Today's Republicans in the South still comprise of a lot of old Dixiecrat racists....yet they're dying off. A GOP pol in Alabama or Georgia can still stir up a lot of votes from grey-haired types who look back fondly on Jim Crow and going to a segregated school. Few more decades and that paradigm is dead along with them. Few more decades and you could see Texas go "Purple" or even "Blue" from Latino voters. Few more decades and Idaho and Mississippi could legalize gay marriage. Few more decades and RU-486 and Plan B will make it real hard for a Theocrat to call for a national abortion Prohibition. Few more decades and oil and coal-based energy policies will be as atavistic as whale oil-based energy policies were in the late 1800s. Changes that are social, economic, scientific, demographic....the mid-21st Century would not be kind to the current incarnation and make-up of the Republican Party.
I think Eisenhower is a seriously-underrated President whom today's republic-can of assorted nuts would do well to emulate. They've devolved so far they are loathe to evoke him, let alone heed his counsel. They've wandered so far afield that they even need to smear their gaudy lipstick on Reagan's desiccated corpse, pretending he never cut 'n ran form a terrorist attack, traded arms to the folks that slaughtered US marines, and pushed through humanitarian immigration reform. For Republicans, there is a corollary to Santayana's "Those who do not know history's mistakes are doomed to repeat them." "Those who reject the achievements of their own history are doomed to achieve none themselves."
In addition to using troops to integrate the Little Rock school....something the Right today would call "Federal tyranny".....Ike would have been called a "Marxist peacenik" by them for these- "Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid. "----Dwight Eisenhower, letter to his brother Edgar, 1954 "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."---DDE
There is no question that the GOP face an up hill battle for winning any future presidential elections due to increasing number of people dependent on federal government hand outs and the massive voter fraud that takes place in the metro areas of the battle ground states. But conservatives are now tremendously energized in their pockets of influence and surely will increase their house numbers and take the majority in the Senate after the 2014 elections. Progressives have no idea how alarmed conservatives and libertarians have become over the corruption and totalitarian tendencies the Obama regime has brought to our country. People that create the jobs and pay the taxes have seen enough. Progressives have become "Chicken Little" and have no real ideas how to govern other than by lying or intimidation.
The GOP has welcomed all manner of trash into their party including the neoconservatives who were formerly Democrat-leaning. There are just some groups (including the Southern bigots and the Moral Majority types) that I wish the GOP would make an effort to hold onto so they don't seep back into the Democrat Party.
1. I saw numbers that showed on the current demographic trajectory for Republicans, the Democratic Nominee could lose 24% of the white vote...and still win the Presidency. 2. Interesting you contradict your pessimism in the first part (all those "free-loaders" costing the GOP national elections).....with optimistm in the second part (all those fed-up conservatives and libertarians uniting to control Congress). Were the fed-up conservatives and libertarians not around LAST YEAR?....if so, why did the GOP not only lose the Presidency....but lose seats in the Senate and even lose a net 8 seats in the House (though obviously not the majority)????
No excuse...but Nixon and the 70s Republicans had little choice. With the Democrats embracing civil rights and exorcising out the George Wallace contingent....that left little for the GOP to run on except their laissez-faire capitalism and being "anti-Communist". Problem was Nixon had opened up China and Ford was doing the SALT talks and detente...so even the anti-Commie stuff was hackneyed. The only way (they thought) to remain a national party was to embrace the racists in the South and the Moral Majority types. Eschewing traditional GOP support for civil rights...and the libertarian even social liberal aspects of the Party (remember a LOT of Republicans were pro-choice). Blastting affirmitive action, pushing 'school choice' (i.e. "Getting your kids out of that inhegrated school"), "urban crime", "welfare mothers driving Cadillacs" (Notice they didn't drive Buicks or Crown Vics?)....all the code-words and "hints" the racists wanted to hear. Then leaping on the "moral decline in America since the Sexual Revolution" and linking arms with American Taliban like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson......talking "Getting Government off your back...and into THEIR uterus!" (as they still do today in Texas).
It's astounding that the crackpots in today's GOP revile the values of Ike, not an ostentatiously religious man, but one who embraced the nation's Christian ethos with as much devotion as today's loudmouth sanctimonious frauds reject it. The ideological fanatics would rather further enrich the corporate elite before whom they grovel than feed the hungry. Reference to Eisenhower's Interstate Highway System, NASA, or National Defense Education Act would have them mindlessly screeching, "Big Gumbmint Waste!" Along with Nixon's proposed national healthcare plan or Reagan's path to citizenship, Eisenhower's prescient initiatives provide ample historical testament to what extreme, myopic nihilists today's clueless berserkers have become.
I'd settle for a party that works for the will of the people instead of a platform. And I'm not talking about making up issues to divide the people, I'm talking about issues that are on the minds of the majority of Americans. Health care, livable wages, corruption in government, a crooked political process, shipping jobs overseas, the obscene gap between the rich and poor, that kind of stuff. - - - Updated - - - BTW Natty - nice thread.
This was Ronald Reagan's record as Governor of California....he wouldn't poll TWO percent in a current GOP Presidential Primary- 1. He increased state spending by 177% 2. He increased state taxes by 30% of the state general fund. 3. He blocked corporate development of nature trails. 4. He blocked the building of new dams. 5. He signed legislation creating an "Air Resources Board", leading to the nation's first tailpipe emissions standards. 6. He signed one of the nation's most liberal abortion rights bill. 7. He opposed a ballot initiative that would have permitted the firing of teachers for being gay. 8. He signed a bill granting amnesty to illegal immigrants.
