I’ve been reading a bit of this panel discussion thing about conservatism’s future. It’s mostly an epic wankfest and it’s remarkable how much Larison stands out. I liked this especially:
Conservatism rebels against the concentration of power and wealth, temperamental conservatism teaches that power corrupts, while the movement concentrates in acquiring political gain particularly on national security.
Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Moby Dick:
The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvelous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! How cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!
I’m sure there are also all kinds of paradoxes in liberalism or progressivism or whatever it is that people like me are supposed to have as a philosophy. And this is why I think it’s a mistake to think that pondering Burke and Hume or their liberal equivalents, whoever that would be, will lead to any kind of clarity.
Cat Lady
Larison gets to multiply by zero. They got nuthin’.
Beauzeaux
That may be the funniest thing I’ve read in the past ten years.
DougJ
That may be the funniest thing I’ve read in the past ten years.
I think that they believe that they do. I think Larison’s contrast between the supposed beliefs of conservatism and its actions is well done.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Fxd.
matoko_chan
Total wankfest.
The conservative base is nearly pure WEC at this point.
Their candidates are all WECs or mormons, the “conservative intellectual” that informs the 912 project is Cleon Skousen, and their party platform is evangelical doctrine gussied up to look like “culture war” issues.
Larison and the rest of the soi-disant conservative “intellectuals” are completely irrelevent.
This conference is a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Ninerdave
Well if the comments are any indication, the intended audience is completely missing the message.
Mark S.
Postrel also stands out a bit:
(I realize this is a rough transcribe but Postrel manages to make Douthat sound intelligent)
Midnight Marauder
I think slightly modified Allen Iverson will do the job:
Ben JB
And this is why I think it’s a mistake to think that pondering Burke and Hume or their liberal equivalents, whoever that would be, will lead to any kind of clarity.
Do you have a philosophy of politics / action / justice?
That may sound snarky, but is meant earnestly. (Am teaching first-year college students Plato’s Republic, which may explain either the snark-sounding or the earnest-meaning or both.)
DougJ
Do you have a philosophy of politics / action / justice?
Not of politics, no. Probably of the other two, but I’m not sure how well I could articulate it. I guess I think politics is the “art of the possible”, if that’s a philosophy, I don’t know.
MikeJ
Quoting John Stuart Mill doesn’t make “don’t be a dick” read any better, so most liberals I know don’t bother.
matoko_chan
Larison….Larison…..wasn’t he the guy that said socons weren’t the problem?
hahahahaha
ds
“Larison….Larison…..wasn’t he the guy that socons weren’t the problem?
hahahahaha”
Without the so-cons, Republicans wouldn’t be getting 45% of the vote. They’d be maxing out at 20%.
Aside from gaybortions, Republicans don’t have any sort of agenda that motivates large numbers of voters.
Notice how they weren’t getting any traction in the health care debate until they morphed themselves into Great Society liberals, railing against any cuts to Medicare, and claiming that Democrats were heartlessly going to cut the disabled and elderly off from their health care.
This obviously isn’t what they really believe. But it’s all they could do, since their real position on health care, which is that they’ll give you a tax cut of some sort, isn’t exactly going to get people protesting at town hall meetings.
Notorious P.A.T.
Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
matoko_chan
ds, yeah, but the problem now is the demographic timer on non-hispanic caucs is running out, and the GOP is enslaved in babylonian captivity to the WEC base.
Romney- mormon
Palin- WEC
Huckabee- WEC
Pawlenty- WEC
Any candidate has to be at a minimum, white, christian, creationist, LIFE! and homophobic.
Those traits are electoral poison to the demographics the GOP needs to stay viable……youth, minorities, college-educated.
the socons have killed the GOP.
it is that simple.
Conservativism is as dead as the dinosaurs, it is just the tiny little brains in their hips don’t know it yet.
Dave
@DougJ: No, come on. No conservative anywhere, ever, has even professed to believe that power and wealth shouldn’t be concentrated in a few hands. Ever, anywhere. The further entrenchment of social hierarchy is like, the definition of conservatism.
