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A Call For Traditional Conservatives To Regain Control Of The Republican Party
The always-thoughtful Joshua Trevino, in a post that needs to be read in full, issues a call for conservatives to reassert control of their party, particularly online.
Here’s a small excerpt:
Serving a structure for its own sake is the time-honored career of apparatchiks through history, and the Republican Party assuredly has its own class. Fortunately, they are easy enough to pick out: they are the ones who pirouette and leap to defend whatever line is promulgated by the ruling elements of the party at any particular moment, independent of its veracity or sense. They do the hard work of shaping the narrative at the ground level, and they hew it so that it is impervious to principled critique — almost always with the protest that such critique merely weakens our own. The irony is that no critique weakens our own so much as their most profound absurdities, be it that Tom DeLay is worth fighting for to the bitter end, that Harriet Miers is competent to serve on the Supreme Court, that Alberto Gonzales is a fine Attorney General, or that the White House is doing a great job in Iraq. The cumulative effect of these things, and the concurrent abandonment of conservative principle in governance large and small, is why we now have a Congressional minority and a President with a 33% approval rating. The men of the party took the 1994 and 2000 victories won by the men of the movement, and squandered it all on — well, the party. Common sense tells us that it’s time to reverse the priorities and put conservatism ahead of Republicanism if we want to begin the climb back.
Read it all.
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21 Responses to “A Call For Traditional Conservatives To Regain Control Of The Republican Party”
A fabulous commentary.
The Republican Party is so easy to kick now that it’s down, but what troubles me is that aside from a few fringe voices I do not hear anyone within the party saying that pretty much the entire pack of GOP presidential wannabes is driving off of the electoral cliff en masse.
I know there are bloggers here who live and die by the latest poll. Giulianni is coming back! McCain is dropping behind! Romney is surging!
Fact of the matter is, this entire group is pretty much babbling the same BS. Do we just give up the Republican Party for dead and hope that it is rebuilt out of the ashes of a crushing 2008 defeat? Is there any hope that the party can begin a true revival while Bush remains president?
Putting aside the usual bashing, I would like to hear concrete ideas about how this could be made so.
I ask this as someone who typically votes for more Republicans than Democrats because they usually field better candidates at the state and local levels where I live. I ask this as someone who is deeply worried about the fate of the party. I ask this as someone who has little faith in the Democrats, and for that matter the two-party system as a whole.
Have at it . . .
but the Question remains, how does anyone turn around a political party when the demographics are all against that party. If the Republicans turn their back on the social conservatives, they lose more votes than they gain.
The problem is that the Republican party has become like the Congressiona Black Caucus in that its leadership come from safe districts where the Republican incumbent faces no risk of being voted out. Thus, those leaders can do many stupid things because it does not really matter to them.
America just has to face the fact they it will become a one party state that the the left side of the Democratic party will be the dominate force in politics.
When the Republicans collapse image how irrelevent people like Jim Webb become. If the Democrats feel no pressure from the right, then the Democrats can ignore moderate Democrats like Jim Webb and move to the left.
How far does this “party” have to go before they are “rescued”? Sorry, the majority of Republicans abdicated their honor many months (years?) ago by blindly following anything Dear Leader said, despite mountains of evidence that their “leaders” would do anything to prop up Dear Leader instead of focusing on what is good for America.
I do not want a one party (Democratic) state even though my beliefs align closer to the current Democratic beliefs. But I do want a second party that has SOME integrity and independence from Dear Leader and his minions.
Revdave,
I would also like the Democratic party to exist with some independence from the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. If there are two groups in Congress that always seem to get their way with the Democrats, it is them.
However, as the Democratic Party becomes the one, dominate party, my guess is that they will become more powerful instead of less and that all of the liberal, white “progressives” will live in fear of those two groups.
Quoting the last few words of Trevino’s post:
“we won’t be cruel — and we’ll be right.”
I think he’s written a good analysis. But I suppose you can’t really know if you’ve gone far enough until you go too far. And at the end, in my opinion at least, he goes too far.
It’s not just the suggestion that his opinion must be “right”–everyone always thinks they are right–but the suggestion that he’s in such complete possession of some kind of moral high ground, that his side “won’t be cruel”.
Won’t be cruel? Tell that to the people he’s calling out–the “apparatchiks”, the “corrupt solicitor of prostitutes”. Trevino is a forceful writer. Naturally, he uses strong language. Sometimes that’s gonna sting or bruise. Maybe it’s all in the name of “tough love” and maybe it’s necessary. In fact, I’m completely certain it’s necessary. But why pretend otherwise?
Trevino has been around on the internet for some time. Over that time, he’s changed his opinions on some things. Fair enough: so have I. But I’ve also acquired some skepticism about my own ability to comprehend the world so fully. So fully that I’m always right and always completely in possession of the high moral ground. No matter what my opinion has currently changed into.
Everyone always thinks they’re right. No more so than once they’ve changed their mind from what they mistakenly used to think was right to what they now know is actually right.
Irony. It might just be external reality’s way of reminding us that external reality exits.
It does seem a bit ironic to see Josh, one of the most vocal cheerleaders for the folks who got the GOP in this mess, finally have an epiphany.
I should probably read it all and will, but so far it rings hollow given his past posts.
