The Future of the Republican Party; Libertarian Movement vs. Neoconservatives

[The Chosen One]

In one of the threads, I mentioned how I don't understand why if Ron Paul is by textbook definition a conservative, why he gets branded as a libertarian by the GOP.

Anyhow, Paul started a movement within the party in his two presidential runs. I personally thought Rand would take some of that movement and build on it, but he fell shorter than his dad.

The current state of the Republican Party has been leading up to this year. It started with Palin and the Tea Party. 2012 was worse than 2008. Romney's general election hopes in 2012 were badly damaged from the primary season. Gingrich, Perry, Cain, Pawlenty, Santorum, Bachmann all at one point went after Mitt and hurt his brand.

All the while, the libertarian movement has grown in the country as an alternative to neoconservatism. The GOP establishment has done their best internally and through media channels to discredit the libertarian ideology. Whether that's Fox News shutting out Ron Paul, or Cruz being called a "Ron Paul libertarian" as if it were a slur and we all know Cruz is anything but.

I think the biggest thing that drives neoconservatives is religion. It's been their biggest call to arms. By definition libertarians, who are by the book constitutionalists, should endorse the idea of keeping our government secular.

Statistics show the country is becoming less "religious", and those numbers are more prevalent the younger the demographic you get.

20-30 years from now, it's very possible when this neoconservative era ends, the Republican Party will have shifted their voter base to libertarian ideology. It's also possible in that same period the Democratic Party will be completely progressive, but I find that harder to believe just because the country will always need blue dogs in rural areas. But many argue the Dem's shift from 2004 candidate Kerry, to 2008 Obama was a huge shift to the left. And if Sanders somehow becomes the nominee and maybe President, he could very well move the party's progressives farther left, and slightly shifting the blue dogs slightly left.

Trump is the metaphorical embodiment of the Republican Party's base. Anti-Abortion, Anti-Same Sex Marriage, Pro-War, Pro-Bloated Defense Spending, Anti-Immigration, Anti-Islam, Anti-Gun Control, etc. Romney and McCain really didn't embody those, but the party forced them to embrace some of those values for the nomination.

Two moderates were nominees in McCain and Romney. Trump might be the final straw in the coffin for the GOP if they don't win this fall. They'd have to seriously rethink their plan for the future as their ideology is shrinking. So naturally the libertarians are the first group of conservatives they'd target.


So how much longer do you guys see the neocon agenda lasting, before the party tries to go after young libertarians as their base for the future?

[zitothebrave]

I don't think religion will go. I think our relationship with religion will change. I think what we're seeing is the 2 party system about to fail. We can see that liberals and conservatives are not being represented by these parties. You see it from the difference between support for someone like Trump and someone like Carson and someone like Rand.

[sturg33]

I think the democratic party is going to just as much crazy as the republican party. Both parties are moving further to the left

[BedellBrave]

Your use of "neocon" is unhelpful, since that has had a specific foreign policy meaning. Try something else.

[The Chosen One]

Your use of "neocon" is unhelpful, since that has had a specific foreign policy meaning. Try something else.

Nah.

The Tea Party of today, ran on an anti-establishment Neo-Con platform. Hey we're the real conservatives, but we agree with nearly everything the establishment has done.

[BedellBrave]

Categorical mistake. Neoconservative is a foreign policy paradigm, not an all-encompassing political philosophy.

[The Chosen One]

Categorical mistake. Neoconservative is a foreign policy paradigm, not an all-encompassing political philosophy.

I'm fully aware of that Beds. I actually did a project presentation on the rise of neoconservatism in high school, 2006.

American Politics on the other hand has become very generalized. As both parties have shifted farther from the middle, we're in the most radically divided government since reconstruction.

When I say neocons, I'm speaking of the Post-Bush 43 establishment. The Tea Party rose to prominence in 2010, as the conservative outsiders taking on the establisment Republicans. But their views, poliitics, and votes have not changed from the establishment at all.

The Tea Party to me, is no longer a subgroup of the REpublican Party. They're absorbed into the Republican Party and basically evolved into the same thing the GOP has been shelling out before the Tea Party.

[The Chosen One]

Beds, to further expound on your media thread, the media has essentially turn every issue into side vs. side argument.

For politics, everything has evolved into
[Conservative vs. Liberal]
Abortion vs. Pro Choice
Anti-Same Sex Marriage vs. Pro-Same Sex Marriage
No Gun Control vs. Some Gun Control
Not taxing the wealthy vs. Taxing the wealthy
Manmade Global Warming is a myth vs. Global Warming is a really big issue

I could go on with that list, but everything has become a party which side are you standing on issue. I've met dems who are big 2nd amendment, I've met conservatives who don't like Israel. But nearly every political issue has been turned into who's side are you on. There are a few Republicans like Rand who acknowledge climate change, as most libertarians. But most conservatives today (I'll call them neocons since they aren't actually conservative) don't believe it's true and continue to make fun of it.