The only way that statement by Larison makes sense is if he’s talking about the wealth and power of this week’s Hitler.
Davis X. Machina
@dougj
Only on a good day.
Most of the time, in Galbraith pérè’s immortal phrase, ‘politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable’.
ds
“ds, yeah, but the problem now is the demographic timer on non-hispanic caucs is running out, and the GOP is enslaved in babylonian captivity to the WEC base.”
But see, rather than ditch the so-cons, who currently form the base of the Republican electoral coalition, they could just tone down their regressive economic policies and their anti-immigration hysteria just enough that they could appeal to Hispanic voters and end their demographic problem.
I hate the so-cons, it’s absurd to somehow blame them for the Republican defeats.
There was a lot of talk about so-cons “staying home” but on election day they turned out like good Christian soldiers and carried all the Republican base states for McCain. It’s not their fault that McCain wasn’t able to appeal to any other significant constituency.
slag
@DougJ:
It’s a shame they didn’t vote for that guy who said that it might be better for everyone if we spread the wealth around a little. What was that guy’s name again?
Jane_in_Colorado
If the GOP is dead, why is it still capable of killing health care reform?
Paul
From said discussion:
Brilliant! Illuminating! Shine a light on the last eight years of misrule…
Wile E. Quixote
You’re reading a panel discussion about the future of conservatism. Cole read Party of Death*. Wow, you guys are like internet crash test dummies for everyone here. Thanks, and be careful out there.
*Is it just me or would Party of Death be a great title for a combination Party of Five comeback episode / psycho stalker serial killer movie? I can hear the announcer’s voiceover now: Tonight, on a very special episode of Party of Five. EVERYONE DIES!
Jason Bylinowski
Larison is just about always the smartest guy in the room in my view. He really puts most of the other right-leaning writers to shame, not just because I sometimes agree with him (I actually don’t agree at all a lot of times when he gets into religion) but because he is one of the most succinct writers out there today, of any political stripe, in any medium.
Larison and the few others like him (Yglesias occasionally, John Cole too) gives me hope that one day we might have further exchange of ideas instead of this constant food fight we’ve got going on nowadays. Anyway…..glad somebody else still reads him besides me.
Roger Moore
@ds:
Yes, it absolutely is their fault. Who do you think are the ones who are amping up the racist and anti-immigrant hysteria? It sure isn’t the business wing of the party. It’s the social conservatives, who want to return the country to the way it was back in the good old 1950s- Jim Crow, lynchings, McCarthy, and all.
Martin
I’d soften that a bit. They can break at least one and maybe two of those things, but they can’t threaten any of those as a matter of policy.
Conservatism today just means a permanent 1954. There really isn’t any more to it. Yeah, they can wrap a bunch of big words around it, but they want to be on the permanent high of just having helped save the world and the clean, unquestioning ethics of killing commies in Korea. Everyone was on the upswing with brand new can openers and Buicks, and every kid went to church, said ‘sir’, and wanted to play for the fucking Yankees. There was nothing mushy in their world – everything was easy and black and white, and they want it to be easy and black and white again.
So yeah, they way they don’t want wealth and power concentrated, but that assumes a class division in their favor. Just as Democrats would assert that wealth and power should be concentrated in adults vs children, but among adults should be distributed, conservatives assert that wealth and power should be concentrated in the people that know best vs those that are misguided, but among the privileged class should be distributed.
It makes perfect sense to them because they don’t see immigrants, gays, minorities, women, atheists, muslims, poor as being capable of handing the responsibilities that come with wealth and power, just as I don’t see children as being capable of handling it.
matoko_chan
Jane, sowwy, stealthcare is going to pass.
And then we will be off to immigration reform.
Obama did healthcare first, to distance it from 2010 midterms, and do it while horrorshow bush was fresh in the electorates mind.
in 2010, we be treated to the epic circus of the GOP trying to hispander the demographic timer while their racist base chews them a new asshole.
it will be sweet.
