How To Fix a Broken Elephant: A Recipe for Electoral Health In Six Incredibly Difficult Steps

Tod Kelly

Tod is a writer from the Pacific Northwest. He is also serves as Executive Producer and host of both the 7 Deadly Sins Show at Portland's historic Mission Theatre and 7DS: Pants On Fire! at the White Eagle Hotel & Saloon. He is  a regular inactive for Marie Claire International and the Daily Beast, and is currently writing a book on the sudden rise of exorcisms in the United States. Follow him on Twitter.

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320 Responses

  1. Art Deco says:

    If you want your memo read, put it on one page. You’ve written 5,000 words which demonstrate that you’re obsessed with media. None of it is at all enlightening to the reader.Report

  2. j r says:

    I am largely in agreement with this post, but I do have a few points of dissension.

    – Kennedy (yes, that Kennedy) didn’t voice an opposition to public education; she voiced an opposition to a certain model of public education, one based around the public school. It’s not a conservative argument, it’s a libertarian one that advocates replacing publicly funded government-run schools with private schools and government subsidized vouchers.

    This may seem like a pedantic point, but it’s important to make a distinction between some guy arguing for throwing the poor out on the street and someone arguing for moving education to a total voucher system. Is the latter still a radical proposal? Yes, but so is a UBI or a nationalization of the banks or, at this point, even single-payer government run healthcare. But you probably wouldn’t ask Democrats to banish anyone making those proposals from their ranks for the purpose of holding the center.

    – On the second point about culture war, I agree with what you’re saying but I don’t see how the right has any ability to unilaterally cut it out. My running theory is that the right watched jealously as the left got mileage out of its own operationalizing of “the personal is political” and eventually raised its own army and entered the fray of the culture wars. The nature of war is that it generally doesn’t end until one side wins or both sides come to accommodation. As long as there is Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes looking smug on MSNBC or TPM/Occupy Democrats/US Uncut/Rawstory to spread lefty click bait on Facebook or the SJWs of Twitter and Tumblr, there is going to be a conservative response. The only way that I can see this ending is if the media stops making money off of it.

    – On Trump, it’s too early to say anything definitively. One of the memes coming out of Romney’s loss was that he wasn’t conservative enough; he was milquetoast and tacked to the middle. What the GOP needed was a real conservative who wouldn’t run from being a conservative. I thought that idea was solid nonsense, but the last six months have so far proven me wrong. If Trump goes on to get soundly thumped by Hillary, I can save some face in being mostly right. But I’m not totally convinced that’s going to happen. What happens to this narrative if Trump wins?Report

    • Don Zeko in reply to j r says:

      Re: Culture War, isn’t a cease-fire or accommodation impossible? After all, there’s nobody giving orders or coordinating millions of Thanksgiving table arguments and twitter flame wars, and there will always be an asymmetry between how each side sees the prominence and loathsomeness of the more intemperate voices.Report

      • Kim in reply to Don Zeko says:

        Don,
        Not when people start copping a gay accent to defend themselves from good hard honest criticism.Report

      • Tod Kelly in reply to Don Zeko says:

        @don-zeko @j-r I think that the idea that either side needs to back off cultural issues or even call a cease fire is overshooting what I am asking for. (Though I agree with you, Don, that it would be nice if people could break bread together without labeling everyone w didn’t agree with them “Other.”)

        The issue for me is what kind of culture war you want to fight. You’ll notice, for example, that I didn’t say that conservatives need to lay off the gay marriage or transgendered bathroom issues. Those viewpoints are ones that I disagree with, and I think in time they will be non-issues my side will win. But I also get how things like that are going to need time.

        But mud sharking, cuck, and primates?

        It’s not really an issue of don’t raise any cultural issues, it’s one of be more careful about the ones you’re associated with raising.Report

        • nevermoor in reply to Tod Kelly says:

          More to the point–and this my role as a litigator speaking–you don’t win by getting the other side to agree with you. They are paid to disagree.

          You win by taking responsible positions that the other side will look bad opposing and abandoning unreasonable positions you would look bad asserting. There’s no law, for example, requiring conservatives to support police violence in EVERY case, instead of letting the particularly bad ones go and focusing on the ones where you can actually imagine the officers had a reasonable fear. If you only fight THOSE battles, reflexive “SJWs” who think all police use of force against minorities is wrong will lose the middle. By fighting the losers, you get the opposite result.

          Likewise, there was no law requiring the GOP to decide that obamacare was going to trigger an immediate apocalypse. Had the GOP instead said something like, “thank god you idiots finally figured out this policy we’ve been trying to explain for a decade, and that we proved-out in Massachusetts” they would have both gotten a ton more leeway to push the law in their direction and wouldn’t now have to pretend the thing isn’t working by hyping every minor criticism and ignoring every major success. They’d also have done a lot better in 2012.Report

          • trizzlor in reply to nevermoor says:

            >>There’s no law, for example, requiring conservatives to support police violence in EVERY case, instead of letting the particularly bad ones go and focusing on the ones where you can actually imagine the officers had a reasonable fear.

            And for an example of this, review the spectacle of Republican candidates claiming that Eric Garner died because of liberal cigarette taxes and not because, um, he was strangled by a police officer and not provided medical assistance when he said he couldn’t breath.Report

            • InMD in reply to trizzlor says:

              The Republicans are often on the wrong side of this and would never be so subtle to argue this point* but liberal cigarette taxes (if they get to the point where illegal resales are profitable) are the types of policies that enable police violence. There are a lot of nuisance and quality of life type regulations that progressives support which in a vacuum sound reasonable. However when they meet the realities of how law enforcement works in this country they become another reason for the police to detain poor people and/or minorities.

              *I understand what I’m saying here is more of a libertarian argument and not what Republicans were saying when this incident was in the press.Report

              • trizzlor in reply to InMD says:

                I get what you’re saying, but there’s a root cause and there’s the final straw. If you got rid of liberal cigarette taxes, do you think Garner (or people like him) would still be getting strangled? What if you got rid of aggressive policing?Report

              • Art Deco in reply to trizzlor says:

                Garner (or people like him) would still be getting strangled?

                He wasn’t strangled. He was tackled. The police officer’s arm and baton were across his neck for all of nine seconds.Report

              • Barry in reply to Art Deco says:

                “He wasn’t strangled. He was tackled. The police officer’s arm and baton were across his neck for all of nine seconds.”

                You know, a through-and-through bullet wound involves a foreign object in the victim’s body for much less than that.

                And here I thought that bullet wounds were *bad*Report

              • Barry in reply to Barry says:

                Art Deco illustrates Todd’s points very, very well here.

                In the past few years, we’ve seen the right back a number of killings of black men by the police, killings which were then ‘taken care of’ by prosecutors working hand in hand with the police.

                But dare to try to even arrest a white right-winger, and the howls reach to heaven.

                Us liberals notice this.

                And don’t think that non-Herrenvolk don’t notice it.Report

              • InMD in reply to trizzlor says:

                I think we need to have a greater appreciation of how blunt a tool criminalization is and do a better job of understanding concepts like diminishing returns when we craft policy. Reforming the police is a noble project but also a very long one.Report

          • Kim in reply to nevermoor says:

            The GOP has become the party of authoritarians,, and they don’t understand things that aren’t black and white.

            Sucks to be them.Report

        • j r in reply to Tod Kelly says:

          @tod-kelly

          Personally, I think that both sides ought to back off most cultural issues, but that wasn’t what I was saying in my comment. I was saying that I can see no incentive for the right to unilaterally start doing things differently.

          As I said, much of this is predicated on the idea that Trump gets soundly beaten by Hillary and the 2016 election is just another step on the GOP’s road to irrelevance. Well, what if Trump wins? Then you have a situation where the Republican Party holds the White House, both houses of Congress and will have the opportunity to appoint at least one, but maybe as many as four, Supreme Court justices.

          If that happens, then the reality will be that the conservative movement will have effectively won and done so by employing exactly the strategy that folks like you and I have been decrying as disastrous.Report

          • Don Zeko in reply to j r says:

            That latter scenario is making some big assumptions about the reliability and competence of one Donald J. Trump.Report

            • j r in reply to Don Zeko says:

              At this point in the campaign, I am much more questioning Hillary’s competence. Her campaign is making some very poor decisions and unforced errors.Report

          • Patrick in reply to j r says:

            Well, what if Trump wins? Then you have a situation where the Republican Party holds the White House, both houses of Congress and will have the opportunity to appoint at least one, but maybe as many as four, Supreme Court justices.

            If that happens, then the reality will be that the conservative movement will have effectively won and done so by employing exactly the strategy that folks like you and I have been decrying as disastrous.

            This presupposes that Trump would actually appoint 1-4 Supreme Court justices that look like Antonin Scalia.

            Given that the Senate has precisely zero chance to go 60+ for the GOP, the likelihood of that happening is pretty small.

            Trying to predict what Donald Trump will do is probably not the best idea, so I won’t predict what his nominees would look like. But I will say that Trump does have a rather deep and abiding love of winning.Report

            • Barry in reply to Patrick says:

              “Given that the Senate has precisely zero chance to go 60+ for the GOP, the likelihood of that happening is pretty small.”

              I would expect the GOP Senate to shut down the filibuster for SCOTUS justices, and very likely for everything they really wanted. And to scream to high heaven in the 2020’s, the instant that the shoe was on the other foot.Report

              • Michael Cain in reply to Barry says:

                I wonder, from time to time, if the Republicans played state sovereignty “properly”, if they couldn’t get a solid 60+ Senate seats. Tell the political class in California, for example, that they get control of the public lands, the water thereof, and a block grant equal to the amount of current federal spending on those lands, and their own say on marriage and abortion, but they have to allow Mississippi some restrictions on who can be married and voter ID. Ditto promises to the political class in Mississippi, that they get to be a modest theocracy but they no longer have a say on how the public lands in California are operated, or how abortion is handled in California.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Michael Cain says:

                Excellent comment Michael. A bit ago I was mulling why the dems are so bad at the less-than-national level and why the GOP is so good, and I think you hit the nail on the head: states sovereignty is an intensely local issue (and as we know, all politics is local…) so they really have the upper hand there. And given what you say – with some tweaking here and there entirely consistent with the concept of state sovereignty – it’s easy to imagine their state-level gains being even greater than they are right now.

                Of course, my thinking at the time was more focused on the Dem party and trying to figure out how it can resuscitate itself. (Is self-resuscitation even possible? maybe that’s why I couldn’t come up with any clear solutions.) Nevertheless, I agree with you.Report

            • North in reply to Patrick says:

              Over optimistic Patrick. In any scenario where Trump wins the Presidency and the GOP gets majorities in the House and Senate I’d bet dollars to doughnuts they’d heave the filibuster faster than you could say ‘nakedly partisan power grab’.Report

              • Patrick in reply to North says:

                Well, that’s a point, one that I myself argued for yesterday actually, somewhere else.

                Because the clock.

                Fifteen years ago, I would wager on the GOP not jettisoning the filibuster because they like having it when they’re in the minority. But they are so unlikely to take the Presidency post 2016 without a massive inroad into the non-white population that this may be the point where they say, “Whelp, if we’re going to have a shot at a GOP-friendly SCOTUS, this is it, and only it.”

                Because they can’t take the Presidency in 2020, not the way the numbers look now. If Trump wins, he’s a one-termer.

                On the other hand, the GOP has been looking at the wasteland for a long time and ignoring it, so there’s that.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to North says:

                Here’s where I think that you’re overly optimistic.

                In my scenario where Trump wins the Presidency and the GOP gets majorities in the House and Senate, the Republicans won’t have the issue of abandoning the filibuster ever come up because the Democrats will always have the necessary number of defections necessary to make any and every law and appointment and appropriation “bipartisan”.Report

              • Michael Cain in reply to Jaybird says:

                So, what’s on your short list of bills that will get passed? Mine starts off like this: (1) one-sentence addition to the Clean Air Act that says, “For the purposes of this Act, carbon dioxide shall not be considered a pollutant”; (2) the PPACA is repealed, except for denying coverage for pre-existing conditions (no restrictions on what the premiums can be) and kids can stay on their parents’ policy through age 26; (3) Medicaid is converted to a block grant at each state’s pre-PPACA level, with no automatic inflation or population adjustments; (4) the EPA’s latest “navigable waters” expansion is repealed.

                My guess is that none of those reach the Senate floor unless the filibuster is trashed.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Michael Cain says:

                The first one will happen, the second one will *NOT*, for some reason. No one will be able to explain why.

                “It keeps dying in committee”, an unnamed source told us via YikYak.

                Same for 3.

                Agree about 4.

                Something’s going to happen with weed. It’ll either be rescheduled or the hammer will come down on Colorado like the fist of an Angry God.Report

        • The Democrats’ religion-bashing is just as bad. I’ve heard them call Catholic archbishops “primates”.Report

    • Vikram Bath in reply to j r says:

      j r: I don’t see how the right has any ability to unilaterally cut it out.

      Genuine questions:
      1. Do both the right and left engage in this sort of thing to the same degree?
      2. Do party leaders on the left pander to, tolerate, and endorse those with radical ideas just as much as party leaders on the right?

      j r: Romney’s loss was that he wasn’t conservative enough; he was milquetoast and tacked to the middle. What the GOP needed was a real conservative who wouldn’t run from being a conservative. I thought that idea was solid nonsense, but the last six months have so far proven me wrong.

      Donald Trump is a real conservative who wouldn’t run from being a conservative? It seems you have gotten the exact opposite lesson than I have extracted from the same events!Report

    • Kim in reply to j r says:

      jr,
      “it’s a libertarian one that advocates replacing publicly funded government-run schools with private schools and government subsidized vouchers”

      Fine and dandy, but when the Powers That Be are funding the voucher-programs — and the Powers That Be don’t want to give a dime to public education…

      I can tell a stalking horse when I see one. Good ideas that masque bad agendas aren’t going to win my vote.Report

    • pillsy in reply to j r says:

      j r: This may seem like a pedantic point, but it’s important to make a distinction between some guy arguing for throwing the poor out on the street and someone arguing for moving education to a total voucher system. Is the latter still a radical proposal? Yes, but so is a UBI or a nationalization of the banks or, at this point, even single-payer government run healthcare. But you probably wouldn’t ask Democrats to banish anyone making those proposals from their ranks for the purpose of holding the center.

      Mr Kelly seems to be taking it as axiomatic that the Republicans should be “small-c” conservatives. If you believe that, it really doesn’t matter that the norms for the Democratic Party might be different. I don’t know how much of the piece I really agree with[1], but I don’t see any terribly good reason for the parties to just be mirror images of each other, and if that means there’s some asymmetry in how they react to fringe-y policy proposals, so be it.

      My running theory is that the right watched jealously as the left got mileage out of its own operationalizing of “the personal is political” and eventually raised its own army and entered the fray of the culture wars. The nature of war is that it generally doesn’t end until one side wins or both sides come to accommodation.

      The culture wars are metaphorical wars, not real ones. If Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow keep on being smug on MSNBC, well, so what? Likewise with the clickbait garbage.[2]

      [1] For one, it’s not impossible Trump wins, and even if he loses, losses can be more or less catastrophic.

      [2] I admit that it’s very hard to resist the impulse to say, “Hey, this person who’s a third tier Salon contributor/county GOP chair in Idaho/Twitter dingbat with 37 followers said something amazingly stupid. Since nobody has ever said something amazingly stupid before, we should all go pay lots of attention to it!”Report

    • j r in reply to j r says:

      @vikram-bath and @pillsy

      Just to be clear, I am taking no position on the relative merits of either side’s culture war beefs. Whether BSDI or one side is clearly in the wrong is an issue that is completely orthogonal to my comment, as is the question of what either side ought to do. My comment is wholly descriptive, an attempt to describe the present state of things, how they got that way, and make some estimation as to where they are headed.

      Donald Trump is a real conservative who wouldn’t run from being a conservative? It seems you have gotten the exact opposite lesson than I have extracted from the same events!

      The best way to extract a lesson from a series of events in the outside world is to remove yourself from the equation. It doesn’t matter whether I think Trump is a real conservative, it matters whether the voters think so.Report

      • pillsy in reply to j r says:

        Just to be clear, I am taking no position on the relative merits of either side’s culture war beefs.

        I’m not really, either. I just don’t think the fact that some TV liberals are allegedly smug dicks, or the fact some liberal websites undeniably run clickbait garbage, makes the right-wing culture war response inevitable, let alone actually helpful for obtaining policies that conservatives want to see enacted.Report

        • Jaybird in reply to pillsy says:

          Remember when the NYT did that dumb-assed article about how we need to put peas in guacamole?

          It came this close to starting a shooting war.

          All that to say, it may not be helpful but it is pretty damn close to inevitable. Close enough that when any given “hey, we should totally change this thing!” movement starts up, we should be surprised when it *DOESN’T* start a countermovement.Report

          • pillsy in reply to Jaybird says:

            Jaybird: Remember when the NYT did that dumb-assed article about how we need to put peas in guacamole?