[zitothebrave]

Abortion vs. Pro Choice
Anti-Same Sex Marriage vs. Pro-Same Sex Marriage
No Gun Control vs. Some Gun Control
Not taxing the wealthy vs. Taxing the wealthy
Manmade Global Warming is a myth vs. Global Warming is a really big issue.

Let me solve our problems.

1. Keep it legal but set up some standards, I.E. you had plenty of time to decide to keep it, you dont' need a 3rd trimester abortion.

2. Keep government out of marriage. State, federal, you name it.

3. Law abiding citizens should have guns within reason. No one needs a bazooka.

4. Everyone should be taxed. And they should be taxed progressively. Flat taxes are notorious failures.

5. Global Warming is real. The question is how much can we let it effect our way of living.

[50PoundHead]

The neocon foreign policy focus isn't the whole story. The initial neoconservative impulse dealt as much with skepticism over the Great Society as it did with anti-Communism. Paraphrasing one of the founders of the neoconservative movement Irving Kristol (father of the insufferable William Kristol), neoconservatives were "liberals who were mugged by reality." A lot of the movement's members came from the American anti-Stalinist left. A ton of Jewish intellectuals in the movement, hence the pretty consistent stance vis-a-vis Israel and the increasing concentration on foreign policy.

I think the biggest thing I've noticed during my career is the consistent migration of "values voters" to the Republican party. In the 1970s, there were a ton of ethnic economic liberals--largely as a result of growing up during the Depression--who were extremely pro-life. With the changing nature of the economy and the emptying out of rural areas, there has been a fusion of conservative economics with values voting. I remember reading an article about the Tea-vangelicals in 2011 or 2012 (featuring my old buddy Michelle Bachmann) and they are probably the largest component on the Republican side of the ledger. But like the Democrats, I think the Republican base is a lot squishier than it was when Bush the Younger was elected and the components don't mesh as neatly as they have in the past. But this is nothing new in American political history. Groups move to where they are comfortable and there has always been migration between the parties.

I think Trump is a total anomaly whose presence won't have a long term effect on the Republican party. He may end up being the Republican candidate and he has certainly motivated a segment of disenchanted voters, but I don't sense the Republicans are necessarily welcoming these folks with open arms.

[The Chosen One]

Like you were saying 50, the politics of parties was a lot more blended decades ago than today.

When FDR was President, he had a bunch of Southern Democrats who were economic liberals, even if some where against desegregating they still didn't mind raising taxes and spending. Any republican who would be considered modest in some spending is considered a RINO/

A while ago I started reading about the Southern Strategy and Lee Atwater. Found this blurb from Wiki

For those reading the following paragraph, the ****** word is censored for the n-word.

Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?
Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, "******, ******, ******." By 1968 you can't say "******"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "******, ******."

I think you still see some of the coded messaging from candidates of today. Gingrich was certainly doing this in 2012. The "Food Stamps President" line that got the loudest applause at the SC debate, was probably one of the biggest blatant pieces of race-baiting I've ever seen without actually using any racial terms.

[BedellBrave]

The neocon foreign policy focus isn't the whole story. The initial neoconservative impulse dealt as much with skepticism over the Great Society as it did with anti-Communism. Paraphrasing one of the founders of the neoconservative movement Irving Kristol (father of the insufferable William Kristol), neoconservatives were "liberals who were mugged by reality." A lot of the movement's members came from the American anti-Stalinist left. A ton of Jewish intellectuals in the movement, hence the pretty consistent stance vis-a-vis Israel and the increasing concentration on foreign policy.

I think the biggest thing I've noticed during my career is the consistent migration of "values voters" to the Republican party. In the 1970s, there were a ton of ethnic economic liberals--largely as a result of growing up during the Depression--who were extremely pro-life. With the changing nature of the economy and the emptying out of rural areas, there has been a fusion of conservative economics with values voting. I remember reading an article about the Tea-vangelicals in 2011 or 2012 (featuring my old buddy Michelle Bachmann) and they are probably the largest component on the Republican side of the ledger. But like the Democrats, I think the Republican base is a lot squishier than it was when Bush the Younger was elected and the components don't mesh as neatly as they have in the past. But this is nothing new in American political history. Groups move to where they are comfortable and there has always been migration between the parties.

I think Trump is a total anomaly whose presence won't have a long term effect on the Republican party. He may end up being the Republican candidate and he has certainly motivated a segment of disenchanted voters, but I don't sense the Republicans are necessarily welcoming these folks with open arms.

Granted there was an economic angle, but to label all that Sav is trying to label as "Neocon" is unhelpful. We are talking of all manner of tribes and convergences.