;)
ds, the problem is the GOP can’t attract hispanics…..their base is racist against black AND brown people.
Wile E. Quixote
@matoko chan
I for one want Romney to get the nomination in 2012 so we can sit back and enjoy the resulting holy war between the Mormons and the snake-handling, holy rollin’ evangelicals. It’ll be ugly but my money is on the Mormons, while their theology is even crazier than that of the snake-handling, holy-rollin’ evangelicals they’re smarter and better disciplined, and in better shape. When was the last time you saw a pair of evangelicals riding a bicycle while wearing a shirt and tie in 80 degree weather?
ds
Nonsense.
Immigration hysteria didn’t become a big issue for them until talk radio, FOX News, and Lou Dobbs started beating the drum.
So-cons voted en masse for Bush who went far to play up the idea that he was close to Mexico, did those embarrassing ads in Spanish, etc.
Immigration is extremely concentrated to the southwest + NY/NJ, so it really doesn’t effect the so-con base very much. The Deep South is still only like 1% Hispanic!
The money wing of the Republican party doesn’t actually want to close the borders or anything, but they love using immigration as a political issue. Using race to motivate the rubes means more extreme conservative economic policies to boost their profits.
They’re the ones behind the immigrant hysteria. It wasn’t Pat Robertson or someone who was immigrant bashing and pushing Prop 187 in California. It was pro-choice “business conservative” Pete Wilson.
Wile E. Quixote
@Martin
More fools they. There’s a great quote that expresses the utter idiocy of that sort of nostalgia from James Ellroy’s Clandestine.
matoko_chan
no it is not.
all Larison’s babbling about conservative principles is irrelevent.
The GOP’s platform is strait WEC doctrine.
anti-abortion, creationism, anti-SSM…anti-tax and drillbabydrill.
that is it.
White protestants founded this country and essentially WERE the electorate.
They aren’t anymore.
ds
The base hated black and brown people just as much in 2000 and 2004, and Bush still managed to do reasonably well among Hispanics, at least in comparison to McCain.
All the Republicans have to do is get Limbaugh and FOX News to dial down the brown hate and focus their fire on their old favorites, gays and blacks, and let some form of immigration reform pass, and they can start to appeal to Hispanics again.
GregB
I find it laughinly hysterical that the GOPers and rest of the right wingnuttia plan on fighting what they believe to be Hitler incarnated with tea parties and rock salt.
-G
P.S. Romney didn’t win a single Southern state in the 2008 primaries. Yet no one in the media has ever pointed that out and declared that the South has a Mormon problem.
bago
You know, I figure you could sweeten the healthcare pot with an opt-out if they let the states keep the tax money that would be contributed to any healthcare solution except for the top 2% of taxpayers. Being that red-states tend to suck up tax money, the loss wouldn’t be that great. However they would get states rights, they would get tax “cuts” for 98% of all people, and be left in an interesting position philisophically.
matoko_chan
ds, WECs hate illegals like poison.
they blame illegal immigrants for escalating healthcare costs.
they railed at Bush and McCain for “shamnesty” all the time.
Joe Wilson’s outburst wasn’t because Obama is black, it was because he is having labor problems with hispanics in his own district.
Imagine the frustration…..in 2020 non-hispanic cauc becomes an electoral minority, but you can’t woo those sweet brown catholic votes because your base will rage-log on you.
The Other Steve
So wait. Is Hume or Kant Liberal? I’d think that the whole rational morality thing would be more in tune with David Brooks burkean bells then moral sentimentalism.
And where does Nietzsche fit into all of this? What about Hegel?
and where does Fyodor Dostoyevsky fit into our hierarchy?
ds
Yeah, but their problem is that “anti-abortion, creationism, anti-SSM” is BY FAR the most popular part of their platform. And once in office they don’t have any popular policies, and do nothing but loot the treasury for rich people and their cronies.
