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Thread: Today's Republican Party is....

  1. #271
    Senior Member Flixy's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by LittleFuzzy View Post
    Since almost all voting is done for local representatives and the few bits that aren't are still running for individuals, does it really matter? Again, you don't seem to really grasp the function of parties in the US system.
    So what exactly is the function of parties in the US system? I mean, if your parties are too divergent, and overlap eachother, what is the point of it?
    Keep on keepin' the beat alive!

  2. #272
    Stingy DM Veldan Rath's Avatar
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    To keep other parties out.
    Brevior saltare cum deformibus viris est vita

  3. #273
    Quote Originally Posted by Flixy View Post
    So what exactly is the function of parties in the US system? I mean, if your parties are too divergent, and overlap eachother, what is the point of it?
    Well different sets get different things but if I had to sum 'em all up I'd say that it's to build the broadest possible semi-permanent coalition that can support each others' political goals. But GGT is pretty firmly focused on just the minimally-involved voter's perspective and from that perspective parties don't do much at all. For the individual voter, one that is passive outside the election booth, coalitions are meaningless, it's not something they have any input on and further they get next to no view of it.
    Last night as I lay in bed, looking up at the stars, I thought, “Where the hell is my ceiling?"

  4. #274
    Quote Originally Posted by LittleFuzzy View Post
    Since almost all voting is done for local representatives and the few bits that aren't are still running for individuals, does it really matter? Again, you don't seem to really grasp the function of parties in the US system.
    Yes, it matters. I think this is advanced posturing, anticipating national elections of 2016. Not so much the function of parties, but their brand.

  5. #275
    Quote Originally Posted by LittleFuzzy View Post
    Well different sets get different things but if I had to sum 'em all up I'd say that it's to build the broadest possible semi-permanent coalition that can support each others' political goals. But GGT is pretty firmly focused on just the minimally-involved voter's perspective and from that perspective parties don't do much at all. For the individual voter, one that is passive outside the election booth, coalitions are meaningless, it's not something they have any input on and further they get next to no view of it.
    That minimally involved voter, or passive voter doesn't have to be "part" of any coalition. The parties will define that for them, so to speak. That's why this early in-fighting between Republicans seems important. They're trying to define the party and coalesce its base, faced with existing suspicions of "government" and "taxation".....while funding military/national defense, and protections for individual freedoms, privacy, and liberty.

    I think this is pretty big. Which faction will define the heart of the GOP, and garner the most votes?

  6. #276
    Quote Originally Posted by GGT View Post
    Yes, it matters. I think this is advanced posturing, anticipating national elections of 2016. Not so much the function of parties, but their brand.
    Ok yeah, sure, probably is what's going on, potential candidates posturing and creating their personal brands. So why were you talking about the party?
    Last night as I lay in bed, looking up at the stars, I thought, “Where the hell is my ceiling?"

  7. #277
    Uh, because candidates will run as Republicans under the party brand. If they continue their internal schism, state primaries could be an interesting fight for defining the national brand. Conservatives vs Neo-conservatives, Tea Party vs establishment RNC, states vs feds.

  8. #278
    But that's going on every primary race.
    Last night as I lay in bed, looking up at the stars, I thought, “Where the hell is my ceiling?"

  9. #279
    Voters don't pay much attention until national elections, as you inferred. Meanwhile, state Republicans are fighting to define the national Party. I think it's interesting and illuminating to watch a northeastern (R) Governor in a "blue" state banter back-and-forth with a southern (R) Senator from a "red" state. It puts pressure on what "the Republican base" actually means.

  10. #280
    Would you prefer to have regional parties, like in India, that don't event pretend to resolve national problems and each try to get "theirs"?
    Hope is the denial of reality

  11. #281

  12. #282
    Quote Originally Posted by GGT View Post
    Voters don't pay much attention until national elections, as you inferred. Meanwhile, state Republicans are fighting to define the national Party. I think it's interesting and illuminating to watch a northeastern (R) Governor in a "blue" state banter back-and-forth with a southern (R) Senator from a "red" state. It puts pressure on what "the Republican base" actually means.
    Do you think the Democratic party doesn't do this? Have you ever seen compared a Texas Democrat to a California Democrat?

  13. #283
    Quote Originally Posted by Wraith View Post
    Do you think the Democratic party doesn't do this? Have you ever seen compared a Texas Democrat to a California Democrat?
    Sure, but this is thread is about the Republican Party.