            It came this close to starting a shooting war.

            I… don’t remember that, actually, and it sounds like I’m better off that way.Report

            • Jaybird in reply to pillsy says:

              Well, the point wasn’t the peas in the guacamole. (That recipe was here and here is a small sampling of all of the articles discussing the phenomenon here, here, here, here, and I talked about it here.)

              The point was that any suggested change, anywhere, will result in pushback. Even over matters of taste. When it comes to things that we think are matters of morality that, suddenly, we’re facing arguments over whether and how much we need to change (and, even more fun, when we’re being told that it’s not only a matter of morality but “YOU PEOPLE ARE ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THIS MATTER OF MORALITY!!!!” for something that we’ve been doing, apparently immorally, since civilization started), we should see culture war as inevitable.Report

              • pillsy in reply to Jaybird says:

                The point was that any suggested change, anywhere, will result in pushback.

                The pushback being described isn’t so much against change as it is against some fraction of liberals being complete assholes. Some fraction of liberals being complete assholes is, well, not a change.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to pillsy says:

                Oh, sorry. Yeah, good point.

                I do think that it provides some measure of “if they acted this way, then *I* get to act that way too!” cover. Which, if nothing else, heightens contradictions.Report

    • Mike Schilling in reply to j r says:

      If Limbaugh and Hannity were as influential as Maddow and Hayes (I’ve honestly never heard of Chris Hayes), we wouldn’t be having this conversation.Report

  3. Kolohe says:

    RON PAUL! was a Congressman, not a Senator. And I think you’re being a bit unfair to Huckabee *as he was in 2008*. (especially since Keyes is in ‘normal parameters’ in your timeline). Huck is a so-con through and through, but he was also a multi term state governor for about as long as Bill C was when he got elected, from the same state, and Huck was making noises about economic populism years before anyone else did.

    Even Palin wasn’t that bad *on paper* before being thrust on the national stage. That might be the inflection point – late 2008 early 2009 – when everyone who was even remotely respectable and ‘professional’ started cashing in. (including Gingrich – including just a bit before, Kasich)Report

  4. Saul Degraw says:

    Some thoughts:

    What if all the stuff you deplore is stuff the Republican base/”Conservatives” sincerely believe in? I remember you wrote an essay a few years ago about switching your party membership to the GOP but you are clearly not a typical member of the Republican Party. IIRC you switched your membership to save it from the crazy.

    1. “Radical Party/Conservative Party”

    I think the mid-20th century version of the GOP that you are longing for was defeated a long time ago. There has always been a strain of thought in the United States that was relentlessly against even the smallest form of Welfare State. They have gone by various names but have generally (but not always) gone with the Republican Party. In the Great Depression, they were called the “Liberty League.” In the early 1950s, they called themselves the “Old Right” and were led by Robert Taft. Then came Goldwater and his followers who were generally Midwestern and Western and loathed the East-Coast Republicans. Nelson Rockfeller was considered a RINO way back when. How else can you explain the constant attacks on the Affordable Care Act? They are mounted by ideologues who refuse to bend for reality which is fine enough if they are sincere I suppose even if the results are clearly disasters. Look at the finances of Louisiana and Kansas after their experiments in tax-cutting mania.

    2. What if Trump is closer to the base of the GOP than you realize? The GOP standard bearers like Walker and Bush the Jebber fell quickly. One of the early lessons was that it was pretty clear that a good chunk of the GOP base did not really care about destroying Social Security or Medicare. But they do care greatly about what they see as decline in the United States. Recent studies and polls show that Trump’s main support comes from that old-standard of Right-wing Nationalism, the petite bourgeois. These are small business people (but usually not educated professionals, more like one truck contractors) who never worked for anyone and might be psychologically unable to do so. They are also most likely to disagree with social changes and perceive them as a reduction in authority and power.

    3-6. Are related. You seem to think that these are all just cynical tactics and tricks to gain lots of money. For some at the top of the chain, that might be true. However, I think that a lot of people sincerely believe in all these things. The LGM crowd would tell you that you are severely discounting the roles white supremacy and racism have always played in American politics.

    Now I generally think the GOP is nuts. You are writing something that should theoretically help moderate them but I think the rot has gone too far.Report

  5. aaron david says:

    And so, a list of six things that Tod wants, with no real thought to what conservatives (who presumably want these thing) want in a party. They must be small c conservatives, and not take stands in a culture war that RTod dislikes, nor have voices that Tod dislikes.

    All the while the R’s are taking names and kicking ass at all levels of gov’t outside the presidency, which more than anything seems to be on its normal two term cycle. Reguarding which, Clinton has fallen in the number from 11.4 to 3.7 in the last month, whether it is due to the R’s solidifying under Trump or Hilarys inability to close the door on Sanders is indeterminate at this point.

    Tod, you have been writing this same post for, what, six years now? The R’s are never going to be the party of Tod, they are going to do the things they want, and all the hopes for change, that don’t take into account the actual members of that party, are a fools errend.Report

    • Art Deco in reply to aaron david says:

      He doesn’t take that into account because he isn’t interested in social relations or the economy. He’s interested in medial flotsam and jetsam around which he can construct interpretive frames.Report

    • Lurker in reply to aaron david says:

      The “Party of Tod” would be nice because Tod is nice.Report

    • Don Zeko in reply to aaron david says:

      @aaron-david , are you personally happy with the things in Todd’s bill of indictment? Are you satisfied with the policy proposals of the current Republican nominee? I get that you don’t think these things are nearly as important as Todd does, but if you aren’t happy with, say, Trump’s proposed trade and immigration policies, that’s a problem you have with the party you prefer to hold power. And even if you think the other party is far worse, wouldn’t you prefer that the party you’re closer to more closely adhere to your understanding of good policy and good governance?Report

      • aaron david in reply to Don Zeko says:

        Personally, I am indifferent to them @don-zeko. I am not a Repub, nor have I ever been one. I have some in my family, but I also have more than a few on the far left. But that begs the question, what should I demand of a party that I am not a member of? I am not going to demand that the Dems be and do what they are not, simply because I am no longer a member. I moved on.

        Under current Dem. leadership, politically they have lost, what, 13 senate seats and 70 house seats? How many state chambers and governerships? HCR seems to be in as big a fight as she was with Obama in ’08, wasting time and energy mopping up Bernie. Should we say that the D’s are broken? Shatered on the lower levels? That the only thing they are winning is the culture war?

        Deciding between Trump and Hilary is like deciding between bone cancer and a fractured skull. I don’t want either.

        “And even if you think the other party is far worse, wouldn’t you prefer that the party you’re closer to more closely adhere to your understanding of good policy and good governance?” That all depends on what you consider good governence. I generally think, that while both parties have aspects of good governance, D’s on abortion and R’s on gun rights, for the most part both parties are trying to make their morality the law. And they haven’t convinced enought of America that they are on the right track. So if I seem to be sidestepping your question, its mainly from the point that my politics don’t lend themselves to answering that question.Report

        • pillsy in reply to aaron david says:

          Political parties don’t really work like that in our system. The Presidency actually does have a lot of importance in our system, and it’s not like the Democrats contented themselves with their control of Congress after Dukakis went down in flames in ’88. If nothing else, you will have elected Republican officials–Senators and Governors, mostly–who want a shot at stepping into the Oval Office, or at least serving as senior officials in a Republican Administration.

          Finally, losing Presidential elections is just plain upsetting for most partisans. They really, really don’t like it, and they don’t want to do it. Maybe everybody should have more perspective on this sort of thing, but they don’t. I’m skeptical that @tod-kelly ‘s set of proposals could be implemented, and if they were, that they would result in a viable party that many #NeverTrumpeters would be happy with, but they’re a lot more plausible than large numbers of Republicans saying, “Hey, letting Democrats hold the White House indefinitely actually isn’t a problem!”Report

          • aaron david in reply to pillsy says:

            It isn’t that not holding the presidency is cool, it is that both sides have serious problems with how they are conducting business, and it shows up ticked for R’s and down ticket for D’s. But only one party is broken? That is why all of these culture warriors on the right are so active, so heeded. Because only half of our political story is told in the media outside of them. Both parties are broken.Report

            • pillsy in reply to aaron david says:

              aaron david: It isn’t that not holding the presidency is cool, it is that both sides have serious problems with how they are conducting business, and it shows up ticked for R’s and down ticket for D’s. But only one party is broken?

              Yes, because Ds are a helluva lot more willing to content themselves with losing down-ticket than Rs are with losing up-ticket. When the roles were reversed, as they were not so long ago, so were the attitudes.Report

        • Autolukos in reply to aaron david says:

          The number of people who are still pretending the Democratic race is competitive amazes me.Report

        • Don Zeko in reply to aaron david says:

          @aaron-david Perhaps this is distinct from the point that Todd is making, but my issue here isn’t that I think the R’s are going to lose elections, nor is it that I think they’ve gone too far to the right (I mean, I do, but that’s why I’m a Democrat). My problem is that the R’s have made a virtue about flouting the non-partisan, non-ideological rules of the game that allow government to perform its core functions adequately and that allow us to keep handing power back and forth smoothly.

          Or, to put it another way, I detest Paul Ryan. I think he’s a total fraud who pushes a radical agenda that would cause immense harm if implemented, and that he gets a pass on all of this because he knows how to manipulate the mainstream media. But I would be far, far, far less concerned if Paul Ryan was the Republican nominee, even though i think Ryan would be far more likely to win in the fall. Ryan is a real politician with a real policy platform. He is interested in public policy, knows things about the world, and has some idea of how to run a political campaign and use political power once it has been acquired. He doesn’t explicitly threaten to use the power of the state to harass hostile media outlets, he doesn’t promise to commit unambiguous war crimes, he doesn’t welcome the support of the KKK, and he doesn’t change what few semi-coherent positions he has in the space of hours.

          But Donald Trump does all of those things, and the fact is that he’s the Republican party nominee, not Paul Ryan. So what I can’t get my head around is the stubborn refusal of seemingly intelligent, discerning guys like you or Jaybird to admit that this is a different kind of person, one whose flaws go beyond the normal team red/team blue divisions. i’m not asking you to vote for Clinton or agree that Obamacare is great or anything like that. But the fact that it’s this hard to get people to admit that the Trump candidacy is not normal and is not ok? That scares the fish out of me.Report

    • Tod Kelly in reply to aaron david says:

      @aaron-david Well then, even though this piece was not really directed at you, I have good news! This will be the last post I will be doing on this topic.Report

      • Burt Likko in reply to Tod Kelly says:

        If I really believed @aaron-david were responsible for that outcome I’d be considerably irritated by that turn of events. I know @tod-kelly to be made of stronger stuff than that.Report

      • Michael Cain in reply to Tod Kelly says:

        @tod-kelly
        This will be the last post I will be doing on this topic.

        No, no, no! Not this time. Not another series — not all of them yours, admittedly — that stops after going on at great length about the brokenness of the Republican Party, with a casual mention equivalent to “of course, I could never join the Democrats.” ‘Cause in my experience, your small-c conservatives — standing athwart history shouting “Let’s move forward at a measured pace!” — sound a whole lot like most of the Democrats between the Appalachians and the Sierras.

        The way I see it, you owe us a minimum of at least one more piece. If you can spend 10,000 words on why the Republicans are so hopelessly broken that you’ve had to leave them, you owe us something on why the Democrats are so hopelessly broken that you can’t possibly join them. Or why they’re not broken, but there are policies that mean you can’t join them.

        And possibly one more piece. Can the Republicans be fixed? Can the Dems be weaned from the policies you object to? Which one seems more likely? Because the answer to the last one is what ought to be determining whose side you’re on.Report

        • Tod Kelly in reply to Michael Cain says:

          Oh, to be clear, I meant the topic of the GOP and its media. Not politics.

          “you owe us something on why the Democrats are so hopelessly broken that you can’t possibly join them.”

          I wrote that piece already, didn’t I? If anything, I’ll likely have to do a piece on why I will be rejoining thing this month, despite hating the thought of it.

          “And possibly one more piece. Can the Republicans be fixed?”

          That doesn’t really need a piece, because the answer is short. If they continue to have a core rallies against Trumpism, then yes, they certainly can be fixed. But, as is becoming more and more likely each day, even the #NeverTrumpers fully embrace Trump and Trumpism this fall? Then, no, they can’t. They can be successful for as long as a party that overtly signals white nationalism and sexism can be in a country with our demographics can be — which means possibly quite successful for a good while, maybe even a decade — and then they’ll die. After two or four years go by, you can walk back from a flat tax push or shutting down the government and voters won’t care much too much. But you can’t walk back from white nationalism. That’s going to stick.

          And hey, if that’s who they decide to be, then good riddance. In that case, it turns out they were never who I thought they were to begin with.Report

    • @aaron-david

      I think a lot of Tod’s advice is right on the mark. I think some of it is off a bit. Where to go from here is a pretty intense subject for debate among people dissatisfied with the status quo.

      But here’s the thing: It’s not just Tod that’s dissatisfied with the status quo. His investment in the GOP may be somewhat marginal, but I have approaching twenty years of involvement in the party that is threatening to come to an end. Of course, I have a degree of ideological promiscuity so hey. But then look at The Weekly Standard, most of the National Review, half of The Federalist, most of RedState, Look at a lot of people, including a lot of real bona fide conservatives. There is a lot of discontent. If not in numbers, then in volume. And it’s not all coming from Tod. (Arguably, it’s coming most loudly from Actual Conservatives.)

      So yeah, there’s actually a market for What Can We Do To Fix This S**t. It’s not something that Tod and a bunch of outsiders made up.Report

      • Art Deco in reply to Will Truman says:

        The discontented among those you name are concerned with the chronic ineffectuality and essential commercial orientation of the Republican elite. You have some others like Pete Spiliakos whose complaint is that the Republican elite is sterile; a variant of that view would be that the intellectual fertility is found in policy shops who are often considering exceedingly narrow questions. R Tod’s 5,000 word yammer is irrelevant to these sorts of concerns.Report

        • Will Truman in reply to Art Deco says:

          Everyone has got a different idea of how we got here, and where we go from here. Most of it corresponding to whatever believed before we got here. But there is a sense far wider than just Tod that “here” is not where we want to be.Report

      • half of The Federalist

        That is, the part that consists of Ben Domenech plagiarizing P J O’Rourke.Report

  6. Lurker says:

    The small-c conservative party you want already exists; it is called the Democratic Party.

    The Democrats meet all your criteria for what the Republicans should be:

    1. D’s (Democratic presidents and the party as a whole with a few outliers, I suppose) oppose radical changes and prefer to move slowly and incrementally. Technocrats and compromisers to the core. They are conservative and not radical.

    2. They oppose Trumpism and White Nationalism and Fascism.

    3. D’s try to appeal to the Social Justice crowd and the political correctness movement but are skeptical and more small-c conservative. They engage with this movement but don[t accept all of it.

    4. D’s are clearly not controlled by a media machine like Limbaugh and Fox,mat least not to the same degree or in the same pernicious way.

    So we need two (or more) parties, yes. I argue the D’s should be the conservative party, you can have a more radical libertarian party, and a more radical socialist party. White Nationalism should not, ideally, have a major party.Report

    • Art Deco in reply to Lurker says:

      The small-c conservative party you want already exists; it is called the Democratic Party.

      You need to quit talking to your navel. It’s silly.Report

    • Saul Degraw in reply to Lurker says:

      @lurker

      Basically right. I have a feeling that if you split the Democratic Party in two, you would have a small c-conservative party represented by the Clinton crowd and a liberal party represented by the Warren/Sanders crowd.

      I suppose what would be partially or wholly missing is some forms of social-conservatism. Both parts are strongly aligned on LGBT rights (though I would guess HRC does not want to have the HB2 debate now even if she agrees with it.) Both would favor keeping/expanding the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act. Issues like drugs are different. I suspect you would see more marijuana legalization but it would stop there. Neither party would advocate for the legalization of harder drugs like cocaine, heroin, etc. Legalization of sex work would have critics in both crowds I imagine too.Report

      • Art Deco in reply to Saul Degraw says:

        Basically right. I have a feeling that if you split the Democratic Party in two, you would have a small c-conservative party represented by the Clinton crowd and a liberal party represented by the Warren/Sanders crowd.

        That is just silly. Hellary is not distinguished from Sanders by stated programmatic content to a degree which would interest anyone but liberal sectaries. She’s distinguished from him in two senses: for Sanders, issues and programs are the end; for Hellary, they may be that, but they’re primarily a means for her self-aggrandizement. Sanders is fundamentally honest bar at the edges where people commonly fudge. The Clintons are the most politically prominent members of the criminal class since Aaron Burr.Report

    • trizzlor in reply to Lurker says:

      >>The small-c conservative party you want already exists; it is called the Democratic Party.