If they would tone that down a bit and start embracing policies besides “FUCK THEM FAGGOTS” and “SAVE TERRY SCHIAVO” they’ll be able to cobble together enough people to get them 51% of the vote.
TenguPhule
Zombies can only be destroyed by more Dakka.
matoko_chan
no way ds
prophecy from 2008
In 2008 there were fewer non-hispanic cauc children under 5 than minority children. In 2020 the percent of non-hispanic caucs in the electorate slips below 50%
A third of non hispanic caucs vote dem….carter to Obama.
There is simply no way for the GOP to forge a winning coalition to get to 51% without minorities.
The GOP is dead.
Citizen_X
@Wile E. Quixote: Fuckin’ ay right. Nostalgia only means “I was a kid then, and didn’t really notice what was going on.” Or even, “I am completely credulous towards happy tales about a time before I was alive.” It drives me nuts, for instance, when I hear someone on TV say, “the seventies were an innocent time.” Yeah, right. Nothing like having a recession and losing a pointless war and having a Presidency dissolve in constitutional crisis, all at the same time. (Hmm. Sounds kind of familiar, doesn’t it?)
Anyone who thinks the fifties were an innocent time needs to read Howl, carefully. Or watch any decent contemporary film noir, as I’m sure James Ellroy would appreciate.
matoko_chan
and ds…..they CAN”T tone down Rush and Beck.
they have tried.
;)
Comrade Luke
Anyone watching Frontline?
My observations:
– how many fucking advisers do these people have? Seems like everyone interviewed was an adviser to one of the generals or diplomats.
– An entire hour with basically nothing positive to say, as far as I can tell
I don’t know how you can watch this and conclude that we’re anything other than totally fucked.
Thoroughly Pizzled
I was actually at the talk. Larison was by far the worst at speaking (read directly from his notes, paused a few times), but definitely had the best points. He didn’t get that much applause, though. Pity that it’s the style that matters to everyone.
Mark S.
@The Other Steve:
Hmmm, some of these are kinda tough. It’s too late at night to look all of this up, but here are my guesses:
Hume: not very political, but I remember reading once that he was a Tory
Kant: fairly liberal, especially Perpetual Peace
Nietzsche: conservative in that he believed in aristocracy (Supermen) but it wasn’t much that today’s conservatives would hang their hats on
Hegel: conservative
tc125231
Ah, but the Christianist conervatives have FIXED that. Money is now the tangible evidence of God’s favor. You see, they really liked “Christianity”, but found the teachings of that pinko Jesus to be pernicious.
tc125231
@kommrade reproductive vigor: Fixed indeed.
tc125231
@DougJ: You are far too kind. The reason they “fixed” Christianity is that most of them worship Mammon. Then they wire a bunch of cover arguments into the pleasure centers of their brains so they never have to consider their nasty little motives again.
Just how do you think David Brooks became what he is today?
Jack Canuck
@Davis X. Machina:
That Galbraith quote is awesome. You’ve just given me a perfect nail to hang part of the concluding chapter of my thesis on. Thank you kindly!
Anne Laurie
@Wile E. Quixote:
Yeah, but it might literally kill me, because there is only so much the blood-pressure medications can manage against my red-screen hatred for Willard Romney. The man is a clinical sociopath who represents every low dishonest unspeakable thread in the vile tapestry of American Exceptionalism, without a single redeeming humanoid trait. If there were actually an Antichrist, Mitt Romney might not be It, but he would certainly and knowingly be leading It’s marketing campaign.
Anne Laurie
@Jack Canuck: J.K. Galbraith is immensely underrated as an essayist. I’m moderately allergic to mathematics and wholly repelled by the forms of religious scholasticism currently labelled ‘economics’, but I find Galbraith’s books both entertaining and illuminating.
JMC in the ATL
Man, I would love to see a Romney vs Huck or Palin throw down in the primaries. I grew up amongst fundamentalists, and Mormons and JWs were regarded as hell-bound cultists.