    Both parties have conservative, moderate, or liberal members in their ranks, but today's (R) party is the one with the identity Crisis. Even after their "post-mortum autopsy" of '12 there's still no consensus among House Republicans, Boehner sucks as majority leader, and Senate Republicans (even McCain!) are calling foul against their 'fellow' party members acting like dolts.

  14. #284
    Quote Originally Posted by GGT View Post
    Sure, but this is thread is about the Republican Party.

    Both parties have conservative, moderate, or liberal members in their ranks, but today's (R) party is the one with the identity Crisis. Even after their "post-mortum autopsy" of '12 there's still no consensus among House Republicans, Boehner sucks as majority leader, and Senate Republicans (even McCain!) are calling foul against their 'fellow' party members acting like dolts.
    Well yeah. They're the party that was in power but lost it and hasn't been able to regain it. We saw the exact same thing from the Democrats from 2002 through 2006-7. It'll continue until the GOP starts winning again at which point whatever philosophy most of the winners or the biggest winners will be declared the New Way whether or not it is particularly different from the last time and the Dems will start their turn through the cycle again. It's how US politics have gone since the 70s, it's our Communication Age model.
    Last night as I lay in bed, looking up at the stars, I thought, “Where the hell is my ceiling?"

  15. #285
    Quote Originally Posted by LittleFuzzy View Post
    Well yeah. They're the party that was in power but lost it and hasn't been able to regain it. We saw the exact same thing from the Democrats from 2002 through 2006-7. It'll continue until the GOP starts winning again at which point

    whatever philosophy most of the winners or the biggest winners will be declared the New Way

    whether or not it is particularly different from the last time and the Dems will start their turn through the cycle again. It's how US politics have gone since the 70s, it's our Communication Age model.
    You're not curious about *whatever philosophy* wins out, or what the (R) New Way might mean?

    I'm also not convinced this is "the exact same thing" we saw from Democrats during the same time frame. They didn't cede to their extremist fringe, as a party, like Republicans did.

  16. #286
    Time for a bump. Say, how's the Republican Party looking these days? Does their internal crisis mean a countdown to government shut down...or will they self-destruct first?

  17. #287
    "In a field where an overlooked bug could cost millions, you want people who will speak their minds, even if they’re sometimes obnoxious about it."

  18. #288
    I should have stopped reading the piece after I saw it was appearing to compare/make equivalencies between apples, oranges, and wax totchkes. Sadly I persevered. One whole paragraph where I decided to stop reading after "if the Senate and President Obama agree to defund the Affordable Health Care Act, which is the law of the land and cannot be defunded." If a writer wants to discuss reality, I'll give it a shot. If you're going to post something that is nothing but partisan ranting and fantasizing, could you provide a note to that effect?
    Last night as I lay in bed, looking up at the stars, I thought, “Where the hell is my ceiling?"

  19. #289
    Quote Originally Posted by GGT View Post
    Time for a bump. Say, how's the Republican Party looking these days? Does their internal crisis mean a countdown to government shut down...or will they self-destruct first?
    I would rather they right Obamacare in the grass roots, which is where I'm fighting it.

    One insight:

    September 21, 2013
    Good Populism, Bad Populism
    By ROSS DOUTHAT

    HERE’S the good news for Republicans: The party now has a faction committed to learning real lessons from the 2012 defeat, breaking with the right’s stale policy consensus and embracing new ideas on a range of issues, from foreign policy to middle-class taxes, the drug war to banking reform.

    Here’s the bad news for Republicans: The party also has a faction committed to a reckless, pointless budget brinkmanship, which creates a perpetual cycle of outrage and disillusionment among conservatives and leaves Washington lurching from one manufactured crisis to the next.

    Here’s the strange news for Republicans: These two factions are actually one and the same.

    The media tend to assume that moderation and reform are essentially synonymous. But ever since Mitt Romney lost last November, most of the genuine policy innovation on the right has come from the party’s populist, Tea Party-affiliated wing. The key figure has been Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, whose antiwar conservatism has kicked off a post-Iraq foreign policy debate that the party desperately needed, and whose forays into issues like sentencing reform and drug policy have raised the possibility of a national Republican Party that’s smart as well as tough on crime.

    But it hasn’t just been Paul turning populism into policy. This spring, Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, nobody’s idea of a moderate, became the Republican face of a financial reform effort aimed at addressing the problem of “too big to fail” banks. And then just last week, Paul’s frequent ally Mike Lee, the junior senator from Utah, took the floor at the American Enterprise Institute to offer a tax-reform proposal that would actually help middle-class families rather than mostly cut taxes on the investor class.