      This is a terrific point, and I think if Tod wants to persuade his conservative readers he needs to address it directly. What is the conservative party that he actually wants to see? Does he want Clinton to become the typical Republican and Sanders the typical Democrat? That is certainly the impression I get from these posts, and it’s going to go over with conservatives like a lead balloon.Report

    • Tod Kelly in reply to Lurker says:

      @lurker

      The small-c conservative party you want already exists; it is called the Democratic Party.

      This is actually an idea I have been toying with inside my head for a while. I certainly think that, with the success of Trumpism, it’s become the de facto pro-business and pro-capitalism party. Which, for someone old enough to have volunteered for the Jesse Jackson campaign when I was in college, is freaking weird.

      On the one hand, of course, there are things like Obamacare and the calls for min wage hikes, which strike me as inherently progressive.

      On the other hand, it’s been interesting this week to watch to two presumptive nominees. One is proposing grand, sweeping changes that will remake America. The other is hammering away on prudence, not rocking apple carts, and respecting tradition. In other words, the exact same contrast we have every POTUS election year — but coming from the opposite parties one expects them to come from.Report

      • Chip Daniels in reply to Tod Kelly says:

        There is this growing pool of people like me and John Cole, ex-Republicans turned Democrats, who joined the Democratic Party.

        Part of it was a true conversion- we saw our old ideas about gays and culture as incorrect; But part of it was that the Dems exemplified our small c conservative beliefs.

        What doesn’t get commented on much, is the effect we are having on the Dems just by our new presence. One of the reasons the Dems are so “conservative” is that the base is increasingly people who are invested in America as it is and is becoming, and very much don’t want that boat rocked.Report

    • El Muneco in reply to Lurker says:

      White nationalism certainly should have a major party. That way we know where they are and can see them coming. It’s not like that’s a constituency that’s going away any time soon.Report

  7. Lurker says:

    i’m not even sure that rises to the level of ad hominem.Report

  8. Doctor Jay says:

    Oddly, after meeting with Facebook, Glen Beck posted this, in which he says he doesn’t think the Conservative Movement is very conservative, either. Or at least a good part of it weren’t acting like it in the meeting.Report

    • Don Zeko in reply to Doctor Jay says:

      Of all the people to have a Strange New Respect for, I never would have guessed Glenn Beck. This is a strange election.Report

      • Jesse Ewiak in reply to Don Zeko says:

        I always has a funny feeling that Beck was selling a line of BS he didn’t believe. Of course, it was also because he’s a Mormon and Utah is the home of MLM schemes so they know how to sell people some BS.Report

        • trizzlor in reply to Jesse Ewiak says:

          I listened to Beck’s show yesterday on this and it was honestly bizarre to hear him trot out the “a few bad apples”, “nothing has been proven”, “they’re trying hard to fix it” defense for a liberal media target. This is the kind of argument he himself would compare to Hitler/Chamberlain were it made about the government. I think he was (a) legitimately charmed by Zuckerberg; and (b) just flat-out trusts big corporations. I don’t think this is a come to Jesus moment, I just think that once you’re in his fave five you get much more leeway, and big corporations (even liberal ones) are on that list … somewhere between racial conspiracy theorists and fiat currency conspiracy theorists.Report

  9. Lurker says:

    How about these four parties?

    Conservadems a la Lieberman or Ben Nelson
    Lefty Moderately Radical Progressives, a la Sanders.
    Religious Social Issue Reactionaries, a la Huckabee
    Libertarian Moderate Radicals, a la Poppa Paul.

    Trouble is the white Nationalist racist homophobes could corrupt any one of these parties, I guess. And four parties for this country sort of would be a radical change. Oh well. A more just society will just have to get put on the backburner for fifty years. Let’s watch TV.Report

  10. LeeEsq says:

    I’m going to echo Saul at point one. What the Republicans are advocating isn’t really that unique in American history. Its just that in the past you found this radical, anti-welfare, pro-market and Protestant morality ideology in both parties rather than concentrated in one party. You also had liberals in both parties. Its the great sort that started in the 1960s that led to the Republic emergency as radical party.

    Another good step for the Republicans would to be stop treating reality TV stars as people with something noteworthy to say.Report

    • Art Deco in reply to LeeEsq says:

      “Anti-welfare’? I’ve seen BO called ‘the Food Stamp president’, I’ve seen complaints about Section 8 vouchers (mostly by alt-right types who exaggerate their importance considerably, not from conventional Republicans), and I’ve seen complaints about the ever-more relaxed definition of ‘disability’. Is anyone not in the pocket of the National Association of Social Workers ‘anti-welfare’?Report

      • nevermoor in reply to Art Deco says:

        Yeah, why would liberals think the GOP wants to cut support for low-income americans?!?

        (other than, of course, because doing so is explicit GOP policy)Report

        • Art Deco in reply to nevermoor says:

          I see law school didn’t teach you the difference between criticism of and reservations about something and wholesale categorical rejection of something.Report

          • nevermoor in reply to Art Deco says:

            You’re going to have to spell that one out for me.

            I think it’s fair to call the party that wants to strip massive amounts of funding for something the anti-that-something party. If you disagree, show your work.Report

            • Art Deco in reply to nevermoor says:

              What ‘massive amounts’? Did Messrs. Hastert and Frist manage to get a bill on Mr. Bush’s desk to scrap the Department of Housing and Urban Development or the Department of Education, to mention two federal pustules (whose spending puke is a fraction of Social Security and Medicare)?

              The one thing the Republican Party managed to do was put some time limits on a small but dysfunctional and socially injurious program, AFDC. Upset Marian Wright Edelman greatly.Report

              • nevermoor in reply to Art Deco says:

                I’m sorry, but why does that question have anything to do with what the GOP wants now? The speaker of the house explicitly wants to cut welfare programs by trillions of dollars. That’s anti-welfare under any honest interpretation of the term.

                Also, to the extent you’re suggesting Bush wasn’t anti-welfare, he tried to privatize social security which would have wiped out a LOT of people’s safety nets when the markets crashed in 2008. Which is the whole reason liberals fought (and won) the battle to stop him.Report

              • Art Deco in reply to nevermoor says:

                I’m sorry, but why does that question have anything to do with what the GOP wants now? The speaker of the house explicitly wants to cut welfare programs by trillions of dollars. That’s anti-welfare under any honest interpretation of the term.

                He likely has the sense not to confuse expenditure flows with lump sums.

                Bush’s actual proposal was to allow a portion of FICA revenues to be placed in private accounts.Report

              • nevermoor in reply to Art Deco says:

                Another quibble that misses the point. You (or, at minimum, others reading this) should clearly understand why the GOP is considered anti-welfare. There has been no substantive dispute from you.Report

              • Art Deco in reply to nevermoor says:

                It does not miss the point at all. It discredits your point. However, you’re emotionally invested in your point.Report

      • Lurker in reply to Art Deco says:

        Is anyone not in the pocket of the National Association of Social Workers ‘anti-welfare’?

        The deep pockets of those powerful, wealthy, manipulative social workers. Yeah.Report

  11. Michael Cain says:

    So, there’s no room for a conservative party that, for example, believes that the government shouldn’t be involved in paying for health care? Or that, at least, the federal government shouldn’t be involved in paying for health care? We’re all progressives now, the only debate is about pace and technocratic details of implementation?

    I guess I’m a progressive, since I believe that for a society to be stable long-term, it has to guarantee floors under outcomes to some degree — opportunity is not enough. And that the state will be involved in those guarantees. And that policy directed to that guarantee can take many forms. I also understand that there are lots of people who don’t believe in such a guarantee, for various reasons.Report

    • Chip Daniels in reply to Michael Cain says:

      That question can be answered by collecting a representative sample of Republicans and asking them if there is room in the Party for someone who wants Social Security and Medicare repealed tomorrow.

      YMMV, but I’m betting the answer is NO.Report

    • pillsy in reply to Michael Cain says:

      Michael Cain:
      So, there’s no room for a conservative party that, for example, believes that the government shouldn’t be involved in paying for health care? Or that, at least, the federal government shouldn’t be involved in paying for health care?

      If you’re using @tod-kelly ‘s understanding of the word “conservative”, as being opposed to radical change–then the answer seems to be, “Yes.”

      Whether this indicates a problem with the belief, or instead indicates a problem with @tod-kelly ‘s definition, is another matter entirely.Report

  12. Jaybird says:

    Conservative, in this case, seems to mean “the type of liberalism that was mainstream in 1986 or thereabouts”. A good, straightforward, Walter Mondale/Mike Dukakis tax and spendism, a return to a less vigorous foreign policy, embracing the welfare state and shoring it up (but not *TOO* much, of course), and otherwise being staid and genteel.

    Well, plus gay marriage, of course.

    The liberalism of 30 years ago.

    Now, of course, back in the 80’s, you’d still have conservatives (or “conservatives”) who argued that we needed to abolish this or that Federal Department of This Or That. (Remember when “We need to abolish the Department of Education!” was something that presidential candidates said? Good times.) Now, of course, those Departments are no longer fairly new and getting rid of them is no longer “going back to the way we were before” but “let’s change this thing that we’ve had for a long long time”.

    Conservatism as a brake, as a voice that says “let’s do things the way my parents did them (but not my grandparents, because that’s crazy talk)”. A conservatism whose job it is to lose every battle, but lose it slowly, and with dignity.

    I can see why we’d want those people to be like that.
    I just don’t see why they’d agree to it.Report

    • Tod Kelly in reply to Jaybird says:

      We likely came from different kinds of families. My grandparents, to take just one example, weren’t really so big on scrapping the entire monetary system.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Tod Kelly says:

        Mine did the whole “survive the Great Depression, Fight in WWII, fight for unions, Buy American, Buy Union, New Deal Good, Great Society Kind Of Iffy” thing. He was a Mondale voter (though, in private, Grandad referred to the candidates as “Fritz and Tits”). Mostly uneducated. Very White Working Class. He worked hard to make sure that all five of his kids got college degrees and white collar jobs. Gran was what we used to call “a homemaker” and supported everybody as best she could.

        So, maybe.Report

        • Tod Kelly in reply to Jaybird says:

          In my family, what you’re describing would be my father, not my grandfather. (Including the “Fritz & Tits!”)

          The one difference between your gran and my dad being that Dad would have driven needles into his eyeballs before voting for Mondale, or any Democrat.Report

          • Tod Kelly in reply to Tod Kelly says:

            (Including the “Fritz & Tits!”)

            Way off topic, but…

            Before the days of the Internet, how does something like this be a thing that passes on from person to person all the way across the country in the two months or so that it had a shelf-life to catch on?Report

            • Joe Sal in reply to Tod Kelly says:

              Truck drivers and coffee shops.Report

            • Saul Degraw in reply to Tod Kelly says:

              It was thought of by multiple people at different points in the U.S.? There could be multiple ground zeros.Report

              • Tod Kelly in reply to Saul Degraw says:

                I can maybe believe it about adult men coming up with Fritz & Tits.

                I have a harder time believing it about jr high schoolers and what happens if you drink COke while eating Pop Rocks.Report

              • Kim in reply to Tod Kelly says:

                Some things are genuine whisper campaigns… like the one about Skin-so-soft… (which got started because the Feds wouldn’t let them advertise their product…)Report

              • Brandon Berg in reply to Tod Kelly says:

                The Coke and Pop Rocks thing didn’t really have an expiration date, so it could spread slowly. Probably by people moving and taking the local folklore with them. A school will typically have several students moving in and out in any given year. Then people have cousins and such, some of whom live far away and come to visit every now and then.

                Also, apparently “Fritz & Tits” was a bumper sticker. That seems like a pretty effective vector, especially if long-haul truckers put it on their trucks.Report

              • Art Deco in reply to Brandon Berg says:

                The only memory of ‘Fritz and Tits’ I have is that it was mentioned in passing in an inane piece of commentary by Barbara Ehrenreich.Report

      • Art Deco in reply to Tod Kelly says:

        Neither is anyone else bar a coterie of Austro-Libertarians associated with the von Mises Institute.

        David Calleo and Lewis Lehrman were also goldbugs, but they favored something along the lines of Bretton-Woods. Ted Cruz made remarks in favor of gold. He’s a lawyer, not an economist. It’s a reasonable inference economic advisors to a Pres. Cruz would dissuade him.Report

        • Don Zeko in reply to Art Deco says:

          That’s always a great way to campaign. Don’t assume I’ll try to do any of the stuff I’m promising, assume I’ll try to do the less stupid stuff that you desperately hope my advisers will talk me into.Report

          • Art Deco in reply to Don Zeko says:

            There is no body of economists with a line to Republican politicians who push gold. It’s a fringe viewpoint. To restore a gold standard or an analogue like a currency board, Pres. Cruz would have to get it past Congress.Report

            • Don Zeko in reply to Art Deco says:

              But if instead a GOP pres just wanted much harder money, he could compromise and put a bunch of extreme inflation hawks in the various Fed banks. My concerns are not assuaged.Report

              • Art Deco in reply to Don Zeko says:

                Inflation is currently running below 2%.Report

              • Don Zeko in reply to Art Deco says:

                How is this responsive to what I wrote?Report

              • Art Deco in reply to Don Zeko says:

                Just what are you expecting from ‘inflation hawks’ that you’re not already getting?Report

              • Don Zeko in reply to Art Deco says:

                Raising rates in spite of our low low low inflation, particularly if accompanied by paranoid fears about hyperinflation. Good thing that point of view has no representation on the right.Report

              • Art Deco in reply to Don Zeko says:

                You think he’s going to appoint Peter Schiff to the Federal Reserve board?Report

              • Don Zeko in reply to Art Deco says:

                So we have moved from “Trump would not have the capacity to carry out terrible monetary policy” to “Trump will not carry out the terrible monetary policy that he has the capacity to enact.” Good to know. For the record, I haven’t the foggiest idea who Trump would put in control of the Fed.Report

              • Art Deco in reply to Don Zeko says:

                We were discussing Cruz, not Trump.Report

              • Don Zeko in reply to Art Deco says:

                My apologies. You shifted the terms of the debate so many times that I lost track.Report

              • Francis in reply to Art Deco says:

                ” Ted Cruz made remarks in favor of gold. …. It’s a reasonable inference economic advisors to a Pres. Cruz would dissuade him”

                Why? He has taken leadership roles in efforts to default on our debt. Blowing up the US and world economy is something that he’s tried to do in the Senate. Why is he owed any charity on this round of lunatic comments, especially when you are so remarkably ungracious to any other senior politician?Report

              • Art Deco in reply to Francis says:

                Francis, a default is a failure to service obligations. The only circumstance in which that would happen would be if the Treasury failed to release available funds to pay the interest charges. Cruz could neither force nor inhibit them from doing that.Report

              • Don Zeko in reply to Art Deco says:

                Had the congress refused to raise the debt ceiling, as Cruz and other radicals urged, the treasury department would have had been forced to not make payments it was legally required to make, potentially including interest payments on the national debt. If you’d like to split hairs and insist that that’s not a default because the treasury could have just stopped sending out Social Security checks instead, feel free, I won’t be moved by it. Neither, i suspect, would bondholders be.Report

              • Art Deco in reply to Don Zeko says:

                No, they’d have been forced to make do with tax revenues without short term borrowing until the conflict was resolved. If they elected to stiff the bond holders rather than stretching their vendors, that was their choice, not Cruz choice.Report

              • Don Zeko in reply to Art Deco says:

                I called it!Report

              • Francis in reply to Art Deco says:

                Just to be clear, do you think that Senator’s Cruz’s conduct was appropriate and in the interest of the US?

                Is it good government policy to fail to pay any of its statutorily-obligated obligations on time? Should individual Senators hold the good credit of the US — on which the entire global finance system is based — hostage to their particular concerns, or comprise (as has been done for 200+ years)? Does the judgment of this individual show that he is fit or unfit for the White House?Report

              • Kim in reply to Art Deco says:

                When republican secretaries of the Treasury start hauling out inflammatory terms like “economic terrorist” — you done gone wrong.Report

            • James K in reply to Art Deco says:

              @art-deco

              That’s true, but its not like politicians spend much time listening to the economists who advise them.Report

    • pillsy in reply to Jaybird says:

      Jaybird: Conservatism as a brake, as a voice that says “let’s do things the way my parents did them (but not my grandparents, because that’s crazy talk)”. A conservatism whose job it is to lose every battle, but lose it slowly, and with dignity.

      I can see why we’d want those people to be like that.
      I just don’t see why they’d agree to it.

      Well, I’m not sure why they’d agree to it either, but one way or another, they often do–at least rhetorically.

      Especially when the alternative so often seems to boil down to losing slowly and without dignity.Report

    • trizzlor in reply to Jaybird says:

      >>A conservatism whose job it is to lose every battle, but lose it slowly, and with dignity.

