place and let others run the party. The social conservatives bided their time and now they want their due. Too bad for the moderates but the social conservatives have been taking over the GOP from the bottom up and now reach very high posts at the RNC. One one hand it is quite likely the social conservatives might end up running the RNC on the other they don't have enough general support to win general elections and since they will never moderate their tones moderates are likely to disengage, just not vote or vote Democratic.
shrieking 24/7 about banning abortion and hating gay people
I think the key is the use of large format color printers and volunteers at street corners. Most people don't understand until they see the severed arm of a fetus or a gay porn star in a speedo.
Get to work RNC. A few million can go a long way.
Ah, but it's obvious. The economic catastrophe follows directly from allowing gay marriage in Massachusetts (and now other states). It's all the fault of those liberals, aren't you paying attention?
A literal reading of the bible might lead you to expect a plague of locusts or raining frogs instead, but that's so Old Testament. This millenium, we get financial panics.
It funny, no one wants to be a dem, but they are so crazy in the GOP now days that the dem party is the default choice. If the dems moved to a slightly more conservative position on big govt, taxes, and NS, left the social issues status quo, they might see a long run, as good run as long as the leaders are somewhat competent running the country and responding to crisis. Obama seems to be Mr competant moderate and could be the model for a long time to come. He must avoid the pitfalls of the Clinton era of course, the GOP armies are watching every move hoping for a mistake. As long as the right embraces the crazies, the left can govern from a moderate position and succeed.
Submitted by Carl Nyberg (not verified) on Tue Oct. 28, 2008 9:47 AM PDT.
What keeps big business from abandoning the GOP?
This is basically the Dem vision for the country.
Use the executive branch and committee chairmanships to extort money from business interests that have money.
If big business doesn't see a viable alternative, it will give the money to Democrats.
If this happens, we may be headed to one-party government.
People have gone back and forth about whether Obama's "reach across the aisle" rhetoric should be off-putting to progressives. This developing division in the Republican Party settles the question, as far as I'm concerned. By reaching over the aisle to pick up votes whenever possible, the Dems will be able to take credit for bipartisanship, while simultaneously encouraging the divisions among Republicans.
"Bipartisanship" in this case can be a devastating tool to put the majority of the Republican Party outside of the mainstream. The Republicans have certainly done this to Democrats for years. Now we're in a position to turn the tables.
Most people don't understand until they see the severed arm of a fetus or a gay porn star in a speedo.
Perhaps the left should counter with equally colorful posters depicting the faces of the already-born: children at the funerals of their mothers, or bruised and beaten, or in a vegetative state after being born with anencephaly. As to porn stars in speedos - not attractive, whether gay or straight.
At any rate, the right might start to 'get it,' too. Since they can only read the pictures.
I disagree with this idea that we need to stick to the middle. We are at a cross roads in terms of the economy and the environment. I think we need extremely progressive ideas to generate a better future. That 'tack to the center' motif is very late '90's and I think needs to be given its rightful burial.
My sense is that what started the turn away from the institutionalized hypocrisy that is the Republican Party was the Schiavo affair, which preceded Katrina. The blatant political exploitation of a family tragedy, reaching all the way up to the Oval Office, exposed the ugliness and bad faith of many "leaders" on the right, and I think that people began to realize what the Christianists really meant to do if they were allowed to.
It is quite fitting that Colorado, home to Dobson's Army of the Living Dead, will probably go Dem this time. God has a sense of humor after all.
Given a sufficient number of dedicated operatives, we could take this opportunity to seize the empty husk of the Republican party and remake it into anything we choose.
I'll be switching my party affiliation (post-election, natch!) and preparing my 2010 bid for Congress on a platform of mandatory alcohol consumption and abolition of the designated hitter.
Quaker in 2010!
IIRC Drew Westen in The Political Brain, showed research that often voters will choose someone who is perceived as sticking to their principles over someone who agrees with them. With that principle in mind, consider the following thought experiment, choose among the individuals who posses equal integrity:
(A) A confirmed Marxist.
(B) A true independent (selects policies from both left and right as appropriate).
(C) A rightwing
fundamentalist.
I think the result is that person B is at a big disadvantage, because most people have migrated to be either liberal or conservative, they see someone who agrees with them part of the time as not having principles. This is one reason why so many politicians come packaged as true believers.
has anyone read "true believer" by Eric Hoffer?:
http://tinyurl.com/63aj9e
Actually, I'm in favor of a strong, credible opposition party. So I'm not thrilled with this trend. It's absolutely necessary for voters to have a way to punish misbehavior at the ballot box. And I think that changing reins every so often allows the new guys to get rid of the old guys' stupid initiatives.
What would really rock would be for a viable 3rd party to emerge from the GOP civil war. Let the social conservatives take over the GOP, let the remaining sensible folk who actually stand for lower taxes, smaller government and individual liberty form a new party. We need an opposition party to check our excesses and I'd rather have a real choice at the ballot box instead of choose between the Democrat and the Theocrat.
Submitted by Nils Gilman (not verified) on Tue Oct. 28, 2008 3:19 PM PDT.
The main thing that the GOP culture warriors can't stand is that they have LOST the culture war. The young and the coasts aren't just "tired" of it, Kevin; they want the forces of tolerance to win. That is: they don't want to stop gay people from getting married, or stop the provision of birth control, or force religion into the public square.
The GOP side of the culture war was always akin in strategy to a counterinsurgency -- it was trying to force a populace to accept a political situation they didn't want. And that counterinsurgency strategy has gone the way of virtually all counterinsurgency strategies that don't involve exterminating large portions of the subject population: it has failed. And, like other failed countersurgencies, the aftermath of the lost GOP culture war will result in a generation or two of hard feelings on the side that lost, with those who concede the reality of defeat being called traitors and weak-willed by those who wished to continue the futile battle.
The evangelicals and social conservatives should wise up and realize that the GOP plays them for suckers and only pays lip service to their views in election years. If they were going to ban abortion they would've done it already. In President Bush's first term he had sky-high approval ratings and the Republicans controlled the presidency, both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court. What else do they need? They aren't going to ban abortion because they need it as a stick to beat up Democrats with.
trying to force a populace to accept a political situation they didn't want
You can see this in their hypocritical attitude towards "activist judges" and "legislating from the bench." They don't like Roe v. Wade because it was activist judges legislating from the bench, and they want to remedy it by stacking the Supreme Court and have activist judges legislate from the bench. They should follow the Republican Party platform and introduce a constitutional amendment banning abortion, but they won't because--even if it could get through Congress, which it probably wouldn't--they know most Americans wouldn't vote for it.
If the GOP keeps acting like a pack of jackals, they'll end up in third party status real soon.
We have Repugs that want Palin to run in 2012, Repugs that want complete religious control, Repugs that want to blame McCain for ALL of Bush's pitfalls while exonerating Bush/Cheney. The GOP has turned into a cannibal carnage zoo and it is almost to bloody to look at anymore. All the cheap talk about how Obama was palling around with Ayers, when too many voters noticed that the Repugs were palling around with Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed and oilfield companies, (like Ted Stevens) and THAN, we see that Palin wants Stevens to still be elected -THEN changes her mind and wants Ted to resign all in one day. I'm telling you, they are a bunch of Turkey Vultures fighting over road kill it's really getting ugly.