    The Lee proposal is a particularly noteworthy breakthrough. Its centerpiece, a large expansion of the child tax credit, is an example of how social conservatism could seek to assist families instead of just lecturing them — by addressing the rising cost of child rearing, the stress wage stagnation puts on parents, and the link between family instability and socioeconomic disarray. This makes it the first major Republican tax proposal in years that actually seems tailored to contemporary challenges rather than to the economic climate of 1979.

    But despite the best efforts of the Lee tax plan’s admirers, the party’s populists didn’t make headlines last week on that issue. Instead, Lee and Paul were in the news — with the ubiquitous, less innovative junior senator from Texas, Ted Cruz — because they’re part of the so-called “defund Obamacare” effort, an elaborate game of make-believe in which Republicans are supposed to pretend, for the sake of political leverage, that they’ll actually shut down the government if the president refuses to go along with the repeal of his own signature legislative achievement. (How Republicans gain leverage by threatening a shutdown they’d be blamed for has never been adequately explained.)

    Except that the game isn’t make-believe to the many conservative voters who have been suckered into actually believing that the health care law could be rolled back tomorrow if only Republicans would just stop “surrendering” and use the power of True Conservatism to bend the White House to their will. This is what makes the defund movement’s style of populism so depressing: In addition to throwing sand into the gears of government for no clear purpose, it’s effectively deceiving precisely the voters that it claims to represent.

    Hence the widespread view — shared by concerned liberals, chin-stroking moderates, and many Congressional Republicans, I’m sure — that Cruz and Paul and Lee and their compatriots need to be crushed for the Republican Party to become effective and responsible again.

    But the trouble is that if John Boehner and Mitch McConnell could somehow crush the populists (and they can’t), they would also be crushing the best hope for conservative policy reform. That’s because, for now at least, the same incentives that shape the “bad populism” of the defund movement are also shaping the “good populism” that wants to end farm subsidies or reform drug sentencing or break up banks or cut taxes on families.

    Their willingness to engage in theatrical confrontations with President Obama, for instance, is part of what lends figures like Paul and Lee and Vitter the credibility to experiment with ideas from outside the Reagan-era box. And their arm’s-length relationship to Wall Street and K Street makes them both more irresponsible on issues like a government shutdown and more open to new ideas on taxes, financial reform, corporate welfare, etc.

    Obviously Republicans should be seeking a way to have the good without the bad: the innovation without the risky brinkmanship, the fresh ideas without the staged confrontations.

    But for now, they’re stuck dealing with a populism that resembles Homer Simpson’s description of his beloved beer: It’s both the cause of, and the solution to, all of their problems.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/op...-populism.html

  20. #290
    Quote Originally Posted by Dreadnaught View Post
    I would rather they right Obamacare in the grass roots, which is where I'm fighting it.
    Does that mean you're a Ted Cruz fan? "Grass roots" doesn't mean the same thing to everyone -- especially not within the Republican Party.

    As for the Affordable Health Care Act, aka Obamacare --- that was designed around a conservative initiative, with support from Republicans and right-leaning Think Tanks ( like The Heritage Foundation). It's officially Law, that withstood challenges all the way to the Supreme Court. House attempts to repeal it over 40 times is the biggest waste of congressional time in recent memory. Using it as political leverage isn't just stupid, but destructive.

    Better ways to tweak and improve the Law, from the "grassroots", will only happen during/after its implementation.

  21. #291
    Quote Originally Posted by GGT View Post
    with support from Republicans and right-leaning Think Tanks
    That's like saying that Republicans supported the 1986 immigration amnesty, and thus they support amnesty today.

    The law is an abomination.

  22. #292
    Quote Originally Posted by Dreadnaught View Post
    That's like saying that Republicans supported the 1986 immigration amnesty, and thus they support amnesty today.

    The law is an abomination.
    Wait, did you do a quick-edit?

  23. #293
    Senior Member Flixy's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Dreadnaught View Post
    That's like saying that Republicans supported the 1986 immigration amnesty, and thus they support amnesty today.

    The law is an abomination.
    It's not a moot point, it's also like saying 'they used to support it, until their opponents supported it and now they hate it'. Depends on context, of course. But it's not invalid to begin with. It's sometimes hard to take a politician seriously if he's railing against something eerily similar to something he supported not that long ago, after all. Gives reason to look at the motives for changing it, anyway. For example, if I read about the republicans supporting immigration amnesty in the past, and now oppose it, I'd like to know what their reasons for chancing were - was it actually a bad idea to begin with, or are they now just pandering votes by being tough on immigration?
    Keep on keepin' the beat alive!

