If Trump wins… the GOP party takes on an entirely different shape…Trump is going to pivot to the middle and deny a lot…and he just might pull the con off.because that is what is does and is
He is a con artist…and he’s winning right now…
That is the conventional wisdom in what has largely been an unconventional POTUS race so far.
I sure do hope we’ll have Cruz to kick around again in 2020. Republicans often do nominate the last contested nomination’s No. 2 finisher, which makes me optimistic.
“There were some Republicans who were saying when it was between Trump and Cruz that we would rather lose with Cruz, and at least put to rest this false narrative that we lost because the nominee wasn’t conservative enough.”
Agree with this statement. The GOP doubled down after 2012 and went more conservative instead of using the election as a sign to come back towards moderate. In 2016, with Cruz running and then losing, this was an opportunity to say that, fuck no the Tea Party conservatism is horrible and to give the rest of the GOP cowering in the wings ammunition to step forward and argue for moderation without fear of being primaried.
But no, now they have the cancer of Trump… so if he loses, the focus is going to be on (1) how to game the primaries to prevent a Trump from ever happening again and (2) spend every bit of Hillary’s presidency resisting her just because that is what the bat-shit far right GOP does.
This is why ALL liberals (from progressives to conservative Dems) should be helping the GOP stick the knife in so that we can appear as the united political ideology in the face of the disarray that is conservatism. There is a unique opportunity to really bludgeon the GOP and conservatism in general for a generation if we don’t dither with fighting each other.
Let me see if I understand this. Republicans believe they are losing elections because they are not conservative enough. Does this mean they think there are truly conservative voters who are voting Democratic? Are they then thinking that the Democrats are more conservative? Or do they believe there are truly conservative voters not voting Republican yet and that there are so many millions of them that if they could really and truly ring the conservative bell they would win a national election?
Whether it’s one or the other, they are utterly deluding themselves.
Once upon a time, Republicans had a vision for America. They believed in responsible governance. Enlightened, yet cautious, is how I remember the Republicans of yore. Unfortunately, Republicanism could not take in the changes that roiled the country with the Viet Nam War. Not just simply the revolt of the cannon fodder teenagers on every campus in the country, but the cultural and societal shifts that began then and have accelerated with technology and innovation. Instead of trying to adjust their philosophy for a changing world, a changing America, they tried to put the breaks on, tried to stop the evolution. They lost their footing, got swept away.
The so-called Republican intelligentsia has maintained the fiction that there is such a thing as conservatism in America. But there really isn’t. And when you hear the strident voices on the right saying “if only we were more so” then the people will be enlightened and come to us, you realize they have nothing.
Trump is, indeed, the absolute, correct culmination of the Republican philosophy of the last 40 years. What philosophy, you ask? Indeed. For what has the Republican Party come to stand for? The past. Never the future. The Republicans have no future to offer, only the past. But the future doesn’t lie behind us, it lies ahead. Ultimately, the Republican Party refuses to embrace the future and seeks only to enshrine the past. They have no vision for tomorrow. They can’t lead America because they just want to stand where they are.
So how is it possible to stand any more still than they are already? How can they possibly get more conservative?
They’ll be the last ones to know.
“We might see a second autopsy only this time it might really be over a dead body,” joked Norm Ornstein
He may have been speaking metaphorically, in the sense that the GOP is not literally a person, but I’m not sure he’s joking here.
Under the hair and beneath the skin of trump…:
Their mistake is seeing broad discontent stemming from a deep-rooted sense of powerlessness as a clarion call for the kind of authoritarian power and control that they envision as a cure for the loss of s past sense of simplistic security which was never there, except in their distorted view of history.
Their version of authoritarian power and control over individuals would only exacerbate the discontent, and generate the kind of revolutionary fervor that Senator Sandrers could only dream about.
The problem is that the resulting forces would generate more chaos than positive direction in society.
Fortunately I have profound hopes that Soon-To-Be-President Clinton will lead the country forward, and if the GOP gets the election results they deserve, they will be in no position to impede the nation’s progress towards s brighter, more humane future.