      I see the 2nd Amendment fight as a counterpoint. Liberals tend to pray and spray with appeals to emotion, bogus statistics, vague policy proposals, and no desire to understand the other side. Conservatives build up coalitions, message discipline, and agitate in the institutions that matter (SCOTUS). And they’re winning. I see not reason why the same cannot apply to other aspects of the conservative agenda.Report

      • David Parsons in reply to trizzlor says:

        I see the 2nd Amendment fight as a counterpoint. Liberals tend to pray and spray with appeals to emotion, bogus statistics, vague policy proposals, and no desire to understand the other side.

        I don’t know what it’s like now, but when I was growing up I knew a _lot_ of lefties who owned guns and used them, and who rolled their eyes tolerantly at the NRA’s slow descent into being a Republican grifting outfit. The right wing’s attempt to claim guns as a tribal thing is really quite recent and a lot of the traction they’ve gotten is not despite the left but because a large subset of the left thinks that most gun control is a solution in search of a problem.Report

    • DensityDuck in reply to Jaybird says:

      “I can see why we’d want those people to be like that.
      I just don’t see why they’d agree to it.”

      Like the old joke about how we all agree that everyone else should take mass transit.Report

    • Art Deco in reply to Jaybird says:

      Now, of course, back in the 80’s, you’d still have conservatives (or “conservatives”) who argued that we needed to abolish this or that Federal Department of This Or That. (Remember when “We need to abolish the Department of Education!” was something that presidential candidates said? Good times.) Now, of course, those Departments are no longer fairly new and getting rid of them is no longer “going back to the way we were before” but “let’s change this thing that we’ve had for a long long time”.

      I’d wager Ted Cruz would readily come up with a list of federal agencies to liquidate, including that one. The trouble is getting it past otiose creatures like AM McConnell.Report

  13. Kazzy says:

    Re: #1 – I’ve noticed that one thing certain Conservatives do — especially around religious issues — is to make a change, insist it always was, and argue tradition. This is often fueled by the media because of their proliferation and how much of their audience takes everything they say as Gospel. You have actually discussed this elsewhere, such as the idea that Black Friday is some brand new thing and that Thanksgiving was always about a certain thing done a certain way… only it wasn’t. So I think these people, especially in the audience, genuinely think they’re being small-c conservative because of this misperception of how things used to be/always have been. Which doesn’t excuse it but might help explain the disconnect.Report

    • Chip Daniels in reply to Kazzy says:

      That’s absolutely true-
      “Tradition”= What We Did When I Was Young

      The variant is-
      “Tradition”= What I Imagine My Parents DidReport

      • Kazzy in reply to Chip Daniels says:

        I got into a recent discussion (a very productive one, I might add!) about the inclusion of a prayer at a Little League opening day. A question arose as to when the practice started and what its roots were. No one could answer one way or the other. And yet at least one of the people defending the practice took a “traditionalist” stamp and accused those of us opposed (though I would categorize my position as more “very curious and mildly uncomfortable”) as trying to change things.Report

        • Chip Daniels in reply to Kazzy says:

          I saw on Facebook one of those memes-

          “I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
          My generation grew up saying this every morning at school- Click Like and Share if you agree!

          To which I wanted to respond:

          “I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
          My parent’s generation grew up saying this every morning at school- Click Like and Share if you agree!

          Report

        • El Muneco in reply to Kazzy says:

          As Fred Clark notes, the idea of absolute opposition to abortion being the defining characteristic of social conservatism is newer than the McDLT.

          Placing the hand over heart when reciting the Pledge dates from 1942. Before the Nazis co-opted the Bellamy Salute, US schoolchildren were putting their hands in the air (and they were doing the same salute for 10 years).

          “In God We Trust” wasn’t on paper money until 1957.Report

          • Art Deco in reply to El Muneco says:

            As Fred Clark notes, the idea of absolute opposition to abortion being the defining characteristic of social conservatism is newer than the McDLT.

            Abortion was generally illegal prior to 1973. Abhorrence of the practice has been a signature of Catholic political action ever since the issue was bruited about ca. 1962. Regarding evangelicals, opposition to it has been adhered to since conservative evangelicals began to organize in a systematic way (around about 1979).Report

            • El Muneco in reply to Art Deco says:

              You agree with me! I’m touched. The McDLT was introduced in 1984.

              As a shibboleth, abortion dates to the mid-80s. As you note, it was a matter of individual conscience since about 5000 years before the scriptures that would be collected into a Bible were collected.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to El Muneco says:

                And prior to the mid 19th century, the Catholic Church permitted abortion up until the time of “quickening”, around the 2nd trimester.

                Its like Chesterton’s Amnesia, the willful forgetting that there never was a fence.Report

              • Art Deco in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                No it did not. The theological discussion differed some prior to the advent of modern embryology, but abortion has always been seen as a grave sin.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Art Deco says:

                But not murder.

                The Church is desperately trying to throw the wool of historical amnesia over history, retroactively constructing a consistent position.

                Ensoulment was never a part of the prohibition, instead it was coupled with the proscription against unauthorized sex outside of procreation.

                Which, ironically, is exactly what the modern critics allege, that the desire to ban abortion is part of a larger drive to regulate unauthorized sex, chiefly by women. Defending life is the fig leaf justification.Report

              • Art Deco in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                You can consult the Catholic Encyclopaedia if you care to. The older edition is online. The oecumenical councils of late antiquity prescribed harsh penalties for anyone guilty of abortion.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Art Deco says:

                Does it explain why?
                How was it enforced?Report

              • Brandon Berg in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                drive to regulate unauthorized sex, chiefly by women.

                So…they mostly want to regulate lesbian sex?Report

              • Art Deco in reply to El Muneco says:

                I don’t agree with you, as anyone with ordinary reading comprehension can see. The notion that it ‘was a matter of individual conscience’ for ‘5000 years’ has no reality outside your imagination (as anyone who consulted the statutory law in effect in 1966 could see).

                As for the issue being a ‘shibboleth’, I was aware that liberals had no understanding of or interest in anyone else’s concerns without another demonstration from you.Report

              • El Muneco in reply to Art Deco says:

                I gotta give you full credit, you sure know how to nail the flounce.Report

            • DavidTC in reply to Art Deco says:

              ever since the issue was bruited about ca. 1962. Regarding evangelicals, opposition to it has been adhered to since conservative evangelicals began to organize in a systematic way (around about 1979).

              You’ve fallen a bit for rewritten history. (Don’t worry, they’re really good at rewriting it.)

              Evangelicals organized politically slightly before that. It’s just they had organized around a goal that few others supported, so they latched onto abortion as a way to get somewhere. And then later, their original goal was so unpalatable they just sorta rewrote history to make it always about abortion.

              Evangelicals had organized on the basis of *pro-segregation*, demanding the right to run tax-exempt private segregated schools. (Which had popped up after public school integration.) But we’re all supposed to forget about that, because now it was always abortion.

              But it wasn’t that before 1979 they merely hadn’t *organized* about about abortion. It was that, pre-1979, they *had no position* about about abortion, or had a much less harsh one.

              Here is the Southern Baptist Convention *praising* Roe v. Wade:
              https://blogs.thegospelcoalition.org/trevinwax/2010/05/06/baptist-press-initial-reporting-on-roe-v-wade/

              Question: What is the Southern Baptist position on abortion?
              Answer: There is no official Southern Baptist position on abortion, or any other such question. Among 12 million Southern Baptists, there are probably 12 million different opinions.

              Granted, assuming the SBC is ‘evanglical’ is not entirely correct, but going into what exactly ‘evanglical’ is somewhat difficult to do here, and you can find the same sort of quotes in Christianity Today (the standard bearers of ‘evanglical’) in the mid-70s also. In fact, being anti-abortion was seen as being a bit…Catholic, and thus suspicious.(1)

              The actual *religious position* on abortion for evangelicals changed *really quickly*, pretty much entirely for political purposes, in 1979 or so.

              1) Which, incidentally, was how being anti-*birth control* was seen when I was growing up! I went to a ‘moderate’ Baptist Church (You could tell we were moderates because we gave some money to the SBC, and some to the CBF.), and in my youth group in the mid-90s, as people got older, there was sorta the expectation that a) people would be using birth control once married until they were ready to support kids, and b) never quite as bluntly stated, but hinted that, if you were *going* to have sex before marriage (Which you shouldn’t), you should probably use birth control. (In the same way that if you were going to drink underaged, don’t drive.)

              Now, apparently, all *that’s* been rewritten, and birth control is now a sin itself. Which, when I was a teen, was a position that Baptists *flatly rejected* as Catholic nonsense. We even specifically talked about the Bible verse that Catholics based that on, with the conclusion being ‘The sin was disobeying God, and to conclude that ‘spilling your seed on the ground’ is a sin generally is like taking the story of Jonah and concluding it is a sin to travel anywhere but Nineveh’.Report

              • Art Deco in reply to DavidTC says:

                You’ve fallen a bit for rewritten history. (Don’t worry, they’re really good at rewriting it.)

                I actually lived through that period and read the newspapers.

                Evangelicals organized politically slightly before that. It’s just they had organized around a goal that few others supported, so they latched onto abortion as a way to get somewhere.

                The mixture of stupidity and projection in this sentence is an amazement. Jerry Falwell wasn’t some Hollywood agent on the make. He and his confederates already had large institutional responsibilities – congregations to run, schools to run, businesses to run. They were organizing and giving voice to their own discontents. I realize liberals cannot process the opposition of others, but you might make minimal effort now and again.

                It’s a minor point, but you’re wrong about the chronology. All the notable supralocal organizations were founded within a few months of each other in 1978 and 1979. There was another circle of organizations around Richard Viguerie which appeared 2-5 years earlier, but they had less sectarian concerns. Fallwell et al upstaged them.

                Evangelicals had organized on the basis of *pro-segregation*, demanding the right to run tax-exempt private segregated schools. (Which had popped up after public school integration.) But we’re all supposed to forget about that, because now it was always abortion.

                The parties in the disputes regarding those academies were the academies themselves, not supralocal bodies.

                Falwell and others had complaints about IRS rulings as well, though Falwell in particular was not invested in the issue re segragated academies. Neither Falwell’s nor Robertson’s institutions were segregated.

                Question: What is the Southern Baptist position on abortion?
                Answer: There is no official Southern Baptist position on abortion, or any other such question. Among 12 million Southern Baptists, there are probably 12 million different opinions.

                It’s a non-creedal denomination and the intramural disputes within the denomination at the time concerned modes of biblical interpretation. The ecclesiology of the SBC is quite different from that of the Catholic Church. That is relevant just how? (While we’re at it, Falwell was affiliated with the Baptist Bible Fellowship, not the Southern Baptist Convention). Pat Robertson was ordained by the SBC but was a free-wheeling devotee of charismatic practices most fundamentalists abhor. Tim LaHaye’s denominational affiliation is unclear; his old congregation admits to no denomination and the schools he attended are not associated with SBC).Report

              • DavidTC in reply to Art Deco says:

                It’s a minor point, but you’re wrong about the chronology.

                My claim: Evangelicals organized slightly before 1979 based on segregated schools, but that goal did not actually get traction. That didn’t happen until evangelicals started talking about abortion in 1979.

                Your claim: Evangelicals organized 2-5 years before 1979, but had less ‘sectarian concerns’. The latter, abortion-issue groups upstaged them in 1979.

                Everything you just said in that paragraph was correct. It is also everything *I* just said, except you notable refrained from noting these ‘less sectarian concerns’ (Whatever that means.) were, in fact, segregated private religious schools.

                Falwell and others had complaints about IRS rulings as well, though Falwell in particular was not invested in the issue re segragated academies. Neither Falwell’s nor Robertson’s institutions were segregated.

                …uh, okay? I don’t know why you think I said anything otherwise. I didn’t even mention those people, much less talk about why *they* entered politics. They were not the first evangelicals in politics.

                It’s a non-creedal denomination and the intramural disputes within the denomination at the time concerned modes of biblical interpretation.

                If you actually want to get into the *weeds* of what ‘evangalical’ actually means, we can do that…but I’d really rather not.

                As I said, while the SBC is not a particular good example of ‘evanglical’ (But they are a good example of the rapid change), there are plenty of gatekeepers of evangalical, like Christanity Today, and *they were not opposing abortion before 1979*.

                There was not only not any sort of consensus, the consensus was *the other way around*, that abortion was perfectly fine. You can find articles they published citing Bible verses about how it was fine, or about how it was fine before the quickening. (Along with a hearty dose of ‘You have fallen for bad Catholic theology if you think otherwise.’)

                And then, within about two years, not only was it not fine, but *saying* it was fine would get you drummed out of evanglical circles.

                The ecclesiology of the SBC is quite different from that of the Catholic Church.

                I don’t know how the Catholics got into the post, but you are aware I am talking about evangelicals, right? I haven’t said *anything* about Catholic opposition to abortion. I don’t dispute that they’ve always opposed it.Report

              • Art Deco in reply to DavidTC says:

                My claim: Evangelicals organized slightly before 1979 based on segregated schools, but that goal did not actually get traction. That didn’t happen until evangelicals started talking about abortion in 1979.

                I realize that ‘evangelicals’ are a big blob of people you don’t like in your mind. Out here, people have particular interests that are not shared by or advanced by others in the same category.

                Your claim: Evangelicals organized 2-5 years before 1979, but had less ‘sectarian concerns’. The latter, abortion-issue groups upstaged them in 1979.

                That was not my claim. My claim was that Falwell, LaHaye &c upstaged a crew of people who had organized earlier and had a more variegated program. I am not aware that any of them were evangelicals (Paul Weyrich was an Eastern-rite Catholic, Terry Dolan was a roue, and no clue about the others).Report

              • DavidTC in reply to Art Deco says:

                @art-deco
                I realize that ‘evangelicals’ are a big blob of people you don’t like in your mind. Out here, people have particular interests that are not shared by or advanced by others in the same category.

                I have no problems with evangelicals at all. I have a bit of a problem with the self-appointed current *gatekeepers* of evangalicism, but that’s any entirely different religious discussion that we’re not having.

                That was not my claim. My claim was that Falwell, LaHaye &c upstaged a crew of people who had organized earlier and had a more variegated program. I am not aware that any of them were evangelicals (Paul Weyrich was an Eastern-rite Catholic, Terry Dolan was a roue, and no clue about the others).

                LOL. You appear to not have realized I was trying to make evangelicals look *better* than actual history. But you caught me.

                The pre-1979 attempts at religious political groups were indeed *not* evangelical (Although they often *targeted* them) pre-1979. Mostly the Christian Voice. They were concerning themselves mostly with pornography and school prayer and other silliness.

                But, uh…that’s sorta the opposite of making the evangelicals look good. As you have now revealed, the evangelical leaders started showing up for politics solely for *Green v. Connally*, where things actually took off. Jerry Fawell, James Dobson, they showed up *because of non-profit status of segregated schools*….claiming the evangelicals weren’t involved before that doesn’t make them look *better*!

                “In some states it’s easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school.” -Jerry Fawell.

                But, hell, let’s me quote Weyrich: “I was trying to get those people interested in those issues [aka, the pornography and school prayer I mentioned earlier] and I utterly failed. What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.”

                It’s pretty funny you’re accusing me of trying to make evangelical look bad. I was trying to be nice! Your version of history, where evangelicals weren’t involved *at all* in the stuff happening pre-1979, makes them look even worse! I was just trying to imply they started institutes for more noble purposes, but sorta used segregation to get votes until they rewrote the current beliefs about abortion…and you ruined that by pointing out evangelical leaders actually just straight up started those institutions about segregation, and the previous stuff wasn’t evangelical at all! (Except, as I said, a lot of the *supporters* were.)

                Well, you sure showed me.

                Meanwhile, my point about this pro-segregation platform not actually being palatable for the American public in 1979, and thus the deliberate campaign that started at that point to alter to religious beliefs about abortion so they could use that *instead*, which worked *incredibly quickly*, still stands.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to DavidTC says:

                Purely with regards 1).

                In what way has the SBC defined contraception as a sin? I’m not Protestant, but whenever I talk to conservative (theologically) Protestants, there is no sense of this. Overwhelmingly my experience has been that they take two points:
                1) Contraception must be viewed within the entirety of the Marriage… that is, the Marriage ought to be open to children, but at any given moment based solely upon personal discernment, (artificial) birth control is permitted.
                2) The method of artificial birth control must not be an abortifacient.

                Here’s a link to SBC’s Albert Mohler’s updated 2012 article on Birth control

                I recognize that I’m not fully to speed on all the factions of Protestantism/Evangelicalism, but you mention the SBC specifically, so I’m wondering whence the hyperbole?

                This is, incidentally, a facsimile of the Orthodox position.

                That’s certainly not the Catholic position (the one I personally adhere to), and Mohler critiques my position as non-biblical, philosophically imprudent, and a little silly; So, I’m a little at a loss at how this is being spun into some sort of total war on Contraception? By Protestants?

