GOP libertarians want more social freedoms; social conservatives want less. Neocons hunger for war, while most other Republicans, both libertarian and constitutionalist conservatives, reject Bushian interventionism. The rising populist wave now inundating the party and driving the Trump juggernaut both detests, and is detested by, the party’s media, corporate and intellectual establishment.
Apart from the uncharitable “hunger for war” phrase, this seems right. But political trends have a short half-lives nowadays. While I think that the Republican Party will be decimated this fall, I don’t believe that a progressive triumph will prove stable.
“I don’t believe that a progressive triumph will prove stable.”
Why’s that?
Progressive are just running out the clock on Texas turning blue. They dont even need a major victory this cycle, its already baked into the cake absent something massive – hence the Faustian bargain that is Trump
Why do we assume Texas will turn purple/blue? I know the minority demographics is strong in the state but Republicans can win minority voters and the last governor race Abbott won by 20%.
Hispanics vote at lower rates, and whites in Texas vote Republican at much higher rates than California, so Texas is still red, but it is just a matter of time until the voting demographic of state is firmly Hispanic. Unless something drastic changes they are and will remain clients of the progressive party. It may not happen but at this point is a safer bet.
Well, once Hispanics become a large enough proportion of the population to turn even Texas blue, they will presumably have “gotten theirs,” so to speak, such that they will no longer need to rely on the ethnic transactional politics of the Democratic Party. Is a more socio-economically secure Hispanic community one that still wants high taxes to fund an expansive social safety net, and is willing to play along on social progressivism in order to get it?
I don’t know either way, but I’m skeptical it’s anywhere near set in stone.
Do the mass of Hispanics have any track record anywhere of supporting libertarian government?
They are majorities in their home countries, is Latin America the Republican vision for the future?
I don’t understand this “gotten theirs” sentiment. They want whatever they can get, any way they can get it. The more numbers they have, the more they can demand.
How is the Hispanic community going to become socio-economically secure. They are subject to the same trends affecting every other working class person. On top of that they have lower average IQ, which means an even greater proportion of their population is going to be permanently “low skill”. We’ve seen from multi-generational studies showing that Hispanic socio-economics stall over the generations at a low level.
Several points from a Cali resident:
1) Republicans can win Latino voters and New Mexico has had numerous Republican & Libertarian governors.
2) Latinos are not as old school unions and they were not hit as hard a working class whites with deindustrialization.
3) Yes, they have tended to Democratic but Bush Sr. got over 40% in 2004.
4) Don’t assume Latinos will continue to vote at lower rates. Trump might change that.
5) If Texas continues to do well economically I expect the Republican Party to hold and more Latino voters will go R.
6) HOWEVER, the Republicans are making the same mistakes as Pete Wilson with Prop. 187 (1994). The Prop did pass with a Wilson reelection but its impact on Cali voting was still around.
1) Maryland has a Republican governor, Governors are very different things from Presidents.
2) Unionization has been going down for a long time. Has this stopped people from voting Democratic. Is everyone who voted for Hugo Chavez in a union? What about Hispanic politics indicates they are going to become small government voters?
3) Bush got 40%, which you’ll note was less then 50%. It was barely enough for him to win two close elections, and not enough for Romney to win.
4) If we deport them, their rate of voting will be 0%.
5) This is a vague hope unjustified by the evidence.
6) The impact is still around because you did not deport. Deported men don’t vote.
All of this can be found in the FWD.us election tool.
http://www.fwd.us/gopfuture
If you achieve record highs (42% of Hispanics, 45% of Asians, 6% of blacks, 59% of whites) you get 240 electoral votes and lose the election.
In fact your still losing the election at 50% for Latinos and Asians.
By contrast, getting 20 year LOWS in every single ethnic category (20% Latinos, 25% Asian, 4% black) but getting 65% of the white vote means 315 electoral votes.
This is simple math.