And that is why the GOP will survive, because the only consistent principle of the party is to seek power for the sake of power, the rest is window dressing to attract the sheep. So the evangelical, anti-choice, anti-gay, racist undertones of the GOP will be discarded as soon as they fail to deliver more votes than they cost the party. But there will be a period where those policies do fail to put the GOP in power or near power, and just because they reboot the party doesn't mean they undo the loyalty that voters have built to the Democratic Party, it will take decades for the GOP to become competitive among blacks or hispanics or asians, and unwinding the racist crap will cost them white votes, because the racist part of the base will feel abandoned as the party begins to pander to Hispanics. And just because the party begins to pander to Hispanics, doesn't mean they sweep Hispanics in the next election, it will take decades to become competitive there. In the meantime, even though the area where the old southern strategy works will be shrinking, there will still be areas where it works, and the people from these areas will dominate the party, so there will be some lag. And that's the good news, people vote for Democrats in tough economic times and things improve, then when times get better they vote Republican, and then things get bad, each party sets the table for the other party.
What conservatives, Republicans and Libertarians do does not really matter. All these similar minded people will rally behind any candidate in 2014 and 2016 that exposes and tells the American people the truth about the Democratic party. The Democratic party has put the United States into a Constitutional crisis with their totalitarian use of government (IRS, EPA, NSA etc). The MSM is protecting the Democrats but the truth is spreading like wild fire in spite of it. We just need someone that has the courage and ability to articulate what is really happening.
Whatever the result, any significant parties in addition to the two significant parties in the American two-party system are destructive of that system, by definition and by experience, if you are a linguistic anarchist and not persuaded by the bold.
How are libertarians going to "rally" behind a candidate that wants to ban abortion? or how will social conservatives going to "rally" behind a libertarian candidate who doesn't want to ban abortion? How will libertarians "rally" behind a candidate who wants to bomb Iran to "stop it from going nuclear"? Or how will neo-cons, Hawks, and the "Israel Right or Wrong" crowd back a candidate who DOESN'T want to start a new war in the Middle East?
A Democratic Party that is systematically setting up a totalitarian state through all its public institutions that will persecute conservatives, libertarians and Republicans will be the impetus that over rides all other factors. The Democratic Party and all their liberal constituencies are taking the United States into a government controlled political correctness type of police state that is just plain unrecognizable to most Americans. The two biggest problems are that the MSM is like state sponsored media that is being complicit in all this and that a large percentage of the population is too stupid to realize it. This is why I say that the main issue in all future political campaigns run by people on the right has to be about this issue and virtually nothing else. America has got to become America again.
If hating the Democratic Party was enough.....Mitt Romney would be President and Mitch McConnell the Senator MAJORITY Leader today.
The irony of course is that the candidate the Dems will almost surely nominate voted to "start a war"in the Middle East. If Paul gets the nod,which I am not convinced of by any means,but for the sake of argument say he is,he can attack Hillary as a dreaded "neocon".
Rand Paul has to appeal to the Neo-cons and "Christian Zionists" to win the GOP nomination....he can't diss them or even ignore them and stick to his Dad's neo-isolationism. S'why he made his pilgrimage to Israel last year to kiss Netanyahu's ring. He will HAVE to promise to "get tough with Iran"...and thus undercut all the anti-interventionism claims of his libertarian supporters. And that will be months before the General Election....and if he tries to backpedal on that, he'll get painted as a flip-flopper and lose the "integrity" angle his (actually his dad's) supporter claim for him. - - - Updated - - - Not my point. You claimed that hatred of "What Obama and the Democrats are doing"...will result in a unificationn of conservatives and libertarians and result in victory in 2014 and 2016? Okay....why didn't that happen LAST year???
Denying that John McCain or Willard Romney was eligible to serve as president was as dirty as you could get, but I can't decide which you are referencing. Which alienates GOP diehards who cannot bring themselves to admit that the Bush's contrived, $2.2 trillion, nation-building fiasco was a monumental disaster, whilst Clinton can admit to having made the mistake of falling for the fraudulent hype of a Republican regime in what will then be the distant past, 2003. That naïveté may have won Senator Obama the Democratic nomination in 2008, but Paul wasn't there to vote against Bush's blunder and it will hardly be a pressing issue in 2016.
Still hoping the Republicans become a party of true political conservatism, which means severing the evangelical and moral majority baggage. Actually, I would prefer they go a libertarian social stance conservative fiscal and defense route. That way they actually are a viable option for me to vote for. Otherwise, they will remain the party of the bible and the rich which means I have zero incentive to vote for them as the concerns of the religious and the rich are not the concerns of a non-rich atheist.
If Rand Paul criticizes Bush or the Iraq War....he'll never make it out of the GOP Primaries with anything more than 10% of the delegates. Every neo-con on Fox News (Kristol, Krauthammer) will do endless articles on "Rand would let the Jihadists take over"....ditto Rush, Hannity, Mark Levin, etc. Then he'd have to backpedal or flip-flop and say "No,no....I'd LOVE to bomb Iran"...and show to his Dad's Cultists that "He's not the True Heir!"....or those folks would have to show they are hypocrites who will follow Rand simply due to his last name. - - - Updated - - - The likely "end game" for the GOP after it re-forms itself.....but...it's going to take a couple more national election ass-whupping for them to do that kind of "purge" of their nutters and hawks.
I see the two major parties giving way to a new political parties listed below Green Party: Made up of Greens, liberal democrats, socialists Independent Party: Made up of moderates from both parties and independent moderates Constitution Party: Made up of Christian Conservatives Libertarian Party: Made up of Libertarians from both parties as well as independent Libertarians and the Libertarian Party itself. Falconist Party: Made up of people who are right-wing on social issues but left wing on fiscal and economic issues from both parties as well as people of this persuasion.