                I’ve certainly heard of Protestants who embrace an..exuberant…openness to children; but then I’ve also heard of Protestants who embrace celibacy… neither the former nor the latter makes the other way a sin.

                I assume this is a result of the Hobby Lobby case and the increasing factionalization of America. The fact that they permit artificial birth control but suggest scrutiny as to means which might limit some options, and ends which might limit some life choices, is now simply intolerable?

                As far as I can tell, the SBC position today is fundamentally the position you said was the case in your youth. How has it changed?

                p.s. I rewatched this teaching video, and as far as I can tell it is still factually correct from an SBC perspective.Report

              • The method of artificial birth control must not be an abortifacient.

                With abortifacient defined as “It cannot be logically disproven that this reduces the probability of the implantation of a zygote. If the same standard were applied to foods, it would result in starvation.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Mike Schilling says:

                Well, no… and this is the source of my confusion on this topic. While I may be accused of starving, Protestants and specifically Hobby Lobby cannot.

                The Supreme Court decision in the Hobby Lobby case doesn’t currently affect the birth control methods that are most commonly used. But Planned Parenthood Federation of America spokeswoman Justine Sessions says the decision “opens the door for other corporations to be able to opt out of providing any form of birth control.”

                It doesn’t affect:
                • Most birth control pills
                • Condoms
                • Sponges
                • Sterilization

                It does affect:
                • Plan B “morning-after pill”
                • Ella “morning-after pill”
                • Hormonal and copper intrauterine devices (IUDs)

                Guttmacher puts IUD and PlanB at approximately 10.5% of all contraceptive users. I assume that’s a fair source for this type of information?

                I’m not really interested in re-litigating HL… but as I note above I’m a little mystified by how Protestant contraceptive users are being othered so effectively.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to Marchmaine says:

                2) The method of artificial birth control must not be an abortifacient.

                That, right there.

                That’s the new thing, the invented wedge that pulls non-Catholics in.

                I spent *years* sitting in Baptist Sunday schools, and never heard that idea *at all*. No one believed that was how birth control worked.

                And as far as I know, the SBC has stayed silent on that, and I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. My point was this thinking has *now* infected protestants, especially ‘religious’ voters, when not only was it not true when I was attending a Baptist church (which was probably *more* conservative than most of the churches they attended…we had a vote a decade ago if *women* should be deacons…although admittedly we voted yes.), but being anti-contraceptive was something my church flatly *rejected* as being Catholic silliness.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to DavidTC says:

                Thank you I appreciate the perspective; it does seem there was some revisiting of the practice in the late 70s. It still leaves me confused as to why the current fights aren’t seen as arguments over prudence/practice but instead seem elevated to existential denial, which just doesn’t fit the actual practice nor the limitation thereof.

                Your use of the term, “wedge issue” (by whom and to what end?), is curious to me, but not something I’ve much interest in pursuing here in this form. Perhaps over a pint somewhere someday.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to Marchmaine says:

                Thank you I appreciate the perspective; it does seem there was some revisiting of the practice in the late 70s.

                People often think mixing politics and religion just changes politics.

                It has actually caused *massive* changes in Christian protestant beliefs, which have been hijacked by the right in many, many ways. (And also Catholic beliefs, or at least *American* Catholic beliefs, which is why the Pope sometimes slaps American bishops down.)

                The thing is, and I know this sounds bad, but most Christians really have no idea of what they are ‘supposed’ to believe. They don’t really know what their denomination says, they don’t really know what the Bible says, they have spent very little time themselves trying to figure this out…

                They basically just go with whatever vague memory of any sort of Christian authority figure said last, plus some cliff note version of what their denomination split over. (Baptist answer ‘Baptism by immersion!’)

                And it gets even worse in ‘sola scriptura’ denominations. Sola scriptura, as I have mentioned before here, is a Christian term actually meaning ‘We have as many just as much specific beliefs and interpretations of the Bible as any church, but we *refuse to write them down*.’. (And then, in the case of Baptists, ‘Also stop calling us a denomination’.)

                Please note I’m not intending to insult Christians. I *am* a Christian. But the fact is, quite a lot of them…if you start printing in Christian magazines that they read that abortion is considered killing babies by God, they will believe it, pretty quickly.

                If you print that contraceptives are the same thing, same thing happens…and that’s already started happening, believe me.

                And if you print the opposite, within a decade, the opposite belief will be mainstream. (Not quite as fast, there’s a lot of inertia to overcome.)Report

          • DavidTC in reply to El Muneco says:

            @chip-daniels
            And let’s not forget, the NRA’s absolutist position against any sort of gun regulation at all is from the mid 70s. *And* the NRA essentially created that as a political issue, in the 90s or so.

            You go ask someone in the 60s or earlier about opposing gun control, unless they were within the specific sportsman and hunter community, they’ll look at you blankly and ask what specific gun control you’re talking about…but probably, yeah, gun control sounds like a good idea. And even the sportsman and hunter community was pretty divided…the NRA was a big part of that community, and in *favor* of the Gun Control Act of 1968.

            Note *even the people that opposed that law* didn’t argue there was any sort of *right* to own guns. They simply said it would damage the community, while not doing anything about crime.

            Then, due to the NRA’s support of that bill, absolutists managed to take it over in the 70s, and they started making it an issue *not just for hunters*, and explicitly tying it to the right. I’m not quite sure when they started presenting gun ownership as a constitutional right, but I think that didn’t happen until the late 80s, as part of their lawsuits against the Brady Bill.

            A lot of ‘conservative’ positions are a *hell* of a lot more recent than people think.Report

            • Chip Daniels in reply to DavidTC says:

              In the same vein, outright bans on guns were a common feature in the “wild” west.

              Its not commonly discussed on the right that Wyatt Earp became famous when the Clanton gang dared him to “come and take it”, and he did just that.Report

  14. Chip Daniels says:

    I wrote variations of Tod’s post, back around 2004 when I was slipping away from the GOP.

    What I’ve had to come to grips with is that “conservative” in the modern GOP base is nothing at all conservative, in any coherent fashion.

    This has been pointed out in a myriad of ways, from the intrusiveness of anti-abortion laws to the massive Department of Ethnic Cleansing under Trump, to the demand for Christian madrassas, to the reflexive righthand salute to any and every new military program or war.

    The GOP base doesn’t want small government, they want what people are calling Herrenvolk authoritarianism, an ethnic tribal based system of mixed markets and government supervision.

    As Saul Alinsky noted, you have to work with the terrain as it is, not as you wish it to be.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels says:

      As Saul Alinsky noted, you have to work with the terrain as it is, not as you wish it to be.

      When I said that I wanted the conservatives to be like the liberals of yesteryear, I didn’t mean *THAT*.Report

      • Chip Daniels in reply to Jaybird says:

        When you wrote this-

        A conservatism whose job it is to lose every battle, but lose it slowly, and with dignity.

        It made me think of that quote from maybe Buckley or someone, who griped that he was tired of conservatism as being merely the “tax collectors for the welfare state”, that is, the Eisenhower-era conservatism that made its peace with the New Deal, just wanted to keep it on the level glide path rather than ramping it up.

        But that’s the problem- if a conservative isn’t comfortable being the cautious brake, but accepting of gradual change, then what is he?

        Wanting wholesale rollback to some earlier state is revanchism, and becomes inherently wedded to a bitterness, a paranoid and fearful outlook.Report

        • Wanting wholesale rollback to some earlier state is revanchism, and becomes inherently wedded to a bitterness, a paranoid and fearful outlook.

          It often seems the “paranoid and fearful outlook” has a lot to do with what’s animating the Republican Party at the rank-and-file level these days. Its leaders are unable to imagine anything else that will make the engine go, other than the fuel of fear. Fear of Muslims. Fear of demographic change. Fear of poverty. Fear of new cultural norms. Fear of losing guns. Fear of receiving moral opprobrium.

          Expose an individual to so much fear for a long time and you risk inducing psychological conditions like post traumatic stress disorder. How does that work on an entire population?Report

          • Chip Daniels in reply to Burt Likko says:

            What would a 21st century small c conservatism look like?

            Well, what if there was a party that viewed America with a loving generous heart, that saw gay couples in committed marriages as part of the ideal community, that saw a mixed economy of private markets matched by efficiently socialized legal and physical infrastructure, where tax revenue and spending were prudently balanced; That viewed America’s place in the world as a brother among peers, rather than the fearsome bully.

            There isn’t anything in that statement that couldn’t be extrapolated from the current GOP, except…the lack of fear and rage.Report

    • InMD in reply to Chip Daniels says:

      I think you’re dead on. The type of blue blood (maybe at this point ‘blue state’ would be better) Republicans these proposals would appeal to haven’t left the party. The party is in the process of leaving them. It probably has been for at least a decade. Trump has just made it impossible to ignore.Report

      • Art Deco in reply to InMD says:

        I have news for you. The type you refer to decamped to the Democratic Party 30-odd years ago. A scatter of politicians who made their career in the Republican Party and calculated they would have been injured by attempting to run in the other party remained as a vestigial set for about 25 years, the last one retiring from the House in 2007.Report

  15. Joe Sal says:

    I am not really sure who this #NeverTrumpers audience is, or what portion of the conservative faction it represents. On the grounds around I see the conservative base pretty pissed at the policies that Obama deployed. Are both Todd and Will in the north west?Report

    • Burt Likko in reply to Joe Sal says:

      Examples?

      Are we talking Obamacare?

      Are transgender high school students in bathrooms of their own choosing really that important?

      Obama didn’t enact same-sex marriage. SCOTUS did that — after a number of states did it on their own, either judicially or democratically.

      Particularly in the Mountain West, how has Obama’s stewardship of BLM lands been materially different than Bush’s, or Clinton’s before him, or Bush’s before him?

      Are we talking immigration? Obama has been more aggressive on interdiction than Bush before him. And equally as forceful and effective in getting reform passed through Congress (which is to say, not at all).

      So I’m a bit at a loss for what non-Obamacare policy might be at play because I see more continuity than change over the past sixteen years — indeed, over the past twenty-four years if the ground wars in Asia are left out of the equation.Report

      • Joe Sal in reply to Burt Likko says:

        Well, ACA is a biggy, as the fines are arriving.
        O’s push for more refugees. Who are these foreigners camped on stateside military bases again, did Bush do that?

        The notion/policy consideration to greatly increase taxes on oil.
        (geebus at the hispanic minorities oilfielders busting my eardrums to vote Republican or the sky will fall)

        Remember way back along time ago when the BLM feds and local law enforcement didn’t kill a reported militia guy on the side of the road. Remember way back when the BLM didn’t look like hired mercs?

        Dammit at the propping up of those alt energy clusterfish companies.

        Who was the IRS targeting again?

        just general rumblings ya knowReport

      • El Muneco in reply to Burt Likko says:

        I’ve repeatedly seen that there is majority support for “A healthcare program that would do X”, while if the pollsters ask what people think about “The ACA/Obamacare program that does X”, enough conservatives freak out to drag the numbers under 50%. Same program. Same people.

        It was originally a Republican plan, after all…Report

    • Saul Degraw in reply to Joe Sal says:

      @joe-sal

      #NeverTrumpers seem to be the conservative ideological policy elite who are dismayed that Trump walked in from nowhere and managed to pretty easily win the GOP nomination. They range from neo-cons like Bill Kristol to establishment figures like Bush I, Bush II, and Nikki Haley. There are also some firebrands like Erik son of Erick that were quite trolling themselves who are dismayed at Trump.

      In my (liberal and partisan view), there is a mix of sincerity, I think that Ryan and some neo-cons truly believe that their policies are best for all Americans and are generally not prejudiced or bigoted. I haven’t paid much attention to his campaigns but Ryan generally strikes me as a guy who does not dog-whistle and would probably prefer avoid talking about social issues. I don’t think he is liberal but he is non-evangelical in his social conservatism.

      Others are pretty rich. Eric Erickson made a career out of inflammatory rhetoric and now he is going all against Trump.

      The big divide seems to be over gutting Social Security and Medicare. The GOP ideological-elite are shocked to discover that this is not popular and maybe their base is not made up of small-government wanters.Report

  16. trizzlor says:

    This is all well and good, but the real issue is that Republicans have had nothing to show their voters. Hate it or love it, Obama’s main accomplishments were a massive expansion of health insurance to his constituents and the end of major combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s something you can put on a GOTV postcard. Bush’s main accomplishments were were a temporary tax cut and a disastrous war. The subsequent McCain/Romney agenda was simply to undo what Obama did. At some point, you cannot continue to run on the fumes of “tax cuts will stimulate growth”, you have to actually show that you got something done. And when you can’t, your people are going to start demanding a gleaming wall.Report

    • Don Zeko in reply to trizzlor says:

      What did (Bill) Clinton do for frustrated liberals? Passed NAFTA and welfare reform, failed to pass healthcare reform, signed a compromise budget and crime bill, etc.. Then Bush took over, and elected democrats compromised; they voted for the Iraq War, they voted for Bush’s tax cuts, they voted to confirm John Roberts and Samuel Alito. So why did Democrats react to that frustration by nominating BHO, but Conservatives reacted to their time in the wilderness by nominating Donald Trump?Report

      • Joe Sal in reply to Don Zeko says:

        “by nominating Donald Trump?”
        I think trizzlor answered this in his first sentence. The moderate republican operation has/had nothing to show their voters.Report

        • Don Zeko in reply to Joe Sal says:

          Well that’s what I’m trying to get at. One could make an argument (which I think would be badly flawed, but whatever) in 2008 that the Democratic party had badly failed their voters since the 60’s. After all, Carter’s presidency was a bust, then they sat through 12 years of Ronald Reagan, then Clinton spent 8 years (from the POV of a liberal) compromising with Republicans, then Dem congresscritters compromised with Bush and put their names on his wars and his tax cuts and his Supreme Court justices. And so after all of those perceived betrayals and failures to produce anything worthwhile for them, liberal voters suddenly had a chance to nominate a President who would likely come into office with big congressional majorities. There’s a similarity there to the position of GOP voters this year, right?

          But unlike today’s Republicans, Dems in 2008 nominated Barack Obama: a young black and charismatic candidate, but also a more or less mainstream Democrat who behaved more or less how major party Presidential nominees behave. If time in the wilderness and frustration with a party that the base thinks doesn’t produce for them produces a guy like Trump, why didn’t it happen in 2008?Report

          • Art Deco in reply to Don Zeko says:

            Well that’s what I’m trying to get at. One could make an argument (which I think would be badly flawed, but whatever) in 2008 that the Democratic party had badly failed their voters since the 60’s. After all, Carter’s presidency was a bust, then they sat through 12 years of Ronald Reagan, then Clinton spent 8 years (from the POV of a liberal) compromising with Republicans, then Dem congresscritters compromised with Bush and put their names on his wars and his tax cuts and his Supreme Court justices.

            Clinton faced a Republican Congress. And, again, the Democratic caucus did not support either his tax cuts or Mr. Justice Alito. It does not surprise me that partisan Democrats lie to themselves. What’s their excuse?Report

            • Don Zeko in reply to Art Deco says:

              To review, the Tea party thought Boehner was a traitor because he didn’t default on the US national debt in order to force Obama to do things Obama didn’t want to do. Nearly half of the Democratic caucus in the Senate voted for the Bush tax cuts, and nearly 2/3 of that caucus voted for the AUMF, but those Senators were accepted back into the party and one of them is about to be the Democratic Presidential nominee. What do you figure would be the equivalent on the R side, Art? I would ask you to imagine a GOP Senator that voted for Obamacare being nominated, but first I would have to ask you to imagine a GOP senator voting for Obamacare.Report

              • Art Deco in reply to Don Zeko says:

                No, only about nine Senate Democrats voted for the conference report and about 13 House Democrats (in the Senate: Baucus, Breaux, Carnahan, Cleland, Feinstein, Johnson, Kohl, Lincoln, Miller, Nelson, Toricelli). You don’t seem to recall that the functional pacifism and the reflexive hostility to the military (along with the usual myth-memes) which later characterized the mode of intramural Democratic Party culture was not in full flower in 2003.

                As for Boehner, recall Sidney Blumenthal’s description: “louche, alcoholic, lazy, and without any commitment to any principle”. He starts out with a substrate of disrespect to which was added a loss of trust due to all the fan dancing of the Capitol Hill insiders over immigration policy. Its a reasonable inference that Boehner was in the position because he had more seniority than all but a scatter of House Republicans and because he has some mastery of parliamentary procedures and some skills re the satisfaction of various parties re the distribution of bon bons. Newt Gingrich is the only idea man who has led the House Republican caucus in the last 50 years. Well Boehner’s skills were not enough in the end, and, in any case, he was vested for his pension.Report

              • Don Zeko in reply to Art Deco says:

                And the missing of the point continues….Report

          • Art Deco in reply to Don Zeko says:

            But unlike today’s Republicans, Dems in 2008 nominated Barack Obama: a young black and charismatic candidate, but also a more or less mainstream Democrat who behaved more or less how major party Presidential nominees behave.

