Yo Republicans: A Party Divided Cannot Stand
Jul 28th, 2011 | 11 responses
With apologies to Abraham Lincoln, that is the harsh reality facing the Republican Party as it looks into an abyss called 2012.
Having learned none of the lessons from its loses in 2006 and 2008 elections and having misread the victories of 2010 as a mandate, the GOP is not only no closer to recapturing the Senate and White House than it was a year ago, it is considerably further way.
That is no mean feat, and the reasons are easy to decipher.
Party leaders, desperate for short-term votes as opposed to developing and executing a strategy for long-term growth, handed the keys to the party pickup truck first to Christianists who were determined to continue fighting culture wars that had little appeal to mainstream voters, and then to Tea Partiers determined to impose an ideological purity on Republican candidates that resulted in driving away many of the party’s moderates.
When the smoke clears in the next few days from the high-stakes deficit reduction imbroglio, which will be less a victory for President Obama than a rout for Republicans, the wheels will have come completely off the pickup truck, leaving the passengers to have to hitchhike into town. That town, of course, is somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon Line since the party has worked assiduously to shed black and Hispanic support and for all intents and purposes has shrunken into a regional entity.
For Republicans, 2010 was the year of big promises and 2011 was going to be a year when those promises would be fulfilled.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the Promises Land: The party leadership recognized that smaller government is something that most voters could gladly support, but accomplishing that on the backs of have-nots, seniors and the infirm while cosseting the super rich and Wall Street fat cats was something that horrifies most of those voters.
And so you had the sight yesterday of House Speaker John Boehner warning the rank and file at a closed-door meeting to “get your ass in line” in trying to beat back an open revolt from the Tea Party wing of the party caucus, while born-again maverick John McCain took to the floor of the Senate to mock the Tea Party wing for thinking that Obama and Democrats will get the blame for a default if Republicans refuse the raise the debt ceiling.
By that flawed logic, “Democrats would have no choice but to pass a balanced budget amendment and reform entitlements and the Tea Party Hobbits could return to Middle Earth,” he said, quoting a Wall Street Journal editorial.
“This is the kind of crack political thinking that turned Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell into G.O.P. nominees,” he jeered.
Indeed.
When, you might ask, are Republicans finally going to get it? “It” being that substituting governance with polarization is a sure loser and will remain so.
I for one am not holding my breath.
11 Responses to “Yo Republicans: A Party Divided Cannot Stand”
It seems like ancient history now, but there were other major parties in our nation’s history. More than once, the party leadership would create a rift that split off a large group, and the parties would re-form along different lines. It was healthy.
We’re long overdue for another reorganization.
Prof:
A reorganization is certainly what the doctor would order, but I don’t see that happening for the foreseeable future.
What might happen if influential mainstream Republicans can muster the courage — and defeats in 2012 and beyond might be the catalyst — is to create conditions whereby the Tea Party wing would break off and start a third party, leaving those mainstreamers with the unhappy but necessary task of rebuilding the party from the inside out.
All of this, of course, would provoke a long overdue reexamination of what conservatism has become and a level of candor that I regret most career politicians — including Democrats — instinctively shy away from.
I would be interested in reading what our more astute commenters — as opposed to the ad hominem crowd — see playing out for the party in the foreseeable future.
Please weigh in.
“When, you might ask, are Republicans finally going to get it?”
I stopped asking that question well over a decade ago. It’s hard to know what it would take – especially since so many of them don’t view their current state as dysfunctional. Maybe when you’re so deep in the kool-aid you’ve grown gills you no longer want to come out.
They think that the unemployment situation, they themselves have created, has made Americans so desperate that “any” loosely analogized tax on the rich will automatically result in job losses. It’s that sword of Damocles threat the Republican party has worn out for decades. It’s a weak argument and everybody knows it now. Instead of falling at their feet in fear and capitulation, the population is becoming angrier by the moment. By calling out the reactionary wing of the Republican party, President Obama, and, his fellow Democrats have ripped down that sword and are poised to jam it straight into the neck of Damocles himself!
Certainly they remain dysfunctional. (More interesting still is not the House Republican situation, but what’s happening in some states.)
@Shaun
Did you see Allen’s expose on, for lack of a better term, the right kind of liberals?
The only thing holding the Democratic party together right now is the Republicans. The only thing holding the Republican party together is the Democrats.
Once one breaks, the other will be vulnerable.
Side note:
That photo reminds me of I-85 in North Carolina (heavy snowfall) on my way between Washington, DC and Atlanta (where there were ice storms), and back, in January 2000.
No (incorrect) metaphor for Republican effects on the economy.
When I saw the photo it reminded me of a typical winter scene in Michigan. Deep winter and hot summer present such incredible contrast here it’s hard to believe they are only 6 months apart. They almost seem like different planets.
Here’s where the pickup foto was published:
http://bangordailynews.com/2010/01/02/news/bangor/mainers-dig-out-from-whopper-storm/
Not bad, Shaun. Perhaps we might have guessed if it had been summer (different shades of green for different species of tree) or better, autumn. It’s on I-95, but much farther north (Turnpike?)
If you ever head to Nova Scotia or elsewhere in the Maritimes in autumn, Shaun, you’ll see plentiful deep red that will make New England reds seem lightweight by comparison.
J. Spencer: Michigan has a maritime-influenced (by inland seas) climate, even though it’s basically continental, and that moderates things, but yes, there’s a respectable amount of snow on the ground each winter. (Far from a lot, like 80-90 inches where I lived in Upstate New York, but still, plenty to rule lives.)
The Republicans – at least the intelligent ones (Boehner, Rove, even Cantor) – last November after election day talked about the results not as a mandate but as an opportunity. An opportunity the American voters would rescind if they didn’t do what the American voters wanted them to do – work to create jobs.
Republicans have morphed in just six short months from understanding they are on he clock to believing they have an unimpeachable mandate.
Power corrupts.