  24. #294
    Immigration is the one topic where most politicians pander for votes, and your country's politicians aren't exactly an exception to that.
    Hope is the denial of reality

  25. #295
    Senior Member Flixy's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Loki View Post
    Immigration is the one topic where most politicians pander for votes, and your country's politicians aren't exactly an exception to that.
    No kidding, far from it. Especially since ~2000 it's the #1 pander point over here. Hence, when over here a politician does a full 180 on immigration, unless he gives a good reason for changing his opinion (new facts, realising his old position was actually wrong, or that his old position was pandering) I'm going to assume it was to woo voters instead of doing what he thinks is right for the country. Your point being? My previous post was about politicians in general, not trying to claim anything about US politicians.
    Keep on keepin' the beat alive!

  26. #296
    Some Republicans seems hell bent on "wooing votes" from a minority of a minority, and quite willing to put their personal political ambitions ahead of governing. Unfortunately, their internal 'civil war' is spilling into the debt ceiling (again) and threatens to harm the whole nation.

  27. #297
    Senior Member Flixy's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by GGT View Post
    Some Republicans seems hell bent on "wooing votes" from a minority of a minority, and quite willing to put their personal political ambitions ahead of governing. Unfortunately, their internal 'civil war' is spilling into the debt ceiling (again) and threatens to harm the whole nation.
    Yeah, it's not like Democrats don't woo voters, and put that ahead of governing. They just pander to different groups. Unions come to mind, raising retirement age..
    Keep on keepin' the beat alive!

  28. #298
    Quote Originally Posted by Flixy View Post
    It's not a moot point, it's also like saying 'they used to support it, until their opponents supported it and now they hate it'. Depends on context, of course. But it's not invalid to begin with. It's sometimes hard to take a politician seriously if he's railing against something eerily similar to something he supported not that long ago, after all. Gives reason to look at the motives for changing it, anyway. For example, if I read about the republicans supporting immigration amnesty in the past, and now oppose it, I'd like to know what their reasons for chancing were - was it actually a bad idea to begin with, or are they now just pandering votes by being tough on immigration?
    GGT is referring to a specific idea (compulsory insurance) that a very few right-wing think tanks supported about 15 years ago. Several years later, a moderate governor in a left-wing state (Mitt Romney) used this idea as part of a health plan that he passed with overwhelming Democratic support in his state. The plan was pretty widely opposed by right-wingers across the US.

    I don't think it's fair to say that an idea that came out of a corner of a think tank and got adopted into law by a large number of left-wingers really represents a core part of right-wing ideology.

  29. #299
    Quote Originally Posted by Dreadnaught View Post
    GGT is referring to a specific idea (compulsory insurance) that a very few right-wing think tanks supported about 15 years ago. Several years later, a moderate governor in a left-wing state (Mitt Romney) used this idea as part of a health plan that he passed with overwhelming Democratic support in his state. The plan was pretty widely opposed by right-wingers across the US.

    I don't think it's fair to say that an idea that came out of a corner of a think tank and got adopted into law by a large number of left-wingers really represents a core part of right-wing ideology.
    Compulsory insurance was lauded by Republicans and conservatives for years -- to "encourage accountability and self-reliance", have people participate with "skin-in-the-game", and reduce use of public safety nets and "welfare". They believed healthcare should be treated like any other private sector business, using "Free Market Capitalism", with supply-and-demand economic theories. They even cited those reasons for why The US has the best health system in the world!

    Main differences: that insurance was to remain within the for-profit, private Insurance Industry, and State legislatures would be the mandating and regulatory bodies. RomneyCare didn't pop up out of nowhere...it had been bandied about in (R) circles for decades. It sprouted from insurers trying Managed Care (HMO, PPO) to control costs, but only worked with lifetime caps and denials for pre-existing conditions, then dumping the sickest/costliest into state Medicaid pools (or SS disability, or Medicare). That's how a (R) governor with a (D) legislature came to an agreement, at the intersection between public and private.

    Sorry, Dread, your selective memory gets a .

  30. #300
    A corner of conservatives for years...who mostly switched away from the concept for about a decade before it became a foundation of Obamacare. Your tunnel vision to the mid 1990s gets a .

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