            It’s misuse of the term ‘charismatic’ to apply it to politicians who put together some applause lines. A more precise description of BO is that he’s a summary of the vectors at work in the Democratic Party and adds little of his own. However nominees behave, BO’s behavior as a member of Congress was odd. You’d be hard put to find a consequential presidential candidate with so little preparation for the office or personal accomplishment. The Republicans replied with Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, but even they compare favorably to BO (Rubio was speaker of the lower house of the Florida legislature and Cruz comes out of the elite bar).Report

            • Don Zeko in reply to Art Deco says:

              Thank you so much for ignoring the core point of my comment in order to remind me that you hate Democrats in general and Barack Obama in particular.Report

              • Art Deco in reply to Don Zeko says:

                Your point seems to be that Democrats have a subjective feeling of frustration, ergo nominate BO. I’m pointing out it’s almost purely subjective, not rooted in what actually happened prior to 2006.

                I find BO vaguely disgusting and would like to see him inconvenienced and vexed after he leaves office. He’s not worth hating.

                I’d be more congenial re partisan Democrats if they’d stop lying and striking attitudes even for five minutes.Report

              • Don Zeko in reply to Art Deco says:

                My point was that I don’t think Joe’s explanation for Trump, that R’s are frustrated with their existing political standard bearers, holds up. At minimum, I don’t think it’s anywhere near the whole explanation, because their frustration at failing to pass very ambitious reforms in a Madisonian system aren’t anything new. The Democrats had similar perceived cause for frustration prior to 2008 but did not nominate a candidate anywhere near as abnormal as Trump.

                Your nitpicking and special pleading to the effect that none of the reasons a Democrat might be frustrated with her party in 2008 exist are wrong, but they’re also irrelevant, because I’m making an argument about why different groups of partisans at different times behave in different ways. For the purposes of understanding that behavior, there’s no need to determine whether a perceived truth is an actual truth, merely to note that it is part of how the person making the decision perceives the world.Report

            • Kim in reply to Art Deco says:

              Cruz comes out of the elite bar?
              Being a personal injury lawyer somehow compares favorably to “being a community organizer?”Report

          • Joe Sal in reply to Don Zeko says:

            Well from the cheap seats, in 2008 Bush really was disliked and McCain appeared more of the same. Obama is a very good speaker, and at the time could talk of a bright future of ‘change’ that could be different than the status quo.

            The change quickly turned into a problem. It wasn’t the change that was expected. This created some polarization in the first term, the second term, well, it went far enough out of the comfort zone to weaponize authority. Tons of condescension was turned to fuel.

            “There’s a similarity there to the position of GOP voters this year, right?”
            I think you nailed it here. Just modify the idea that Trump represents ‘hope and change’ in the opposite direction.Report

            • trizzlor in reply to Joe Sal says:

              This is also a good point. It’s possible that Democrats just got lucky with their change agent. Had they elected Edwards in 2008, we might be talking about The Broken Donkey and the re-election of the first Hispanic Republican. But the critical point is that Obama’s term has not yielded the kind of structural problems that the Republicans have, which is why the Democrats don’t have to run a risky change-agent this time around. It will be interesting to see if Clinton will fall into the same trap W did.Report

          • Kim in reply to Don Zeko says:

            Teaparty deliberately designed to bleed off frustration and coopt the crazies.Report

      • Art Deco in reply to Don Zeko says:

        Congress passed welfare reform. Clinton signed it because Dick Morris had more persuasive arguments than Marian Wright Edelman.Report

      • Art Deco in reply to Don Zeko says:

        About 20 Democrats in Congress voted for GW Bush’s tax cut bill. About 4 voted to confirm Samuel Alito.Report

        • Don Zeko in reply to Art Deco says:

          Art, I’m trying to describe the perceptions of a stalwart liberal here in order to make a broad comparison. Also, since the comparison is between the Dems in 2008 and the GOP today, that level of cooperation with the other party would be seen as a massive, historic betrayal if it came from the Tea Party Era GOP.Report

          • Art Deco in reply to Don Zeko says:

            Two of your four examples are dead wrong. As for the other two, the Democratic caucus was split.

            You have ready analogues from the last 4 years. One third of the Senate Republican caucus cast a ballot in favor of upChuck Schumer’s amnesty program.

            You were not going to get the type of co-operation with BO that you get with Bush because the background and attitudes of the two men are quite different. Bush is a businessman, he negotiates readily, and he was never inclined to be confrontational on domestic questions. His signature initiatives consisted of one GOP staple (a tax cut), a prescription drug plan via Medicare, and an update to federal aid to education. BO has no background in business and not much in banal law practice. BO regards the opposition with contempt and does not bother much with negotiation. He’s oriented toward public relations, not policy.Report

      • trizzlor in reply to Don Zeko says:

        Clinton presided over prosperity that the Democrats could then point to as an indicator of their success. Bush didn’t. It was, and continues to be very easy to sell Democrats on “Clinton-era [FILL IN THE BLANK]”. Then Obama secured the ACA: another feather in their quiver of constituent services that will be paying dividends for several elections. In contrast, the Republicans have to reach all the way to Reagan for policy victories, and those victories hardly resonate anymore (“he got us out of the Carter malaise”, “he defeated the USSR”). Absent recent accomplishments, the GOP needed to offer a gleaming future, and if you look at it from that perspective you can see how weak Jeb, Walker, Perry, Rubio, and Cruz really are.Report

        • Don Zeko in reply to trizzlor says:

          I think you’re quite right to point to the general peace and prosperity that Clinton presided over, but I’m interested in the 2008 campaign, so Obama’s various liberal accomplishments are outside the scope of the question. They do run into another question that I think is quite interesting: why are so many Liberals dissatisfied with Obama’s accomplishments?Report

  17. Saul Degraw says:

    Some questions for you Tod:

    1. Why do you think these six steps are massively difficult?

    2. Why do you think the GOP will not want to take these steps? Are you willing to concede that many GOP supporters like things the way they are?

    3. What do you think it will take for the GOP to moderate?

    4. How do you deal with contentious social issues like LGBT-rights? Legislation like HB2 seems more like massive resistance to social change than anything else. What is your small and slow incrementalism to expand LGBT rights? What is the slowest pace that should be acceptable for LGBT people?Report

  18. nevermoor says:

    I genuinely fear any long-term future without a stable and disciplined conservative party to anchor the nation.

    I think this, from my perch as an unrepentant tax-and-spend redistributionist liberal, is the most important line. And it’s a feeling that I have all too often (not least because I follow San Francisco’s politics, where we thoroughly lack any view anywhere near this category).

    If I’m trying to think through why I believe such a party is important, I think the reason is that it ought to keep liberal policy grounded. Single-payer is a good example of this. I have strong philosophical support for a one-page law that amends the age at which US Citizens qualify for Medicare to 0 years old. I think it would be an ultimately-great development that would trigger a ton of necessary reform throughout lots of American life (no medical bankruptcies, access to healthcare, no more price-gouging from providers, massive negotiation efficiency, space for those who want additional care to pay for it, etc.). I also think it puts the straightforward job of processing/reimbursing claims in the right place (Government is good at efficiently doing clerical work, and has strong enforcement powers, private insurance will seek profits both by denying valid claims and generally larding up overhead). That said, it would be an undeniably radical change in nearly everyone’s life, and would drastically increase the amount of tax revenue our country would require. A small-c conservative party would be a good partner in making sure that I don’t get the policy I want until and unless it satisfies skeptical members that it would actually work, and actually be an improvement.

    I think the biggest lesson from that text wall is that I want my opposition party to be reality-based. I want them to be able to admit that the world is getting rapidly hotter and to help me solve the problem in a way that can get broad support. I don’t want a party that pretends any step towards solving the problem will be immediately-disastrous (even though every step before has survived equally overblown concerns) or that says global warming is fake because it snows in the winter. I want a party that can discuss economic policy honestly, rather than pretending tax cuts amounting to $5.7T will somehow be revenue-neutral.[1]

    I think @jaybird ‘s point about wanting an opposition that will lose, but slowly and with dignity, is the best critique to all of this, because it’s true. Obviously I want an opposition party to lose. If I didn’t, I would support that party. But I don’t think that’s all I want. For example, I completely understand why elements of the conservative platform win. The second amendment says what it says, so gun restrictions are difficult. Abortion is a tough issue that reasonable people can (easily) disagree on. Capitol punishment too. I just wish the opposition wasn’t fighting on benghazi-investigation-#218 or into the 73rd-dimension of Obama-is-a-secret-Kenyan chess.

    [1] My desire for engagement with facts is, of course, one of the reasons I can’t support Bernie. His policies require equally (or, in some cases, more) absurd fantasies to pencil out.Report

    • Saul Degraw in reply to nevermoor says:

      @nevermoor

      How would you define the ideological differences between the Scott Weiner faction on the Board of Supervisors and the David Campos/Jane Kim faction?

      I think that you can basically describe the SF Board of Supervisors as being divided between the HRC crowd and the Sanders crowd.Report

      • nevermoor in reply to Saul Degraw says:

        I don’t think it really nationalizes that well.

        HRC’s big pitch is that she can’t control the GOP but she can try to identify narrow opportunities to move forward. Bernie’s big pitch is that our nation should be having a revolution (but clearly isn’t, at least yet).

        In SF there’s no GOP to be incremental with. I don’t know where, for example, Wiener’s towel-requirement for Castro nudists (or the nudity-ban) maps nationally. Similarly, I don’t know how to map the soda-tax debates, which have an entirely different set of objections in SF than in their national version.Report

        • Saul Degraw in reply to nevermoor says:

          @nevermoor

          I suspect that there are not many areas outside of the Bay Area where the nudity ban is an issue. I could be wrong though.

          But I do think when it comes to economic/fiscal issues, SF has a strong split between Clintonian moderation/incrementalism/somewhat pro-business but not rabidly so (Weiner’s famous Medium essay on the laws of supply and demand and SF Housing) vs. further left voices like Peskin.Report

  19. Burt Likko says:

    A basic premise that I see baked into this post is the idea that conservatism represents gradualism, incrementalism, slowing down the pace of change. “Burkean” conservative ideas. I don’t think this is true, in the sense that conservatism has not just been about this, whether in its intellectual golden age when Bill Buckley used National Review to tell the John Birch Society to get lost, or today in the gnashing-of-teeth about the Rise Of Trump, or anytime in between.

    Conservatism, best writ, is about the community. It is about how to best deploy institutions –governmental or not — to strengthen the community. It is about how norms of culture and behavior and morals create and define the community. It is how the community prospers and thrives. “Small government” is code for this: the government does what is necessary to enforce these norms.

    Conservatism is far, far from its best writ state now; few on these pages would disagree. Maybe it’s because cynical leaders have perverted the enforcement of those norms, or maybe it’s because the community has become too diverse and ill-defined to have a consensus of what those norms are, or maybe the norms of the past no longer serve the community well.

    The conservatism of “anti-everything” or of “less of what progressives want, and slower,” isn’t ever going to be anything other than “revanchist,” to use @chip-daniels phrase. What are conservatives for? What do they want (beyond “liberals go away”, itself a form of reactionarism)?

    This is a step left out of the prescription in the OP: forming an affirmative agenda. Ronald Reagan had one: the defeat of the Soviet Union, a robust military, and a governmental budget that could survive indefinitely on a top marginal tax rate of under thirty percent. (Whether that was achievable or not is irrelevant to this point.) I know Donald Trump wants a wall so the Mexicans will go away and he wants to repeal Obamacare and he wants the Muslims to go away too. Is that the agenda of conservatives today?Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Burt Likko says:

      I know Donald Trump wants a wall so the Mexicans will go away and he wants to repeal Obamacare and he wants the Muslims to go away too. Is that the agenda of conservatives today?

      You should probably include some stuff about the trade deficit and bringing the jobs back. Check this out:

      Speaking not far from a Carrier factory, Mr. Trump on Wednesday repeated his pledge to impose a 35% tariff on products the company makes in Mexico. “They’re going to call me and say, ‘Mr. President, Carrier has decided to stay in Indiana,’ ” he told a raucous crowd.

      That’s going to be interpreted as a positive message by a lot of folks.

      An affirmative agenda, even.Report

      • Burt Likko in reply to Jaybird says:

        Protectionism — so be it. Yes, that would be an affirmative agenda.

        Whether it’s a good idea or not, that’s a different story.Report

        • Jaybird in reply to Burt Likko says:

          “Finally. Someone who is going to be protectionist for me, rather than protectionist for the Club for Growth people!”

          Maybe we should have done a better job covering the benefits of Free Trade in public schools.Report

          • Saul Degraw in reply to Jaybird says:

            @jaybird

            Benefits for whom though? Perhaps the Carrier move will result in lower prices for American consumers. But will those lower prices be good enough for the laid off factory workers who are now going to go on Social Security early or see their wages go much lower as the only jobs they can get are as Wal-Mart greeters?

            Carrier was extremely profitable already. Moving overseas might make them more profitable but to whose benefit and to whose expense?

            I think the free trade advocates (who tend to be well-educated professionals with marginal fears of outsourcing and automation) are kind of clueless on this issue even if they are technically correct in many ways. Yes free trade does take the global poor out of poverty. Maybe it results in cheaper consumer goods in the United States. But I think a lot of the free trade advocates expect the factory workers who are dealing with declining wages to just go silently into that good night and take one for the overall cause. Expecting that is kind of naive. Being a white-collar pundits and expecting factory workers to happily go from 25 an hour to 8 an hour because it fits your ideology and world-view is kind of silly.Report

          • Mike Schilling in reply to Jaybird says:

            Free Trade is Kaldor–Hicks efficient, which means that it helps the upper class even more than it hurts the working class.Report

    • Francis in reply to Burt Likko says:

      Discussing the animating principles of one’s political opponents is very dangerous ground. And the Bernie campaign shows that Democrats can be just as mathematically unrealistic as Republicans. That said:

      1. When HW Bush promised no new taxes, then raised taxes, then was defeated, fiscal discipline for the Republican party vanished. conservatives (please everyone stop writing “small-c”, just type it that way) who cared about that issue have gotten kicked to the side. Witness (a) the impact of the W Bush tax cuts, (b) the tax cut promises of the current round of Presidential candidates, including Trump, (c) the financial state of Kansas and Louisiana and (d) Oklahoma just now caving on the Medicaid expansion.

      Fiscal discipline is hard, and boring. The Democrats at the federal level for years have run on campaign promises of great new programs that will make everyone’s life wonderful. I can understand why the Republicans flipped that message and are now promising the exact same government we have now, but with much lower taxes. Both parties are lying on the campaign trail, but since 1980 only one party has persistently tried to enact those fiscally ruinous policies.

      2. The culture wars are a great way to get people riled up. But once riled up, people are a lot harder to settle down. If you parse through the complaints about gay marriage, the principal issue appears to me to be the idea that being gay is acceptable. What really enrages Dreher (to take an extreme example) is that religious organizations can no longer teach that homosexuality is objectively disordered without being called bigots by an ever-growing segment of society that disagrees with that teaching.

      He and many others long for the (mythical) day when straight white men were naturally and comfortably at the top of the social pyramid. Again, I understand the anger at the loss of relative position. But it’s really not a terribly healthy approach to call those who disagree with you your enemies. That makes compromise a lot more difficult.Report

      • Art Deco in reply to Francis says:

        He and many others long for the (mythical) day when straight white men were naturally and comfortably at the top of the social pyramid. Again, I understand the anger at the loss of relative position. But it’s really not a terribly healthy approach to call those who disagree with you your enemies. That makes compromise a lot more difficult.

        1. You don’t get Dreher. With that man, the personal is the political in a the most literal way. He hasn’t gotten over getting the s**t kicked out of him in high school in 1981, or that his sister was a better son to his father than he was.

        2. You have trouble understanding these people because you think the frames you use to sell your point are a description of their actual thinking.Report

        • Francis in reply to Art Deco says:

          I get Dreher just fine. I think his diatribes about the end of the world are actually quite funny. The point is that other people read him, link to him and talk about him.

          As a person who consistently insists on mind-reading the other commenters (just see below for examples), you’re not really in a position to complain when others do it.

          But since I come here seeking enlightenment, please tell me – oh wise one — what it is that troubles social conservatives and the petit bourgeois who make up a solid fraction of Trump’s base? If we are to make America great again, when was the last time that America was so great? And what were the essential elements of that greatness that was lost and need to be regained?

          (According, of course, not to you but to the cultural warriors to whom I was referring.)Report

          • Art Deco in reply to Francis says:

            I have no comment on what Mr. Trump’s voters think. People vote for a candidate for disparate reasons. It’s a reasonable inference that discontent over immigration is the modal reason, but I cannot say.

