I write, fully agreeing with Will that the looming Trump nomination represents an institutional failure: A healthy patient would not have succumbed to the opportunistic infection that is the Trump candidacy.
The Republican Party is ill, and it has been ill for a long time. Republican leaders like Paul Ryan and Reince Priebus were presented with an impossible problem by the rise of Donald Trump. Trump tended to lose primaries where only registered Republicans could vote, and to win primaries open to anyone who cared to cast a ballot, except Texas and Ohio, the home states of rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich.
Once Trump had secured the nomination, leaders had to execute a complicated strategy of hoping to lose at the top of the ticket—without in any way being seen to sabotage a nominee they disliked and distrusted—while doing their utmost to protect the rest of the ticket. His ideological radicalism from to pushed the party in directions that made it unelectable at the presidential level. The Republican rank-and-file wanted more health care and less immigration; the GOP congressional leadership consistently offered exactly the opposite.
It opened the market opportunity that Donald Trump exploited. Arguably too, some of its members also allowed their personal animosity to Ted Cruz to sway them against supporting the last available alternative to Trump.
Not that Cruz helped. Yet in the end, Trump is a creature not of the congressional leadership, or the Republican elite, but of the voters upon whom any future center-right presidential candidacy must be based. One can disavow Trump. People who aspire to lead those voters must recognize that fact and respond to it.
Such intellectual movements can change the world, as the environmentalists have done, and the gay rights movement, and gun advocates. Libertarians have won arguments in the past deregulation of transportation , and they may win arguments in the future marijuana legalization. But while such movements can shape and bend politics, they cannot form it, because they are inspired by a unitary ideological doctrine and most human beings are not. True parties must be run by politicians, and politicians must make concessions to the refractory and contradictory demands of non-ideological voters.
You support one party or another, if you do, because you share enough beliefs with enough other people that you can accept all the ways that those people also differ with you. Trump for President campaign at the end of the last reporting period. I favored making a deal on universal health coverage. Universal health coverage is not a human right, but in an advanced wealthy democracy, the lack of it is a great human wrong. I thought it was futile to keep trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act once passed.
I favored monetary and fiscal stimulus to mitigate the Great Recession. But I look to the Republican party as the party more sympathetic to creative business enterprise, more respectful of work and achievement, more cautious about social experiments such as mass migration, and more committed to preserving American world leadership. So I stay. Not everybody needs to belong to a political party, of course. But politics in a democracy is inherently a team sport, and parties are the most important of the teams in the game.
Team sports never offer the option of playing alongside only people you like. To effect sustained political change, you have to build broad coalitions. Tea Party Republicans invested great energy in the first Obama term trying to drive out of the party all who dissented from their extremist minority program.
They largely succeeded. They built just what they wanted: an extremist minority party. Their hope—and Paul Ryan was very much a proponent of this fantasy—was that they could mobilize a majority coalition for a minority program. The mission ahead for conservative Americans is to open up their closed ideology enough to attract a majority that agrees on some things, but not on everything.
The flag-and-country themes of the GOP can be kitschy. They also are the indispensable basis of any idea of social cohesion across the vast continent. But they remain the best formula to support the longer-term growth of the economy — way better than the Democratic preference for high taxes and opportunistic economic interventions.
Defense and national security are the supreme priority of the state. Only after fully funding defense can you then worry about the appropriate level of spending for everything else, and the appropriate level and form of taxation to pay for that spending. The gap in wealth between white and black families — 10 x greater than the gap in income — has widened under affirmative action.
And this system is one of the most basic political commitments of the modern Democratic party. Bush and acid rain, real progress on the environment almost always comes under Republican presidents.
And the Democrats are the party of the public-sector unions. Democratic administrations typically seem guided by the opposite theory.
0コメント