Sometime political pundits don’t talk, they just write. Excerpt from Nate Cohn’s The Upshot, NYT, a few hours ago, titled Yes It’s Early but Donald Would Have Uphill Battle Against Clinton. Sort of amazing that a guy with no experience in politics, academia or the military could come this far on bombast alone.
Mr. Trump trails Mrs. Clinton by around 10 percentage points in early general election surveys, both nationally and in key battleground states.
He even trails in some polls of several states where Mitt Romney won in 2012, like North Carolina, Arizona, Missouri and Utah.
Mr. Trump’s biggest problem is that he would be the most unpopular major party nominee in the modern era, with nearly two-thirds saying they have an unfavorable opinion of him. More than half view him “very unfavorably” or say they’re “scared” of his candidacy — figures with no precedent among modern presidential nominees.
Mr. Trump’s ratings are worst with the voters who made up the so-called Obama coalition of young, nonwhite and well-educated voters who propelled President Obama’s re-election four years ago.
“If only Republicans had only nominated a true conservative, a consistent anti-abortion neocon with an impressive history of holding the conservative line on everything from immigration to government spending, the GOP could have won.”
That is not what the Republican primary voters wanted, but “if we try it again we will win in 2020.”
Once again, the delusion is large.
“We might see a second autopsy only this time it might really be over a dead body,” joked Norm Ornstein, "
An autopsy is not required this time, Norm ole’ buddy. The GOTP will go straight to the cremation. As mirthful as I should feel, I also have a sliver (just a bare sliver) of …sadness…melancholy…dolefulness… something… I just thought the GOTP would step up and stop this clown. They didn’t. And they lost. Now they’re gone.
Keep in mind that the power in politics lies with the fact that more or less 50% are with you. It is that sliver dead in the middle that really matters in being elected.
Ultimately the GOP will have that discussion, but they will (again) fail to understand the underlying problem.
Yes, for some, they will argue that the candidate wasn’t sufficiently Conservative. However, that misses the entire point. Conservative has come to mean “overly religious” and strongly bigoted, racist, and misogynistic. That means a “proper Conservative” isn’t going to be acceptable to the American People, regardless of their purely political positions.
The second issue is that, yet again, the GOP cannot…or will not…enunciate clear and understandable policies which voters can use to evaluate the candidates and the party. They want desperately to repeal the ACA, but can’t come up with any replacement ideas…and we all know the only real problem is that the guy who passed it is Black. Unrelated to his placement on the Left-Right scale, Drumpf cannot explain in any concrete terms, what he stands for or how he would accomplish anything. His continue refrain of “we’ll make it great” rings hollow when he can’t back it up with anything but more refrains of the same thing. He complains about China, but has his own product lines produced there. He proposes deporting up to 10 or 11 million people, but completely ignores the reality of what happens if he actually did that. He speaks blithely about using nuclear weapons, clearly oblivious to the implications of doing that. Paul Ryan continues to propose budgets that only balance with the use of Magic Asterisks"…and he still can’t identify what those are. We can look at Kansas and Louisiana as textbook examples of the FACT that “trickle-down” doesn’t trickle down…yet the GOP seems to continue to believe in that fairy tale.
In short, the GOP is going to get clobbered in November, and their post-mortem might end up saying…“we got clobbered.” They still won’t understand why.
I agree with most of your post but I think you have gone astray with the labels that have been misappropriated by the players. There always has been, is now, and always will be conservatism in America but there is no longer a conservative political party in America. The Tea Party, Freedom Caucus and other fringe factions that have been incorporated into and taken control of the GOP are not conservative, they are the most radical elements in the US political arena. They do not believe in the gradual, incremental change that is the hallmark of conservatism but instead demand a radical and immediate shift to conform to their political ideology. The problem of labels is further complicated by the religious right which calls its puritanical belief system “conservative” and then conflates its socioreligious dogma with a theory of governance. That is the core of today’s GOP, and it is not conservative.
Republican strategist Brian Walsh is right when he calls out the false narrative that the GOP lost because the nominee wasn’t conservative enough. And Norm Ornstein is right when he says there is going to be a real struggle for control over the Republican Party. The question is whether true conservatives can regain control of the existing party structure or if they have lost it to the radical elements.
Brought to you by the GOP/RNC
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Is the Bernie Revolution going to end up giving us Donald Trump?