            Vociferous social conservatives are people I know and have been reading for twenty-odd years. Consider the following phrase, “He and many others long for the (mythical) day when straight white men were naturally and comfortably at the top of the social pyramid.”

            Francis, ordinary human beings do not think this way or talk this way. A subaltern in the dean of students’ office talks this way. A low rent academic talks this way. Gliberals and leftoids playing rhetorical games talk this way.

            Strata of recognition are inherent in human societies and they are implicit in the judgments people make and the actions people take. There are people who are power motivated or narcissistic for whom obtaining this or that is an end in and of itself. If you fancy such people are not operating on your side of the argument, you’re a deluded jackass. (See Stanley Rothman’s research on occupational groups: one of the more power-motivated are journalists; business executives tend to be achievement motivated). However, most people are not primarily self-aggrandizing in this way and some are not self-aggrandizing at all. The hospital supply salesman is not standing outside the Planned Parenthood clinic with a home-made sign because he wants to lord it over post-adolescent sluts. He’s there because he has a horror of what goes on inside those clinics.

            I was involved in a liberal political action committee for a number of years a generation ago. The topic of homosexuality took up almost no space in our heads apart from some glancing references to public health matters. There was too much else to discuss and to do to be all that concerned with boutique causes. How dispositions toward homosexuality came to define the sense of self of liberals and define in-groups and outgroups among a certain sort of bourgeois is an interesting question for the anthropologist. It has both gross manifestations (a physician in Boston fired from his job for reciting some banal facts in an intramural memorandum) and weirdly comical ones (the editor of this site deleting as a ‘slur’ colloquialisms used by lesbians, among others, or going on a silly jag about psychotherapists &c).

            People from my side of the argument are not and have not been fretting over their ‘position’, but over the insistence that the rest of the world adopt the obsessions of the professional class twits who have been so fixated on this subject. There is no need, none at all, to have babble about sexual subcultures imported into school curricula. There is no need, except to please the homosexual population itself, to sic lawyers on merchants and landlords. There is no need to grant any sort of legal recognition to homosexual couplings These issues have been raised by others, democratic deliberation has been denied by others, and yet somehow the whole problem is our drives for power or recognition.

            As for the racial angle, that’s a hoot. The black population is predominantly working class and not thickly populated with financially or socially ambitious people. There aren’t any racial resentments of any degree of prevalence deriving from blacks in management. The continual manufacture of patron-client relationships bothers people (and is wholly contrived). Obnoxious hustlers like Ben Crump bother people. Urban crime bothers people. You have those inane patronage programs not because so-and-so’s social position is threatened, but because, under most circumstances, it really would not be. And it does not do its beneficiaries any good; it just makes the supplicants of people like you. The same deal applies regarding the mestizo population. Ordinary people can see mass immigration and racial preference schemes for what they are: contrived efforts to displace them tinged with petty insults directed at them. The perpetrators are … people like you.

            It’s pretty obscene for someone in a predatory occupation like yours to look at an ordinary man who has been through the wringer of contemporary divorce proceedings (or, more rarely, put in front of a campus star chamber) and babble about ‘being at the top of the social pyramid’. That’s not what’s on his mind.Report

            • Francis in reply to Art Deco says:

              Dear Moderators:

              Is “despicable jackass” within the scope of accepted conversation?

              If so, could I get a sense of what appropriate responses might be?Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Francis says:

                Technically it is an if statement describing a possible you.

                Are you prepared to claim that there are *No* “power motivated” or “narcissistic” people for whom obtaining a given end are operating on your side?

                If yes, then j’accuse. Because right now, its a classic schrodinger’s jackass scenario.

                p.s. new idea for [report] button name.
                p.p.s. I know I’m not helping.Report

              • Will Truman in reply to Marchmaine says:

                It’s in a gray zone, for the most part. A category of things I would rather not see, but defensible. Ultimately, though, we’re disinclined to try to hash our precisely where its proximity is with the line, if the commenter in question refuses has no intention of trying to be on the right side of said line. Otherwise, I think we can let the comment stand with the assumption that it is meant as a more general critique and not directed at Francis in particular.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Will Truman says:

                Yeah, I know. He’s abrasive in an intentional way; he could easily have written the same sentence and said Francis would be a fool… who hasn’t been called a fool here?

                If ever there was a need for a write a good post earn another post commenting policy and technology to support it, it would be in this case.

                [this is just between you and me, right? He can’t see this can he?]Report

              • Burt Likko in reply to Francis says:

                I remind everyone of the “report comment” function. If there is a question, flag the comment.

                @will-truman is reacting to this particular comment below, with my full backing and endorsement. Art needs to indicate whether he will commit to conforming to the norms of our community, or not. We will proceed from there based on his response to that question.

                FTR I was not the editor who redacted Art’s comment yesterday that used a slur, although that action also has my full backing and endorsement.Report

            • Will Truman in reply to Art Deco says:

              Art, this brings us back to the question you never did answer. I had let it go because things had actually seemed to improve and I’d hoped to take that for your answer. Now, you need to answer the question one way or the other:

              Do you have any intention of contributing to the commenting atmosphere that we have expressed a desire to have? If we ask you to, for instance, refrain from talking about sluts and dykes, will you try to do as we ask?

              Yes or no. Then we’ll take it from there.Report

              • Art,

                I have asked, on multiple occasions over a lengthy period of time, your intentions with regard to our commenting policy. You have not given a definitive answer.

                So going forward, all of your comments will be held for moderation. We will, at our leisure, look over the comments and send them through provided that there is nothing objectionable. We will not be passing through comments in the gray zone.

                This restriction will be lifted if you indicate clearly that you will try to participate in accordance with the commenting culture we would like to see. We do understand that nobody is perfect (including us), there are ambiguous cases, and so on. We’re happy to try to hash these things out with folks who are at least trying.

                But we’re not going to try to hash out where precisely the line is with someone who doesn’t recognize the legitimacy of the line, and will not state a willingness to try to stay on the right side of it.

                Feel free to email the gmail accounts of either Burt (burtlikko) or myself (trumwill) if you would like to discuss this further, or want to state your intention to try. You can also contact us here. Otherwise, you can simply tack it on to your next comment. We’re flexible.Report

            • Kazzy in reply to Art Deco says:

              “The black population is predominantly working class and not thickly populated with financially or socially ambitious people.

              Glad you’re showing your true colors, Art. Stay classy.Report

            • He’s there because he has a horror of what goes on inside those clinics.

              Women getting prenatal exams! Being given vitamins!

              Or does he imagine women being prescribed sugar pills as contraceptives, so they’ll come back to have abortions that facilitate highly lucrative fetal parts sales?Report

          • Mike Schilling in reply to Francis says:

            What I find funny about Dreher currently is that his horror of the transgendered has led to him saying quite respectful things about same-sex marriage, which only a year or so ago was the end of the world as we know it.Report

      • El Muneco in reply to Francis says:

        Re: #2 – One of the shining lights on Trump’s recently published shortlist to fill the SC vacancy makes no secret of his wish to re-criminalize homosexuality.

        (Also, his favorite for Secretary of Energy not only denies climate change – that’s de rigueur – he denies that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas)Report

    • DavidTC in reply to Burt Likko says:

      @burt-likko
      A basic premise that I see baked into this post is the idea that conservatism represents gradualism, incrementalism, slowing down the pace of change. “Burkean” conservative ideas. I don’t think this is true, in the sense that conservatism has not just been about this, whether in its intellectual golden age when Bill Buckley used National Review to tell the John Birch Society to get lost, or today in the gnashing-of-teeth about the Rise Of Trump, or anytime in between.

      Yes, I see this idea all the time, and I have no idea what point in time anyone is talking about.

      There are places where the right has *pushed change*, yes, along with the left. There actually does not seem to be any point in time where Democrats wanted 100, and Republicans tried to talk them do to 20 *consistently*. Maybe it happened once or twice, but the inverse is just as likely, and it’s not actually how American politics were structured *ever*.

      Moreover…this is an *unreal* political position.

      As I’ve said before, perhaps there is some sort of magical unicorn conservative that is in favor of change, but slowly. But that description does not appear to describe *any amount of voters*.

      So it’s a political position that a) never actually existed, and b) no one actually holds. Why are we talking about it again?

      This is a step left out of the prescription in the OP: forming an affirmative agenda. Ronald Reagan had one: the defeat of the Soviet Union, a robust military, and a governmental budget that could survive indefinitely on a top marginal tax rate of under thirty percent. (Whether that was achievable or not is irrelevant to this point.) I know Donald Trump wants a wall so the Mexicans will go away and he wants to repeal Obamacare and he wants the Muslims to go away too. Is that the agenda of conservatives today?

      As I said somewhere else, Trump has managed, in a single electoral cycle, to flip three-fourths of the Republican agenda around. Anti-free trade, no problem with higher taxes on the rich, not a single damn about social issues, etc. About the *only* ‘conservative’ position he’s taking is immigration…which is exactly the one the party had started softening on.

      I’m sorry to say, at this, about the only possible conclusions to draw about the Republican base is that they are Authoritarian. They don’t seem to have *any* beliefs. They don’t believe in the three legged stool of conservative, they threw all that out. And *no one ever* believed in the ‘We should change laws cautionously’ position.

      And it actually kinda makes me sad to say that. I’ve spent a lot of time and effort trying to frame various ideas within supposed conservative thought, and it’s a little annoying to realize that no one actually believed any of that anyway.Report

      • Art Deco in reply to DavidTC says:

        And it actually kinda makes me sad to say that. I’ve spent a lot of time and effort trying to frame various ideas within supposed conservative thought, and it’s a little annoying to realize that no one actually believed any of that anyway.

        If it helps you feel better, go with that.Report

    • @burt-likko

      A basic premise that I see baked into this post is the idea that conservatism represents gradualism, incrementalism, slowing down the pace of change. “Burkean” conservative ideas. I don’t think this is true, in the sense that conservatism has not just been about this,

      I think I agree. What Tod seems to be making the case for, in point no. 1, is indeed Burkean conservatism, or some type of conservatism that people who today call themselves “conservative” don’t actually or necessarily agree with. Maybe their “radical” proposals is what they see as “conservative.” In that sense, Tod’s asking them to be what they are not (at least as far as concerns his point no. 1).

      That said, there’s a strong case to be made for a Burkean-style conservatism, but as someone pointed out above, maybe the Dem’s have already enunciated it. (Alas and alack, though! I just can’t sign on to them.)Report

  20. David says:

    j r:
    @Vikram Bath and @pillsy

    The best way to extract a lesson from a series of events in the outside world is to remove yourself from the equation.It doesn’t matter whether I think Trump is a real conservative, it matters whether the voters think so.

    I think this is only true if one is trying to deduce, empirically, what is happening from reality. If one is taking a principles-driven position over what should happen, one is sort of required to hold an idea of “conservative” that is distinct from observed data. That’s what norms are.

    Tod is making a point about what he wishes those who value a certain type of conservatism, among which he includes himself, would try to do as a collective action agenda. Observing what Republican voters do can have a bearing on how realistic it is, but whether Donald Trump is a conservative against those lights is not a polling question, it’s a question about conservative principles (as Tod understands them) and their fit to Trump’s espoused policy positions and public statements/actions.

    To put forward an analogous claim – many/most Americans may believe that this is a “Christian nation” despite the language of the Constitution. Convincing them otherwise may observably be difficult or impossible. However, believing that the Constitution indicates that no religion should be established, and articulating a desire that such a platform be worked towards, is not affected by the percentages who believe one or another thing; it’s a question of what the documents mean. There is no lesson to be learned about what the constitution says based on what most people think it says.

    I suspect a lot of the issues generated by this post are because it is pitched as a call to action, and those it seeks to address view themselves – correctly, by and large, I’d stipulate – as unable to change events on the scale Tod has portrayed. However, the core of “here’s what you should try to do if you care about small-c conservatism” remains a valid point, even if the audience of this site believe themselves powerless to work towards it. And the first step in any collective action effort is to agree on a common goal, even if the initial set of actors are not able to make progress toward it.

    I find it more interesting from most of the comments that it doesn’t seem that most of those who consider themselves conservatives on this site actually agree with the vision of a small-c conservative party, in the sense laid out in the first two paragraphs. There seems to be some agreement with libertarian visions as an initial platform, and some “who are you to criticize our team when you’re not even one of us” responses that reflect more of a Republican Conservative than a conservative position, but relatively few people who agree with the need for a principled conservative party and are invested in the Republican Party being that party.Report

    • j r in reply to David says:

      I think this is only true if one is trying to deduce, empirically, what is happening from reality. If one is taking a principles-driven position over what should happen, one is sort of required to hold an idea of “conservative” that is distinct from observed data. That’s what norms are.

      That’s great, but why quote me as your starting point? I’ve gone out of my way to be clear that I was making a set of positive, not normative, comments.

      I get what Tod’s post it, but making meaningful normative statements starts with a correct understanding of how things are. If you get the how things are part wrong, you are very likely to get the how things ought to be wrong, as well.Report

    • Joe Sal in reply to David says:

      “I find it more interesting from most of the comments that it doesn’t seem that most of those who consider themselves conservatives on this site actually agree with the vision of a small-c conservative party,”

      I am not sure of who you are claiming is considering themselves conservative. I think the only one who outright self describes hasn’t even commented yet. A lot of us live in a various oceans of conservatives, but to actually be one on this blog often takes body armor and sedatives (but it’s getting better, Daves head in ass comments aside).Report

    • Art Deco in reply to David says:

      To put forward an analogous claim – many/most Americans may believe that this is a “Christian nation” despite the language of the Constitution. Convincing them otherwise may observably be difficult or impossible.

      The ‘language of the Constitution’ prohibits a federal religious establishment and federal laws restricting the free exercise of religion. That’s it. It does not make any categorical declarations about the character of the nation or society bar that it is one governed by electoral and deliberative institutions and has no delineated orders of clergy, nobility, burgesses, and peasantry.Report

  21. Brandon Berg says:

    The elimination of public education

    Let’s be clear here: She was talking about replacing the quasi-monopolistic system of public provision of education with a system where parents would choose from a number of privately provided options using taxpayer-funded vouchers, not eliminating the public funding of education. This is not a crazy proposal. If it were, we wouldn’t be using a similar system for providing financial assistance for medical care, food, housing, general living expenses, and post-secondary education, and any number of other things.

    Democrats pretend it’s a crazy proposal because they’re hot for teacher(‘s unions), but let’s not indulge them in that conceit.Report

    • greginak in reply to Brandon Berg says:

      It would be a radical change from how we do things. It might be a good idea and not crazy, but still a radical change.

      Teachers unions??? ugghh. Really? You think the only reason people think public schools are good is because teachers unions get our nipples all hard….You really don’t understand how people who disagree with you think. If we had no teachers unions ( which dont’ exist in many states) i’m still for public schools in the manner we have them now. Maybe there is a bit over focus on union hatred from some on the right.Report

  22. Jaybird says:

    Been thinking about this some more. Trump is not a Conservative. Neither is he particularly conservative outside of a handful of areas where he’s well within acceptable tolerances. (I mean, he could run as a Democrat in a number of parts of the country and the majority of his viewpoints (insofar as he’s articulated any) wouldn’t cause you to blink.)

    What Trump is, is *POPULIST*.

    For the last few decades, we’ve been watching a bunch of elitists fight it out on the left/right spectrum and, for the most part, when it comes to the left/right thing, the right does a good job of losing the battles slowly (though we can argue over how much dignity they lose with).

    What you seem to be arguing for in your post is for an intelligent, elite, conservative opposition to the intelligent, elite, liberals in power (and, I suppose, for them to hand power back and forth periodically).

    Trump is yelling populist things and we haven’t had someone yelling populist things at his level in a long, long time.

    If you want to worry, here’s where you should worry: Bernie is pretty far to Hillary’s left. He’s not doing well because he’s that far to her left. He’s doing well because he’s a lot more populist than she is. She is a quintessential elite technocrat and while she is doing enough of a job to beat Sanders to end up with the nomination, she’s not demonstrating that she’s doing a particularly good job of arguing against populist arguments. If the playing field were something like Clinton vs. Romney, we could discuss left v. right things until the cows came home… because both of them are elite technocrats who are pretty much at the same level when it comes to elite technocracy and the remaining debate is over left vs. right stuff.

    Something that I’ve been thinking about: If Hillary fights against Trump the same way that she would have fought against Romney, Trump is going to win the election. At which point a whole lot of elite technocratic pundits are going to argue as if this were a left v. right debate all along and discuss what it means that the right wing has won this argument… which will inevitably feed the next few failures of arguing against this newly emergent populism.

