2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumGOP’s epic internal struggle: The modernists vs. libertarian fabulists
The essential conflict in today's politics is not between Democrats and Republicans -- but factions of the rightKIM MESSICK
If we look for unity in our politics today, where can we find it? Only in the claim that it has never been more divided. Everyone seems to agree on that. The two parties have never been further apart, wrote the liberal Ezra Klein last fall. Republicans and Democrats are currently further apart ideologically than our political parties have traditionally been, wrote the conservative Ross Douthat, a mere four days later. Only the fact of our polarization brings us together; we are fractured in everything except our mutual sense of brokenness.
Many liberals attribute this situation to an increasingly radicalized Republican Party. Some Republicans do, too. Immediately after the 2012 election, Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana, lashed out at the offensive, bizarre comments of some GOP candidates, whom he accused of espousing a dumbed-down conservatism. Republicans, he insisted, must stop being the stupid party. The RNCs own autopsy of the 2012 results, issued in March of last year, made many of the same points. (In kinder, gentler terms, of course.)
But some Republicans bridle at this kind of talk. Polarization suits them just fine. As they see it, there is only one alternative to being their kind of Republican, and that alternative namely, being a Democrat is truly a fate worse than death. Calls for them to be more moderate, more reasonable, strike them as calls to adopt policies like those of liberals advice they reject with great alacrity. David Limbaugh, brother of Rush, provided a characteristic formulation of this response not long after President Obamas victory in 2008. Anticipating that Republicans would be pressured to work with Obama on a wide variety of issues, David Limbaugh cautioned that if Republicans reduce themselves to offering merely liberal lite the next four years they would do nothing but compound the damage of Democratic legislation.
But there is more to our predicament than disputes over policy. These differences, after all, arent so much the scourge of politics as the reason we have politics in the first place if everyone agreed about everything, we wouldnt need elections. Our problem isnt necessarily that Republicans support lower marginal rates for high-income taxpayers or smaller cost-of-living increases for Social Security recipients. We had a politics like that once as recently as the George H.W. Bush years and, though often fraught and volatile, it ushered in actual achievements. Things got done.
more
http://www.salon.com/2014/02/15/gops_epic_internal_struggle_the_modernists_vs_libertarian_fabulists/
Laelth
(32,017 posts)-Laelth
Warpy
(111,419 posts)Back in the 50s and 60s, all the dreamers and fabulists were on the left, daring to dream of a world with fewer working hours, machines to do all the shitwork, and the population turning to pursuits they enjoyed rather than having to sweat their lives away in donkey work they didn't. They also dreamed of a more egalitarian society across race and gender lines. They actually got the latter, to a point.
Starting in the late 70s, all the dreamers started to be on the far right, dreaming of a society with no laws and everything governed by their favorite deity, the invisible hand of the marketplace, with no one parasiting off the rest of us and the government engaged only in funding and maintaining a bloated military.
While it's refreshing to see the impractical fantasists on their side for a change, it's also disquieting in terms of what they might achieve before they implode the party, which they will.
I'm just hoping the fistfights in 2016 are on camera.