Jack Canuck
@Anne Laurie:
I’ve been meaning to pick up some Galbraith for reading for quite some time, ever since I saw Krugman mention a quote of his that I’m considering as my next tattoo (“Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking”). Needless to say, I’m not starting any new reading until the thesis is done – but that will hopefully be by the end of the month, at which point I intend to collapse on the couch for an indefinite period. When I’m not sending out job applications, anyway.
MelodyMaker
@Roger Moore:
Needed repeating. IOW, the people who never lose. ‘Course, who stands to gain the most?
Dean Wormer
@matoko_chan:
now if only they would exit, pursued by a bear
geg6
The comments there are priceless. One guy saying that he just can’t understand those blackies. They used to all be Republicans and now they are all Dems! How did that happen? Don’t they know that Dems have never done anything for them? Funniest, most obtuse shit I’ve ever read. Oh, and Douthat is as stupid in person as he sounds in his “columns.”
bellatrys
Since when?
bellatrys
@Jason Bylinowski:
Larison is just about always the smartest guy in the room in my view.
You need to visit an optometrist, then! (Of course, in this country and given the long-running work of conservatives to keep making the poor poorer to the end of making themselves richer, that’s out of reach of most people & will remain so if Larison’s buddies and leaders have anything to do with it.)
ironranger
Conservatives have spent decades trying to make their dream world become reality. They never give up attempting to turn fantasies into facts. I have a mental visual of conservatives feverishly pounding square pegs into round holes without success but, dammit, it they keep at it long enough, the pegs have to fit.
MikeJ
There was much silliness in the original article about how it’s Obama who makes Rush Limbaugh popular, how the two ned each other, etc. It’s like the money wing of the GOP not only wants to ignore their party’s base, they want to ignore all the elected republicans who suck Rush’s dick.
superdestroyer
@matoko_chan:
Actually blacks and Hispanics are more likely to believe in Bibilical creationism, attend church, oppose homosexual rights than whites. However, they stay with the Democratic Party because the whites in the Democratic Party never demonize black or Hispanic churches and that the Democrats promise to tax whites and give them more government goodies.
If everyone on the left would take what they are saying to its natural conclusion, the U.S. will soon be a one party state where the Democratic Party primary will be the real election and the real question is how high will taxes go to pay off all of the Democratic party groups.
The other question is what will happen to the Democratic Party when all of those white, evangelical Christians start voting in the Democratic Party primary.
bellatrys
@Roger Moore:
Actually, the business wing has been funding the social conservative’s back-to-54 movement since before the 1950s. They have a LOT to gain by keeping women/ethnic minorities down and the poor divided amongst ourselves – and have since before 1792, getting back to the Burkean Bells tag.
This false dichotomy between the “social” and “fiscal” conservatives (or theocons and meocons as I like to put it) is a red herring dragged along the political observers’ trail: scratch a social conservative who claims to only care about “TEH BABIEZ” and “Protecting our children from sex” and “the Godly nation” and find a free market/pro-Wall-Street mammon worshiper 9 times out of 10; scratch a fiscal conservative who claims not to care about any of that social stuff and you’ll find under the “pragmatic” veneer a firm belief that women in the workplace are bad for business and ethnic minorities are responsible for all the crime and poor financial performance of the economy.
I used to think that we theocons were not part of This World, “in it but not of it” and all that when I was one – and that we weren’t at ALL racist or supporting the plutocracy over the poor, that was just liberal slander. All that mattered was praying for the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary over Godless Commie Russia and Godless Aborting America, after all! That’s all we good little Catholic housewives/housewives-to-be knew or needed to know, anyways.
Then I worked in a conservative think tank for five-odd years and realized I was the *only* one who believed in equal pay for equal work, gender-wise, and who thought the Bell Curve was racist rubbish – or that the fact that Wm. F. Buckley came from a family of oil barons had any connection to his magazine & movement’s defenses of entrenched hereditary privilege and the rights of property owners over non-property-owners, too.