    But maybe Hillary is really good at this. She’s beating Sanders, after all.Report

    • Art Deco in reply to Jaybird says:

      Hillary is not a technocrat at all. She’s a crooked, self-aggrandizing lawyer. Her pal Ira Magaziner would qualify as a technocrat. Janet Yellen would qualify as a technocrat. Michael Dukakis had a technocratic cast of mind. Hellary? No.Report

    • El Muneco in reply to Jaybird says:

      By the same token, I don’t necessarily agree with the idea that “Bernie will run better against trump than Clinton because he’s also tapping into the same vein of populism!”. To me, that means that he’d be competing against Trump for the same voters. While Clinton is obviously coming from a different direction.

      It’s like trading my shortstop for your shortstop. If the guy I end up with has a better season, I win, if not, I lose – it’s a straight up challenge. Trading my shortstop for your left fielder and a relief pitcher gives me more options to fill in around the new parts.Report

      • Art Deco in reply to El Muneco says:

        Sanders has polled better than Hillary does against all four Republican competitors.Report

        • North in reply to Art Deco says:

          Nobody’s seriously tried to put a dent in Sanders. Not Hillary because she doesn’t need to ta win and she doesn’t want to burn her bridges with his faction. Not Republicans (yet) because they would very much love to run against him. Once someone tried I don’t see any reason to believe Bernie would come out ahead, he’s not shown that kind of nimbleness with the mild attacks and problems he has faced on the campaign so far.Report

          • El Muneco in reply to North says:

            Which is why most people realize that current polling is meaningless.

            Sanders has yet to face a truly hostile opponent in a real-time, nationally-publicized, scripted occasion. As opposed to Clinton, who came out of the Benghazi! hearings polling even better than before.

            The R’s have spent 25 years doing their worst to try to torpedo anyone named Clinton (I’m surprised George Clinton’s reputation survived it, frankly). No one has investigated Sanders to anything like that depth.

            Basically, reputation-wise, Clinton is at the floor, and Sanders is at the ceiling.

            Also, there are micro-details. Sanders vs. Trump on a debate stage might be interesting with regards to the constituency that they are competing for. But what to you put for the over/under as to how many minutes it will take in a Clinton/Trump debate before there is an unambiguous reference to oral sex, whether it’s ostensibly aimed at her husband or her self?Report

          • Jesse Ewiak in reply to North says:

            Sorry, @north, I was told a few weeks ago here that the idea that Hillary was pulling her punches was silly.Report

    • Marchmaine in reply to Jaybird says:

      @jaybird This is my sense as well… we’ve (you and I) arrived here from different points of the political compass, but fundamentally this is the phenomenon at hand. Very nicely put.

      I’m a little skeptical that this is an enduring populist phenomenon, or that the Donor Faction(s) won’t adapt and adjust, or that there’s anyone out there with the wealth, charisma, and political acumen to put together an actual movement that capitalizes on the discontent on the Left/Right… Mark Cuban(?!). That’s sort of the problem with populist movements, lots of smoke a few sparks and then ultimately co-opted into something else. I am curious to see the something else, though.Report

    • Kim in reply to Jaybird says:

      Hillary is beating Sanders by playing dirty pool, pulling every lever and every single stop.

      Against Bernie Sanders, dudes!Report

      • nevermoor in reply to Kim says:

        Right, that dastardly dirty-pool tactic of getting over 3 million more votes than Bernie (and counting!)Report

        • Kim in reply to nevermoor says:

          Did you vote in NY, by some chance? Do you know how many places people voted for Bernie and then sent Hillary’s electors to the Convention?

          I know people with these numbers. Unsurprisingly, they are working for Bernie right now…

          Not nearly the dirty pool that Walker was doing in Wisconsin during some of those recalls, mind.. There’s pulling every lever and pulling out every stop, and then there’s actual cheating. I ain’t alleging the second.Report

  23. Step 0: Decide whether you’re the party of Lincoln or the party of the Confederacy.Report

  24. Mudsharking, eh? Surely the respectable Right is above insisting that there’s something wrong about interracial relationships.Report

    • @mike-schilling The thing is, I think there is actually a huge difference between dog whistling and overt racism. Even if the dog whistling is intentional, it still comes packaged in an assumption that society has reached a point where spewing overt racism is something all mainstream sides will condemn.

      Having one side — a mainstream side, no less — decide that spewing such things is OK seems to me to be a rather enormous step backwards.Report

  25. Dan Scotto says:

    I think this is a great start, and if I disagreed with any parts of this four years ago–and I think I might have–I am chagrined now.

    But if nothing else changes–I mean, barring a recession or foreign policy crisis–that party still won’t win many national elections. Right now, I think Republican electoral success in downballot elections is for two reasons:

    1. Different electorates.
    2. Frustration with long-term economic stagnation, and perhaps progressive priorities in government.

    Basically, the Republicans don’t have a program, yet, that will push them to over 50%+1 in a high-turnout national election on an even playing field. I thought they were getting there with the reform conservatism stuff that was starting to emerge from the fog in 2014. But 2015 and 2016 have been a real step back.Report

    • Art Deco in reply to Dan Scotto says:

      Dan, the House of Representatives is a national institution. The party not winning many national elections has held it for 17 of the last 21 years. There’s a core electorate (about 37% of the adult citzens) and a periphery (about 17%). There has been for decades. That is not a phenomenon which has appeared in the last 15 years; the same proportions prevailed in 1978. The core electorate and the peripheral electorate vote for Republican congressional majorities.Report

      • In many of those election more votes were cast for Democrats than Republicans (likewise in Senate elections.) The Republicans have a gift for gaining power with the support of only a minority that rivals Saddam Hussein’s.Report

      • Road Scholar in reply to Art Deco says:

        Dan, the House of Representatives is a national institution.

        True enough, but the constituencies are local/regional. Likewise, Senate constituencies are statewide vs national. POTUS and vice are the only national elective offices with national constituencies. These differing levels of constituency go a long ways toward explaining how the Dems currently enjoy an advantage at the top while the GOP rules the House and the Senate straddles the line.Report

    • I agree the post sets out some good ideas for the Right to go forward.

      But as you suggest, they can only work with a program that has appeal. In the context of the suggestions then, popular appeal must be paired with civility.

      As a liberal, I may have not given reform conservatism enough of a fair hearing, confirmation bias and all. But it seems to me that RC’s appeal rests significantly on its ideology first, then its capacity to solve problems. I’m not sure when this was, but I recall Paul Ryan going around to various places not normally Rep territory listening, (I give him credit for that) and then talking about finding conservative solutions for the various problems a particular venue highlighted. Maybe he talked about solutions some of the time, but just watching the news my impression was that he generally stressed the conservative angle.

      Again as a liberal, it just seems there a fewer and duller arrows in that quiver. At any rate, whether I am right or not about that, it seems to me that the right would be well served by deemphasizing the ideological requirements of their proposals and focus on both why and how they would be effective beyond the margins.Report

    • El Muneco in reply to Dan Scotto says:

      Also helping downballot:
      – Better leveraging of existing community infrastructure (e.g. churches, NRA) to support the ground game
      – More freedom to tailor local messaging to tack against the national partyReport

    • Tod Kelly in reply to Dan Scotto says:

      Thanks, Dan. As I said on Twitter, this post was likely more for you than anyone else here.Report

  26. North says:

    Great post my Tod. I’m in general agreement with much of it. One quibble though:

    As you note enacting these changes will be hard, extremely hard. I’d submit that the most plausible way for these kinds of changes to come about would be losses, devastating losses. The kind of losses that leave the right wading around in the ashes of their aspirations wondering what the fish happened and finally snapping out of the fever they’ve been clutched in.

    In that Trump represents the best hope for the GOP to suffer those kinds of wide ranging losses I think that a certain degree of popcorn munching glee is warranted. Trump is toxic, I agree, but so is chemotherapy. Maybe the Trumpocalypse is the wildfire after which new growth becomes possible.Report

    • J_A in reply to North says:

      @north

      I’m sorry but I think you have it exactly backwards.

      The expected Trump loss will be business as usual: “We lost because we didn’t nominate a true conservative”.

      There is no succesor to tap the Trump constituency because there is no one (to my knowledge) that has both the enormous name recognition and the ability to self fund a primary run.

      There are several names that can have an appeal similar to Trump’s, Sarah Palin for instance, but she would need donors to keep her viable. True, Trump mostly did not need to self fund because the press did his campaign for him, but I think that was a happy surprise for him. A Trump ver 2.0 can’t really count on that.

      Once you are bound to donor money, be it Koch’s , Adelson’s, or the One Million Mum’s, you are bound to policies (tax cuts for the rich, Middle East wars, LGBT discrimination in the name of religion) that are really not what Trump voters care about of want. And you will have a couple more cycles of this.

      What would really shock the Elephant would be a Trump win in the general. What would come out after four years, I cannot even imagine, but it won’t be the same.Report

      • North in reply to J_A says:

        Yes but do you think those voters will just troop back to the GOP elite? Potentially they could find themselves a marginal rump. But it all depends on how much losing they do.Report

      • Barry in reply to J_A says:

        “What would really shock the Elephant would be a Trump win in the general. What would come out after four years, I cannot even imagine, but it won’t be the same.”

        Why would that shock the Elephant? It would validate 7 years of nihilism.

        There’s a historical view that the US Civil War was a foretaste of WWI, the result of the Industrial Revolution hitting warfare.

        If Trump wins, Dubya would be viewed similarly, IMHO – a foretaste of GOP horror.Report

  27. scott the mediocre says:

    Tod: I, a left of current USAian center, registered Democrat who probably votes “R” in partisan offices maybe 10-15% of the time, also

    believe [the] Clinton Machine to be utterly corrupt, manipulative, and self-serving.

    and informally (in the mythologized Pauline Kael sense) I would say that well over 50% of my social circle (> 3/4s D, < 1/4 R) think the same. I can only think of one person whom I know personally whom I know to have an actually positive opinion of HRC (as opposed to "less vile than Trump", which is at least the plurality view and probably the majority view). It's hard to imagine that $generic_democrat (best exemplified by O'Malley among those who actually ran) not doing better than HRC at this point. Certainly I could vote for O'Malley without meaningful qualm (I plan to do so in the upcoming CA Dem primary), as I think I could for any current Dem governor with the possible exception of Cuomo.

    I submit that the possession of those characteristics (being corrupt, manipulative, and self-serving) is not strictly incompatible with being a reasonably effective POTUS, although I can't really come up with a good example, other than perhaps Clinton I. And of course self-serving and self-aggrandizing as I believe HRC to be, a certain other candidate Trumps her with respect to those characteristics (actually, right now my tentative plan for November is Johnson/Weld, both of whom I have reasonably high regard for, if not for all elements of the libertarian platform).

    It seems like the Burkean/Oakshotteian conservative party you want is more or less the right of center party in most any other first world parliamentary democracy over the last 20+ years, with the possible exception of the Harper era Conservatives. Is that more or less correct? (I'd be in the right of center party in most of those countries where there isn't an actually liberal party like Germany's FDP).

    If so, I suggest to you that the presidential system as it has formed in the US since roughly FDR allows too great a level of irresponsibility at the Congressional level for any great hope: the unusually responsible Congressional parties we had from ~1945 to ~1996 were a historical anomaly over the long sweep (I acknowledge that calling those Congresses "responsible", particularly in the fiscal sense, is iffy in many cases: I still claim that the average level of responsible behavior over that period greatly exceeded the average responsibility before or since).Report

    • Kim in reply to scott the mediocre says:

      “I submit that the possession of those characteristics (being corrupt, manipulative, and self-serving) is not strictly incompatible with being a reasonably effective POTUS, although I can’t really come up with a good example, other than perhaps Clinton I.”

      Nixon. He wasn’t really all that bad, for all that.Report

      • scott the mediocre in reply to Kim says:

        Yeah, I was thinking of Nixon too, and agree that he wasn’t so bad (“last liberal president” and all that). I certainly think that had his paranoia been kept somewhat better in check, he’d have a significantly better reputation, while being still corrupt, manipulative, and self-serving. Same could be said, I think, of Clinton I’s combination of horndogginess and indiscipline.Report

        • Stillwater in reply to scott the mediocre says:

          BSDI!

          {{QED, natch.}}Report

          • scott the mediocre in reply to Stillwater says:

            @stillwater
            Sorry, was not meaning to draw a false equivalence or BSDI. FWIW, I voted for Clinton both times and probably would not have voted for Nixon any of the three possible times (was too young to have to decide).

            I meant that the respective characterological weaknesses (which both seem to predate their respective terms as POTUS, though the paranoia seems a lot deeper in RMN than the horndogginess and indiscipline in WJC) were their respective nemeses: an alt-WJC who could keep it in his pants in the Oval Office would still have faced the oh-so-moral Newt, etc., but he would have faced him on more favorable ground and I suspect been able to hand the WH over to Gore; a somewhat less paranoid RMN might well have “gotten away” with his Constitution-shredding if said shredding had involved somewhat fewer amateur burglaries.

            Compare e.g. LBJ: could you name a character flaw that was his nemesis in a similar sense? Serious question – I can’t (although I’ve only read Master of the Senate of Caro’s biography and no other works specifically about LBJ – perhaps if I read all four – eventually five – volumes I could).

            BTW, I don’t get your “QED, natch” – please explain? ThanksReport

      • Barry in reply to Kim says:

        “Nixon. He wasn’t really all that bad, for all that.”

        Yes, he was. And it’s amazing how the right which doesn’t defend Nixon is still defending him.Report

        • Brandon Berg in reply to Barry says:

          You mean Kim? She’s not identifiably left or right, and Scott the Mediocre appears to be saying he wasn’t that from a left-wing perspective (“the last liberal president”), which is not entirely without basis, since Nixon was arguably the most economically left-wing Republican in living memory.

          I don’t see how any actual conservative (as opposed to a purely partisan Republican) could hold Nixon in high regard. Corruption aside, he just wasn’t very conservative. Economically, he arguably wasn’t even centrist.

          Edit: Holy crap. Hillary Clinton is the Second Coming of Nixon.Report

      • Creon Critic in reply to Kim says:

        @kim @scott-the-mediocre
        The White House entertained the idea of firebombing the Brookings Institution – including President Nixon personally ordering a theft. Not to mention the whole Saturday Night Massacre thing.

        There is no world where Nixon and “wasn’t really all that bad” go together. Part of the job of POTUS is running the building, and an Executive Office of the President that is thinking about firebombing a DC think tank, I’m going to put that in the epic fail category.Report

        • scott the mediocre in reply to Creon Critic says:

          @creon-critic
          I confess I didn’t know (or remember, anyway 🙁 ) about Colson’s proposal to firebomb Brookings. Thanks – now I do. Yikes!

          I do remember at least some of the many breakins, both planned and executed, the various harassments planned or executed of the enemies list’s members, …

          If your point is that Nixon did more than any president in a very long time, possibly ever, to subvert constitutional norms as they existed at the beginning of his respective administration, I agree. Epic fail indeed as it played out.Report

    • Great comment, @scott-the-mediocre . Thanks.Report

    • Alan Scott in reply to scott the mediocre says:

      scott the mediocre: and informally (in the mythologized Pauline Kael sense) I would say that well over 50% of my social circle (> 3/4s D, < 1/4 R) think the same. I can only think of one person whom I know personally whom I know to have an actually positive opinion of HRC (as opposed to "less vile than Trump", which is at least the plurality view and probably the majority view). It's hard to imagine that $generic_democrat (best exemplified by O'Malley among those who actually ran) not doing better than HRC at this point.

      And yet, Hillary Clinton stomped O’Malley flat. Have you considered that, Like Pauline Kael, your social circle may be unrepresentative?Report

      • scott the mediocre in reply to Alan Scott says:

        Alan Scott,

        Hi Alan, if you are still reading (sorry, missed your comment somehow when it first showed up) –

        Of course my social circle is unrepresentative of much of anything beside itself, hence the Pauline Kael reference. In particular, it’s deeply unrepresentative of this year’s Iowa (D) caucusgoers, among whom O’Malley got a molecularly flat 0.54% (amusingly, his total vote was only a little bit more than the difference between Clinton and Sanders).

        In case it wasn’t clear, by “doing better than HRC at this point” (late May), I meant better versus Trump in a median voter sense (normalized by respective swing state elasticity, of course), extrapolated to November (yes, I’m aware of the historically poor predictive performance of polling this far out; I also recognize that this year is an unusually poor one for relying on prior experience).

        Do you really think Clinton is on average (counting the combination of her skills, record, baggage, apparatus, etc.) is a net positive for the Ds versus $generic_democrat (as said $generic_democrat would be tested and bloodied and swiftboated by Nov, not as an empty vessel of hopes) in the general, rather than just less negative for the Ds than Trump is for the Rs? Serious question, not rhetorical. If your answer is “yes”, which I infer it is, why? What do you think she brings? More preparedness to respond to the VRWC?

        Thanks in advance for any response.Report