Yes deported Latinos vote 0%. However, Latinos are citizens! I remember a Latino comedian variation on the old African-American joke was “The Border was moved on us!” So of course Republicans are not going to win Latinos (or Asian-Americans) with comments like that or Trump’s Republican Party.
1) Of course Governors are not the same thing Presidents! However it is telling that Republicans Governors can win Latino votes just a the NE is not pure Democratic for local government.
2) Who knows how demographics can switch Parties in the long run? To older Americans, Catholics voting Republican would have seem ridiculous. Just think of farmers who were the Democratic base 100+ years ago.
3) Once upon of time, most Asian-Americans were much stronger Republican. Bush Sr. & Reagan won these voters.
4) What if Latinos who work hard and succeed economically in Texas? Don’t they like lower taxes and less regulation? Parties tend to do well everybody is economically succeeding so it seems reasonable they are likely switch in Texas.
5) And finally look at the Democratic voting in the Primary! HRC is completely being carried by strong minority voting with a majority of Latino voters. (It is not to the level of Southern African-Americans.) Given the Republican Party is jumping off the cliff, it appears Minority voters are saving America from a Socialist Democratic President!
And finally in terms of huge switch of California Republicans to Democrats in early 1990, people forget how much the California economy depended upon Defense spending. So California was so Republican in 1950 – 1988 because it was a way to protect all that sweet defense spending for the Federal Government. By the early 1990s, the defense companies moved a lot of production to other areas of the nation and the contracts decreased.
If they are illegal they are not citizens. They only become citizens if we make them citizens. That is what illegal means.
1) Republican governors in blue states tend to be a lot more blue. Romney passed Obamacare in MA, remember.
2) Catholics still vote more to the left then WASPs. Do you have any evidence to show that demographics switch without policy switches? If the Republican party became the party of affirmative action, welfare handouts, and political correctness to an even greater degree them democrats it might make inroads into NAM voters. Would such a party even be the Republican party anymore?
3) And now most Asians vote the way people in Palo Alto and Greenwich vote. Shocker. They are also 5% of the population in non-swing states, and last time I checked they hate affirmative action and are racists which doesn’t make them democratic fits. Mostly, they just want to fit in and get ahead, and they are employed in blue industries and live in blue areas.
4) Hard work is largely genetic. Productivity is largely genetic. The talented tenth of any racial group doesn’t change the genetic potential of the mass of the group. Most Latinos will never be productive enough to be net tax payers, so they will never be a demographic in favor of lower taxes overall.
5) Minority voters are barely literate vote banks that operate based on name recognition and client systems. They know who Clinton is. They don’t know who this nerd Sanders is. They have no clue what the policies of anyone are.
Trump is also doing better in the primaries with minority voters then most of the other candidates. He’s a BIG MAN with a name they recognize.
Here are your NAM voter geniuses that are so on top of the issues:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SnByRPbDDM
Well, any “progressive” victory this November is likely to be more a product of the Right’s lack of cohesion than a product of voters broadly accepting progressive tenets. A political movement whose victories are predicated on merely being the least bad option is stable only for so long as it is less bad, and until the American people broadly accept progressivism, it won’t be terribly difficult for an alternative to fashion itself as less bad.
We’re already seeing cracks in the “progressive” coalition in the democratic primary, between straightforward social welfare on the one hand and ethnic retail politics on the other side. My own suspicion is that the American people writ large are probably more amenable to the former than the latter, and any demographic changes that make the latter more viable will likely start to flounder on the fault lines between the various ethnic groups that make up the ethnic retail wing of the “progressive” coalition.
NAMs vote for big government and racial oriented government favors. They do this in every country in the world. What evidence do we have that they will stop?
The idea that Republicans can remain colorblind small government and win the NAM vote has zero empirical track record and not much of a theoretical background. Their big idea is that maybe they can lose a growing population by less, as if importing people who you’ll never get 50%+ of is a good strategy. Bush had relatively fewer Hispanics vote against him, but he barely won his elections and the demographics have only gotten worse.