Your second paragraph is a fine observation. One party has no place whatsoever for what you label as the "value voters," the ones Sav hates. The machinery of the other has pretended to have such a place...

[50PoundHead]

I misread your comment about neocons. I agree with you that they are merely a sliver of the Republican base, albeit an influential segment on establishment foreign policy. The neocons are highly credentialed, but I always have found them to be very dismissive of opposing viewpoints (think Krauthammer and Bolton). They can never say "I disagree" without going on a diatribe about how anyone who disagrees with them is barely a biped. I find William Kristol's apoplexy over Trump to be one of the most entertaining aspects of the 2016 campaign thus far.

[Tapate50]

It is interesting. A party in which I identify with for the most part got a kick in the nuts and went the other way toward the Tea Party and further away from what I identify with. Its almost like they don't realize that their voting base is dying off for the most part. I can't understand that strategy.

[weso1]

If you're talking about just the presidency then I think you'll see the republican nominee will concentrate on the economy, ISIS and dissatisfaction with the government. I don't see the over all party changing much though. Religious folks are more likely to vote than less religious so it's a good voting block for pubs. And they've done very well lately in the senate, congress and governor races.

The presidency will be more about what kind of personality the pubs can come up with more than the issues.

[Runnin]

I thought Dick Chaney was the last NeoCon left and he's of no consequence.

[BedellBrave]

I think this is a better take of what is going on with the Republican party Sav. It's not religious-values convictions driving this. It is existential-economic conditions.

"Get a job, you racists, and stop playing the victim! Don't you remember the '80s?"

Does that sound like a successful political program to you? Does it sound like an adequate response when perhaps one-fourth or more of your party's voters are staging a minor revolt? Of course not. And yet, that is effectively the message the Republican elite is delivering to Donald Trump's disaffected white working-class supporters.

I recently suggested that the Republican Party, and the conservative movement, offer next to nothing to working-class Trump supporters. There are no obvious conservative policies that will generate the sort of growth needed to raise the standard of living for these working-class voters. Instead, the GOP's Powers That Be make a great show of obedience and deference to the center-right donor class, even when that donor class' preferred policies — endless war, unlimited immigration, and slashing tax burdens on the wealthy — have almost no relation to conservative ideas or even popular opinion....

It is not enough to say, "Stop bothering us with your economic problems, and be more virtuous; we're too busy addressing the complicated problems of our rich patrons, and using the levers of the state to make it easier for them to invest in foreign work forces instead of the whiny entitled American worker." Which, is, of course, the message that has come through to Trump voters over the last two decades.

The conservative movement can no longer repeat its old formulas as if they were a magisterium given divine authority to guard the deposit of faith in 19th century's economic liberalism. "Get a job!" is an insufficient response to the problems faced by poor Americans.

I presume that most of the working-class whites who support Trump do want jobs. I doubt that, like Williamson, they see hard work in industries that are ringed by some tariff protections as the same kind of "dependency" as a straight welfare payment. (Do Lockheed employees suffer some stigma and self-doubt from this kind of dependency on government, I wonder?) But I am not yet even arguing for protective tariffs.

Despite a natural desire to work and to create, we've seen working-age men dropping out of the workforce at alarming rates for decades. Many of these men do some work, but remain underemployed in the service industries. And the overall picture of the decline of this once-middle class is not one of living high and happy on the dole; it's far more depressing than that. Some of them do stay on Social Security Disability, and some of them abuse it, because it is competitive with some of the low-paid service work that is relatively easy to find but hard for formerly proud men to take.

At the same time as this decline of work, the returns are starting to come in on the post-Cold War policies that elite conservatives have championed, namely free trade and liberal-to-uncontrolled low-skill immigration.

The results of these policies look like a major transfer of wealth and, more crucially, wealth-generating power, away from workers and to capital....

...the American political class seemed blind to the effects of globalization on its working population...

...We also see better now than before that mass immigration of low-skilled workers does actually interact with the laws of supply and demand as you would expect; it lowers the wages of low-skilled American workers. Yes, technology has played a role in displacing workers. And yes, some forms of trade liberalization were obviously coming after the fall of the Iron Curtain. But economists did not expect the costs of these policies to be this concentrated.

America's elites, however, have won astounding gains during these decades with their ability to more easily invest in the development of foreign workforces, and to hire recent immigrants who don't share the typical American's democratic revulsion at entering into low-status service jobs at their great homes. The stock market proved resilient in the face of an economic crash, recovering and surpassing its previous value, even as real median household income is still almost $4,000 below the pre-recession level. Williamson says the answer is growth driven by investment. Growth is here, but it is captured at the top. Investors are getting gains. Why aren't others?