It’s more a matter of emphasis – are they more sex-obsessed or more money-obsessed? But like the anti-abortion “Libertarians” who are awfully thick on the ground, the market-venerating ones either genuinely believe or affect so much that it doesn’t matter for practical purposes that the 1950s were the pinnacle of American society socially as well – even if they pay lip service to the ideas of racial and sexual equality in public, this is still compatible with believing in and practicing actual discrimination, and calling it “rational” behavior in the service of the invisible hand (because women are so unreliable running off to get married, and customers won’t want to deal with a non-white CSR, and property values come down in diverse neighborhoods and blahdy blahdy blah.)
Which, to put it shortly, is why the heirs of the Carnegies and Mellons and Adolph Coors and the makers of gunpowder and DDT (Bradley et al) have been for decades paying good money to the “social” conservative think tanks to mainstream their neopuritanical memes of the awfulness of the ERA and homosexuality and liberal Hollywood and sex ed and the ACLU, often alternating in the same theocratical pages with their anti-union, anti-national-healthcare, anti-regulation views…
*Hey, if people stop being scared of each other based on the color of their skin, they won’t rush out and buy all the guns and ammo on the shelves in a feeding frenzy, and where will the profits go? And if they listen to those liberal environmentalists and start caring about the peregrine falcons, where will our ability to sell them pesticides go? And if a few eggs get broken, figuratively or otherwise, so what? The business of America is business, after all.
El Cid
The problem is not that they quote arguments by Burke or any other philosopher.
The problem is that they do not use arguments by philosophers when appropriate; rather, they invoke their favored philosophers as mystical incantations.
In other words, a quote from Burke isn’t appropriate because it’s the best potential argument for a particular situation, but simply because Burke said it, it must be right.
matoko_chan
rawr, superdestroyer is kinda right.
blacks and hispanics do share social con values.
But WEC racism keeps them in the democratic party.
In 2008 the GOP was 50% WEC.
I estimate 75% WEC now…..republicans leaving the party to become independents are not WECs.
The “burkeans” and “hayekians” and mega-businessmen are statistically insignificant and pretty much every one in the party has to be some sort of white christian.
WECs are 20% of the general, mormons are 2%, and the K-lo catholics (catholics that didnt vote for Obama) are probably 7-8% of the general electorate.
The GOP has devolved into a near purely religious party.
And it is a party that is demographically doomed unless they can attract youth and hispanic votes.
The panel discussion is simply pointless. Larison should have been discussing the transubstantiation of the host and how many angels can dance on the head of a pin and whether mormon dead-baptism is effective for jews.
lol.
kay
@superdestroyer:
I’m so sick of this myth. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the Democratic Party by Republicans.
Black people don’t “stay” in the Democratic Party, in some passive way. They are the Democratic Party. Those pictures you saw? At the Convention? Of black delegates, superdelegates, mayors and members of statehouses and the US Congress? They’re leaders in the Democratic Party, and have been for 30 years. They’re the Old Guard.
You have it backward. Black people created huge swathes of the post-Dixiecrat Democratic Party structure, they lead huge swathes of the Democratic Party, and they vote for Democrats. This whole “plantation” myth is pure fiction, promoted by clueless national conservatives, and anyone who’s actually worked within a state Party knows it.
Go to any state Party convention in any big state, and tell me that this is a passive voting block “following Democratic leaders” because they get “goodies”. They are Democratic leaders.
superdestroyer
@kay:
The point is that there is nothing that the Repubilcans or conservative could ever go to separate blacks from the Democratic party. Even though blacks are overwhemly Christian, attend church more than whites, and lean conservative on social issues, there is just nothing that Republicans could go to ever appeal to them.
The same can be said for Hispanics. So as the U.S. becomes majority non-white there is nothing conservatives can do to remain relevant in politics.
