20 days from the 2020 vote……
What Happened To The Moderate Republican?
That was a question I was asked recently by a friend and it got me to thinking about the disappearance of this political beast.
Back in the Dark Ages of American politics there use to be moderate Repubs and yes even some they would call “liberal” Repubs….those days are gone and it looks like for good.
Over a decade ago here on IST I looked at moderate/liberal Republicans…….https://lobotero.com/2009/07/17/is-there-a-liberal-republican/
That post set up what to look for in a Repub candidate to see if they pass the test…..today’s crop there is NO such thing…..plenty of Neocons that are against Trump policies but that is because they loss control of the party not a change in stands.
The site fivethirtyeight.com has taken a look at the lack of moderate Repubs…..
So if Republicans were to lose on that scale — the House, the Senate and the presidency — that raises the question: Would the GOP change course?
This is a question I’ve thought about a lot, and it’s one of the reasons why I argue in my book, “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop,” that America’s two-party system is failing us. With the two parties now fully nationalized, deeply sorted by geography and culture, and locked in a tightly contested, zero-sum battle over “the soul of the nation” and the “American way of life,” it’s nearly impossible to break that cycle. And so I think it’s unlikely that Republicans will become more moderate even if they were to take the shellacking I’ve outlined above.
The problem is that political parties are not singular entities capable of easily changing course. They are, instead, a loose coalition of office-holders, interest groups, donors, activists, media personalities and many others, all jockeying and competing for power. Think of a giant tug of war in which all the tugs have been toward more extreme and more confrontational versions of the party.
Why There Are So Few Moderate Republicans Left
I do not see a change for the GOP no matter the outcome of the vote in 2020….there still way too many haters for the party to change…..but a better question is…will the GOP survive 2020?
https://lobotero.com/2020/09/14/what-has-happened-to-the-gop-2/
Some believe that the GOP can redeem itself when Trump leaves office……I am not one of them…..
But defeat — no matter how large or ignominious— probably won’t redeem the GOP, nor cure it of its Trumpist excesses.
A landslide victory for Democratic candidate Joe Biden “would turn the Trump era of nihilism, tribalism, and cruelty into a cautionary tale of extremism, illiberalism, and, above all, failure,” Andrew Sullivan wrote last week. He added: “And a landslide is the only thing that can possibly, finally break the far right fever that has destroyed the GOP as a legitimate right-of-center political party, and turned it into a paranoid, media-driven, fact-free festival of fear and animus.”
https://theweek.com/articles/943139/gop-ever-redeem-itself
What are your thoughts?
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”