Without trying to hand working-class Americans a permanent victim card, we should allow ourselves to notice that following some of the bootstrapping advice that Williamson and Nichols offer as a substitute for political reflection is more difficult now than in the past. Why? The bootstrapping solution also requires resources — spiritual, social, habitual, familial, and cultural. These resources sometimes well forth from a man who has hit rock bottom in life; many callers into Dave Ramsey's radio show will testify to that. But for others these resources are usually "loaned," so to speak, from what conservatives used to treasure as the mediating institutions of our society — namely, families, churches, ethnic clubs, paternalistic employers, schools, and even unions. Collectively we might refer to these institutions as a kind of treasury of resources. My intuition, confirmed faintly by statistics on declining church attendance, rising divorce and cohabitation and illegitimacy, and the shortening terms of employment, suggest that these institutions have abandoned their paternalistic roles, or partly disintegrated, especially among working-class Americans. In other words, this treasury of resources is close to bankruptcy.

By their nature, the networking, emotional support, and loyalty traditionally delivered by these institutions to working people is almost invisible to policy wonks. These institutions push and pull. Men are much more urgent job-seekers and better job-keepers when they are living with a wife and children. Americans have slowed their pace of internal migration to find work, perhaps because moving to find work is more difficult when you are divorced and would leave children behind. Perhaps it is more difficult when you tried participating in George W. Bush's ownership society and over-invested in an inflated home that you can no longer afford to sell. Or perhaps it is more difficult because the institutions that you would seek out for social stimulation and solidarity in new places, like your denomination's local church or an Italian-America club, mean little to you now or have ceased to exist. That societal treasury, if it were full, could supply people with motivation, resources, and unofficial patronage networks to make difficult changes in life, like moving for work.

This state of affairs should be a frightening thing for any civic-minded American, particularly those who call themselves conservative. Long before American conservatives pledged themselves to the free-market tenets of Manchester liberalism in economics, the people defined by a conservative political persuasion dedicated themselves to protecting and defending those mediating institutions. If these institutions are in as much disrepair as I see, do conservatives have any idea how to regenerate them?

The foremost task of conservative political forces is to maintain legitimacy for the state and to carefully guard the surplus within that great invisible treasury of goodwill in their societies. That means finding ways of balancing the interests of different actors, classes, and types in society, whose unchecked actions would otherwise tear the nation apart. The tenets of Manchester liberalism were adopted by conservatives in America because they found them well-suited to an Anglo-Protestant people with a wide distribution of property and a continent of resources. They are not divine writ, though I happily admit that they have been successful because they align with something in our nature and history. Still, we may need to make different exceptions to them than we have in the past.

But if the libertarian prophecies of an American society without a middle class comes true, and 80 percent of resources will ineluctably accrue to the top 20 percent, then the American polity will find itself in danger very quickly of something much worse than Trumpism. The combination of an anti-statist ideology inherited from the Cold War, and a natural inclination to be responsive to an ever-more-rich donor class, puts the conservative movement in danger of rationalizing all the work the movement and the government does in the economic interests of their elite clients, and de-rationalizing any work it might do in the economic interests of workers. Such a course is a sure way of delegitimizing the state and the American political class.

It is true that I manifestly do not have the answers yet, nor do I believe Donald Trump has them. My aim in trying to understand and explain Trumpism and generate sympathy for the people who find themselves supporting Donald Trump is not to ratify dependency or a sense of victimhood in working-class people; it's to slap conservatives out of a torpor, to tell them that they are not victims of this Trump-led populist revolt, but the authors of it. And to warn them that they make Trumpism inevitable by enabling the American elite and the political class in its cultural and economic secession from the rest of the American nation. And ultimately, my aim it is to recruit men like Kevin Williamson and Tom Nichols into the incredibly inconvenient work of stripping away the policy ideas and political formulas that have grown stale over the last 20 years, and to revivify the American right, and the bonds that hold our nation together.

Link

[BedellBrave]

I think this is the sort of thing that OHawk has spoken of time and time again. It also, I think, gives us an insight into some of Bernie's popularity outside of the expected millennials who have no qualms with socialism. "The system is rigged" message resonates with blue-collar folks who've lost a lot.

[BedellBrave]

It's something of a Cracker Revolt and it has some interesting historical roots - roots that go as far back as the 1700s at least. Cracker culture (clannish-Celtic Scot, Scot-Irish, and Irish) has always been at some odds with more elitist (Brahmin, English, plantation owner, Yankee Industrialist culture) and historical it has been much more, shall we say, wilder. That social 'looseness' has been challenged and changed to great degrees via the Great Awakenings of the 1740s and then 1800s. And it was once again during the heyday of Billy Graham evangelicalism. As such it found much more alignment with the Rs as they touted social concerns along with a "Puritan work-ethic." But then NAFTA hits and everything since and as the Church's influence has actually waned and the economic problems increased, an older, deeper-set, may I call it Celtic, spirit seems to be prevailing. And Trump is scratching that itch.

[57Brave]

George Wallace ?