Maybe he’s really one of the rats who just now realized his ship is sinking.8)
Sorry. Josh is mistaken. Don’t get me wrong—I like him and his writing. Tacitus was one of the reasons I started blogging myself (that and Winds of Change).
But the idea that conservatism can or will reclaim anything is mistaken. It was the union of old-line conservatives, small-government libertarian-type conservatives, and social conservatives that Republicans remember fondly as “the Reagan era”. It didn’t belong to any single one of those groups.
However, those groups (reminiscent of the old-line liberals, socialists, trade unionists, and rent-seeking social conservatives who made up what Democrats fondly think of as “the New Deal”) have so little in common that the combination is unstable. Only the glue of what Josh refers to as “the apparatchiks hold them together.
The 1930′s bank robber Willie Sutton robbed banks because that’s where the money was. We support political parties because that’s where the power is and, like it or not, the appartchiks of each party will continue to wield the power for the foreseeable future.
Shorter version: traditional conservatives (whatever that means) have never had control of the Republican Party.
Dave: perhaps not, but they did have more influence than they have right now and, once, debate was allowed within the GOP. Now, those who disagree are called RINO’s, traitors, etc.
Michael, haven’t you ever heard of the Eleventh Commandment?
Who succeeded Reagan as president? A conservative? Nope. A man (whom I believe is a very good, decent man) who has his picture in the dictionary under the word apparatchik. Josh is longing for a past that never existed.
Dave Schuler,
Look back at when Gerald Ford was running for President and the Republicans were nothing but the old, guard purist. They were bascially irrelevent and had little affect on the government. That is where the Republicans are heading except that instead of the country club being the only gathering place for the Republicans, it will be the church social in the south.
However, the real question that everyone avoids is what happens when the U.S. is a one party state. My guess is that it will make the current day New Jersey look like a well run place but there will be nothing that the voters can do about it.
superdestroyer–
It is possible that the Republicans might just find a way to appeal to other demographics? Especially if the Democrats do a terrible job running the soon-to-be-soviet?
Or is such a possiblity simply too distasteful for you to consider?
I think the basic problem for American conservatives now is the war. Conservatism as a movement has always been rooted in respect for authority, especially military authority. In time of war the conservative thing to do is rally around the commander in chief, even if he is Roosevelt or Johnson. When the C-in-C is a conservative Republican, the pressure to rally to his side is immense. Bush may not have been a very conservative President, but outright opposition to a leader in wartime is a greater betrayal of conservative principles than anything Bush has done.
aristas:
You make a big point, but it comes with an asterisk: Conservatives do rally around their commander in chief — unless the president is named Clinton and the war is in Bosnia.
The catterwauling from conservative Republicans when Clinton committed American might to that war was deafening.
But the conservatives did not rally around the CIC when we were in Bosnia or Somalia? Didn’t Republicans in Congress vote to cut off funds? The only consistency I see is partisan opposition to a Democrat, and rallying around a Republican in wartime.
Well, the extremists call them that, but they do not succeed in driving them out off the stage. Look at the Republican debate — among the 10 candidates, it is difficult to find any issue upon which all 10 agree. This is in stark contrast to the ideological homogeneity of the Democratic Party field.
I don’t like the amount of influence that so-called “social conservatives” have in the Republican Party either, but its just wrong to claim that that influence with without “debate” from within the party. I find the internal debates within the Republican party far more vigorous and wide-ranging than the very few that are tolerated within the Democratic Party.
George Sorwell,
White voters are the only ones who have ever punished Democrats for doing a bad job. Have the black voters in Detroit, Newark, Baltimore ever voted against the Democrats in national or state wide elections since those cities began to crumble in the 1970′s? No. I believe that black and Hispanic voters have almost never voted out bad Democratic politician (See Marion Barry)
The Asian American community also seems to like the Democrats, see the Democratic establishment in Hawaii.
I believe that any attempt by the Repulbicans to appeal to other than white middle class and blue collar voters will fail and leave the Republicans further behind because it will alienate the white voters without picking up any minority voters.
When you look at the 80% of the vote that the Democratic Party gets in NYC, you are looking at the future of the U.S. Of course that future is without a native born middle class.
Unlike you SD I believe in the future of the conservative/Republican party.
Because the Democratic party by its nature is a riot waiting to happen. They have SO MANY PACS and special interest groups that it is very difficult for them to maintain a consensus for very long.
Even now they have no consensus on anything except the WAR. Without the war they would still be floundering around lost in a sea of change and about 5 years behind the times.
The worst thing for the democrats will be to come home and end the war. Because they will then have to STAND for something rather then STAND AGAINST something.
They are incapable of doing that, not because they are bad people or have bad ideas, its just they have TOO MANY ideas and cannot come to agreement on what is the most important things to focus on.
This victory is short lived. I hope they enjoy it for what it is. A vote against the War……..Not a Vote FOR democrats.
JS When the 11 Republicans went to Bush to debate the Iraq policy, his staffers came out and attacked Lahood for talking about the meeting. If anybody, Republican or Democrat, challenge the Iraq policy they get a negative label.
Rudi,
But what you are pointing out is how the administration reacts to ‘dissenters’; what Jason is saying is that the Republican voters don’t react that way to differences of opinion.