Romney ran on the Bush coalition in 2012 and the Bush coalition lost. He got the same % of whites Ronald Reagan got when he won 49 states, where are just fewer whites around.
Short term the only GOP path to victory is to win whites even bigger by becoming the white person party. This is especially true of swing state Rust Belt whites.
Long term the only GOP path to victory is to keep Texas red, which means building a wall and mass deportations.
I tend to agree with Corey Robin that this crackup is the result of the triumph of conservativism from which we will see a slow shift back towards balance.
I don’t believe that a progressive triumph will prove stable.
Of course it won’t because it was not stable after 1992 or 2008. Clinton ran as a economic Republican in 1996 and Obama survived 2012 due to coming divided Party. HRC probably takes 2016 due to the Party division.
However, Neocons do hunger for war is absolutely correct. They really want to bomb Iran and show Russian & China whose boss. (Note Iran is complying with the nuclear deal.)
You, on the other hand, hunger to provide Iran with nuclear weapons. Got it.
No coalition ever proves stable, no matter how incompetent the opposition. When a coalition gains power, each internal faction demands spoils. Winning internal factions gain power. Some faction gets left out, and defects.
Staunchly Democratic working-class white men began to defect when they were outcompeted within their own party by identity politics groups. Now they are the core of the Republican party.
The same can be said of college-educated professionals being outcompeted by evangelicals within the Republican party.
Texas turning blue is not a cataclysmic event for the Republican party – in living memory, Texas was the anchor blue state (LBJ) and California was the anchor red state (Reagan, Nixon)
The new core groups of the Democratic party (educated single women, blacks, Hispanics) have wildly divergent interests, and success of that party, like any other party, will cause infighting. As a betting man, I would guess that repeated Democratic success will cause defection by non-college single white women (tend to social conservatism), college-educated married white women (will be impacted if middle-class taxes rise), or Hispanic men (a bit of both reasons).
Nobody would have dreamed of calling Texas a “blue” state when it was solidly Democratic. In those days, “red” meant “communist” and blue was associated with the Union Army in the Civil War. The idiotic (and obviously leftist-devised) red/blue color scheme used today became fixed only around 2000.
Moreover, the Democratic Party of today is obviously not the Democratic Party of the days of Lyndon Johnson, which was primarily the party of the northern urban machines, organized labor, northern ethnics and white southerners. I suspect that most of today’s white gentile Democrats are the grandchildren and great grandchildren of midcentury Republicans.
I agree. The various groups that make up Democratic voters seem to have very different interests. I just don’t see how this can stay together.
Trump is keeping these incompatible groups together in the Democratic party in the same way that the Soviet Union kept together in the GOP the odd mixture of religious conservatives, suburbanites, warlike neocons, libertarians, and small business interests. Trump being in the race is distracting everyone from this other train wreck.
The Republicans just ran off the rails first.
Hillary is a lousy candidate. The only reason she would win is a worse GOP candidate, which the Republicans have ben trying hard to provide. She is unlikely to govern any better than she campaigns, so POTUS will be in play in 2020. If Trump wins, it will be interesting to see if the Democrats become as crazy as the Republicans have been of the last 7 years. Not sure that is possible, but I suspect they will try and might even succeed.
Steve
‘Apart from the uncharitable “hunger for war” phrase,’
Uncharitable? Yes. Undeserved? No.
The article implies that the problem may be the solution. Perhaps Republicans are being punished for being over-reliant on centralization when their natural niche is to counter the Democrats on centralization.
The truck is how to win central election on de-centralization. Reagan did it by emphasizing naturally (and legitimately) cebtralized issues like national defense.
The Reps might lose, but might well win, too — even with Donald. Who’s going to claim “moral superiority” when voting for Hillary, the criminal (even if she’s un indicted)? Well, lots of Dems will try, but they will be ripe to be laughed at.
Much of America knows it’s been going the wrong way — and it’s been a Dem leading for the last 7 years.