In Which I Think Andrew Samwick Misses the Point...

I am not concern trolling--that is, I am almost certainly that I am not consciously concern trolling--but I think Andrew Samwick misses the point when he writes:

The Right Wing Strategy | Capital Gains and Games: I suspect it will take months or even years for those on the political and ideological Right to map out a strategy to compete in national elections after two sound defeats in 2006 and 2008. The first step has been to assign blame.... Christie Todd Whitman in yesterday's Washington Post lays the blame on "social fundamentalists." I don't know how constructive that is -- each Party has a base, and if you alienate the base, you have to make inroads substantially across the political center to make up for it. The most liberal Republican he could have picked for his running mate would have been Whitman herself. I don't think that ticket would have run any better against Obama-Biden this year...

Andrew Samwick has no influence on how the next Republican presidential and congressional candidates will campaign. But he does have the potential to have considerable impact on how those Republican members of congress (and perhaps presidents) govern: to push them toward governing in a constructive conservative manner--rather than be, say, a rerun of Gingrich-Armey-DeLay-Boehner-Dole-Lott-McConnell-Bush governance, which has been "conservative" only in its social policy.

So I want to hear something very different from Andrew this winter: I want to hear what ideas and policies the Republican Party could serve as a carrier for that would make America a better country and the world a better world, and I want to hear how all of us can help make the Republican Party the carrier of those ideas--rather than the ideas of, say, National Review, The Weekly Standard, and Rush Limbaugh, to name three sets that America and the world would be better off without.

Comments

[jimbo]

The public face of the GOP is dominated by assholes. That's the first problem they need to address to rebuild the party. Unpleasant dishonesty is not the basis for broader public support.

[tjallen]

Even without the social conservatives, won't the Republicans still be for tax cuts, de-socialization (which they call privatization), a less-progressive tax system, and smaller government?

Are the Republicans more wedded to the military (Pentagon and companies) than the Dems? That sure won't change quickly, and that isn't based on the social conservatives. So Republican 'social support' of the military complex continues.

Republicans have become as connected to 'deficit spending' as Democrats are to 'tax and spend' - the truth underlying those crude characterization won't change.

So the above comprises a partial list of 'socially neutral' Republican principles, without any mention of abortion, life, immigration, God, church, south, etc. not to mention recent Republican meanness and hypocrisy. If you wanted to face a socially neutral Republican party, that's my beginning of a characterization. But I don't see how the Republicans could so easily shake the fleas from its carcass.

[justsayin]

We get a sense of the Republican social soul from this AP headline:

Obama Election Spurs Race Crimes Around Country

with these particularly unsettling details:

"Second- and third-grade students on a school bus in Rexburg, Idaho, chanted "assassinate Obama," a district official said."

"At Standish, Maine, a sign inside the Oak Hill General Store read: "Osama Obama Shotgun Pool." Customers could sign up to bet $1 on a date when Obama would be killed. "Stabbing, shooting, roadside bombs, they all count," the sign said. At the bottom of the marker board was written "Let's hope someone wins." "

And in my view McCain gets to own some of this by his divisive, disrespectful, all negative all the time smear campaign.

[Lord]

Arnold on This Week has many valuable things to say, not that anyone in the party will listen to him.

[Blissex]

«what ideas and policies the Republican Party could serve as a carrier for that would make America a better country and the world a better world» That's not the goal of the Republicans: it is to make things better for the deserving, productive, minority of WINNERS and to make sure that the parasitical, exploitative majority of LOSERS get punished. The Republican culture is like that of most Latin American ones, where government protects the interests of a small minority of superior persons (usually lighter skinned) and puts down the majority of disgusting untermensch (usually darker skinned). Assuming that everybody should want to make "make America a better country and the world a better world" is just cultural imperialism, imposing one's values on others -- there are many americans whose values include a revulsion against regarding most of their co-residents, never mind the rest of the world, as deserving of respect and comraderie.

[Charles]

The one policy that the so-called "conservative" movement could implement that would benefit the country would be joining the Cistercian order.

At the very least, that step would diminish the number of Republicans being indicted for bribe-taking, busted with congressional pages, playing footsy in the bathroom, and so on.

[Neil B]

The resurgent and reformed conservatives could start by adopting principles of honest and consistent government minimalism, and not for the purpose of benefiting their upper-income base (as GWB put it "the haves, and the have-mores. I call 'em my base.") One example: drop the phony pretense that any capital gains tax rate being lower, other than to index for inflation or to reward genuine initial investment, is a fraud and a wasted rent that other taxpayers have to foot. And how ironic, that rich-on-welfare, spreading the wealth upwards policy coming from the Right.

delver in VA

[johne]

"Assuming that everybody should want to make "make America a better country and the world a better world" is just cultural imperialism...."

I lived a number of years in South America and observed that a non-trivial number of the political elite there feel that the imperatives of patriotism as well as the demands of simple Christianity (the cultural equivalent of wanting a better world) require that they continue to shoulder the burden of guiding their country through the perils that beset it, even knowing that the combined effects of ignorance, baseless idealism, and misleading propaganda may make a majority of their fellow-countrymen impute the worst of motives to any action that they are forced to undertake.

That such a calling also provides these patriots with personal opportunities is as providence may dispose, and this circumstance cannot provide a reason that they should renounce their worldly obligations, any more than it could do so for the Creole aristocracy that mostly founded their republics.

It is more or less exactly the same point of view that holds sway in the upper ranks of W's party, with its most important stronghold now in states that were dominated by an aristocracy of very similar world-view. And both in South America and here, there are no lack of lower order citizens who will defend this stance, and rationalize their government's abuse of power, or pilfering of the public treasury.

Experience shows that such a system is at least as stable as any currently in existence. To assume that it will disappear on its own, let alone shrivel under the light of reason or the example of good governance under other modes, is a pipe dream, as going on two centuries of Latin independence should show.

[Blissex]

«That such a calling also provides these patriots with personal opportunities is as providence may dispose, and this circumstance cannot provide a reason that they should renounce their worldly obligations, any more than it could do so for the Creole aristocracy that mostly founded their republics.

It is more or less exactly the same point of view that holds sway in the upper ranks of W's party, with its most important stronghold now in states that were dominated by an aristocracy of very similar world-view. And both in South America and here, there are no lack of lower order citizens who will defend this stance, and rationalize their government's abuse of power, or pilfering of the public treasury.»

Great minds think alike! (mine and yours, Criollo aristos and Republican have-mores, useful idiot voters in South and North America). :-)

[Bob Mullen]

There is an emerging sense that we need an opposition party that is not brain-dead. So we hope the Republicans will come to their senses.

But were not the Democrats brain-dead when they went along with the war, the patriot act, gitmo, and the rest? Even after they had a majority in the house?