Saving Conservatism from the conservatives

[Gutenberg]

Interesting blog post by Jennifer Rubin in which she argues that the Reagan conservatives have been too conservative with conservatism, not allowing the movement to change with the times, and that the GOP needs to overthrow the Reaganites and tax Talibans like Grover Norquist if it wants to prosper.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/righ...p/?hpid=z2

However--is the younger guard even more doctrinaire than the old guard, and would handing the party over to the Ryans, Rubios and Jindals turn even more voters away? I think so.

[hal]

Very interesting piece... I suspect that this problem in the Repub party is just a small subset of a larger issue - that baby boomer old guard EVERYWHERE is reluctant to cede power...

The repub issue is just fascinating... sure it's amusing to a lefty, but when you look at it seriously, it's one heck of a problem. I have no idea how they get past this low...

[davester]

This means coming to terms with the 21st century electorate, attending to the middle class pinched by stagnant wages and rising expenses, and developing a sober brand of internationalism to defend American interests. It means mastering new and old media and avoiding the trap of preaching to the choir. It means moving from the abstract to the specific and re-balancing power between an executive branch exceeding its proper authority and a Congress that has ceded traditional prerogatives. And it means finding fresher faces and more engaging voices to articulate the vision and agenda of the new right.

Good luck with any of that. The republican party seems to be heading in the opposite direction, led by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. All they seem to want these days is jam up the works and diss any of the non-crazy conservatives (I'm thinking Huntsman and Christie here).

[Ted King]

IOW, the old Republican coalition is dying (figuratively and literally - literally since a huge part of the Republican coalition are elderly whites), so they have to build a new coalition and that coalition has to have more women, brown people and young people.

It seems obvious... except that the old coalition is still powerful enough to elect a majority to the House of Representatives and probably will again in 2014 even if they don't change their positions very much. They also have a good shot at taking over the Senate in spite of not changing their their positions very much. I say not changing their positions "very much" because in low turnout midterm elections, old white people make up the electorate way disproportionately (that is the fault of the people who don't vote, not the people who do) and thus to keep the House and win the Senate in the next election the Republicans only have to tweak their positions a bit (e.g., compromise on immigration) to pick up just a bit more support from the demographics that went more heavily with Democrats in the last election. The ideological rigidity of the Republican old white base keeps them from being able to shift too rapidly to attract more of those demographic groups, but they only need to shift a bit to be successful in the next election without facing the prospect of losing big chunks from their coalition.*


*Of course, that is a hunch on my part. I hope I am wrong and there is either a high turn-out for a mid-term election or people are more turned off by Republican positions in general than I think they will be.

[SteveG]

Non-crazy conservatives are just as wrong.

[Ca Bob]

That quote Davester uses could be translated to a shorter phrase: Act like a Democrat.

[RgrF]

When it comes to minorities the Republican Party is just plain schizophrenic.

"On Sunday, former Bush press secretary Dana Perino, a regular on Fox News, composed a much-quoted tweet that sums up the worst about this false Jesus Christ/Cesar Chavez dichotomy. “I thought the Chavez-google thing was a hoax or an early April Fool’s Day prank,” she tweeted. “Are they just going to leave that up there all day?”

It’s hard to imagine a world view where celebrating the life of Cesar Chavez is considered a hoax. Unless of course you live in Fox Nation, birthplace of the ginned-up “War on Christmas.” (It was only a matter of time before this evolved into a “War on Christ.”)

Monday morning, conservative commentator Lou Dobbs chimed in, tweeting, “Google’s insensitivity and hubris rising to new heights.” wrote:

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me...4833.story - LATimes (Rupert's new takeover target)

URL link doesn't seem to be working.

[decay]

if you read much online commentary, non-conservatives are libtards.

[Mac-A-Matic]

Steve G. wrote:
Non-crazy conservatives are just as wrong.

More classic examples of the attitude that drives this impasse in politics, government and society.

[RgrF]

This is no way to spend your birthday.