So as the groups inside the Democratic Party who specialize in extracting government benefits while sticking others with the bill grows, the question becomes how high can taxes go and will there be any limits on the social engineering that the government attempts.
inkadu
During Obama’s speech to congress, I was alternately thrilled and depressed when I could tell which party I was looking at simply by the total lack of or inclusion of black people. My God, how can anyone say Republicans aren’t racist when their entire caucus is white, white, white?
I’m also not well-read on philosophy, largely because I think philosophy is bunk — but this may be a self-reinforcing phenomenon. I prefer writers who talk about how things work, from a scientific perspective, and draw their conclusions from that. Philosophy seems more like religion, in that the premises are either unfounded or immune to challenge. Why can’t they just be considered hypotheses or a way of organizing things that probably shouldn’t be organized anyway? Humans love to see patterns and make order out of things; but it doesn’t mean that spot on your toast actually looks like Jesus.
@bellatrys: Not all fiscal conservatives are social conservatives, but all social conservatives are fiscal conservatives. SoCons are too wedded to tribal values to have any use for federal government. Fiscal conservatives don’t care who smokes pot or where people put their dicks, as long as they can keep their money (and maybe as a side benefit, not useless negros get their money — but racism is a big part of why the US has such a dysfunctional social net).
Your experience might also have something to do with the circles you ran in. Selection pressure at a think tank might be fierce… people who are working full-time conservatives know that party-splitting isn’t good for their careers.
I’m also in the Northeast, which might be another part of our differences.
matoko_chan
Simply Hilarious
I especially love Steele begging for “republican coders” to make the site work.
There aren’t any republican coders.
Just like there aren’t barely any republican scientists, film makers, university professors, hollywood actors, black people, brown people, young people or musicians-that-aren’t-c&w.
superdestroyer, as the GOP declines, a new party will arise.
It is arising already.
Follow the thin green line.
alien radio
@bellatrys:
This is brilliant.
you missed out the necessity of the propaganda in ensuring that both groups of peasants attack each other instead of their fuedal overlords, but otherwise great comment.
JMC in the ATL
Superdestroyer,
I disagree that there is nothing the Republicans can do to attract black and hispanic voters, but rather that there is nothing they are willing to do (or, rather, refrain from doing).
For reference, see Uppity Barack and Michelle, Wise Latina Sonia Sotomayor, etc., etc., ad naseum, ad infinitum.
jetan
I’ll wave the flag for Larison. He really is a very good writer and he is so anti-jingoistic as to make him an anomaly in either party. He also has an almost pathological honesty. He makes a good match for Glenn Greenwald on the left, with whom he often agrees, . The fact that he can’t throw out these bullshit soundbite lines off the cuff as, for instance, Frum can only makes me respect him more. The GOP needs a few more people who actually think and write at the same time. The fact that a liberal dem like me agrees with him quite frequently sometimes concerns me a lot.
The most pitiful thing about this panel is that none of these guys has the slightest influence on whatever is left of the conservative movement. I’m sure some of you have visited Frum’s site and seen the comments section in which he is hit with some of the most virulent (and illiterate) right wing attacks I have ever seen. He is exiled with a capital “E”. it’s gotta be the smallest and most embattled “New Majority” ever. They’re like the White Army in revolutionary Russia. Douthat has zero credibility with the so-called Republican base as well. Larison has an almost sneering indifference to the whole party, so he doesn’t count and doesn’t even seem to want to count. And Postrel…..well, what can one say?
So who exactly are they talking to? Rod Dreher?
kay
@superdestroyer:
You’re still not getting it, and you’re evading responsibility, so that’s a two-fer.
While Republicans were hatching the southern strategy, black people did what people do, which is associate. They form groups. Civil rights leaders started changing the platform of the Democratic party not in 1964, but in 1948, when they lobbied Truman to integrate the military. The black delegates won what was sort of an epic battle. It was the beginning of the end of the Dixiecrats, and the beginning of their rise in Democratic leadership, at the state Party level. There’s a history here. This dismissal of black Democrats as lock-step followers, this insulting assumption that they have been somehow co-opted and tricked and bribed by the national Party ignores reality. Conservatives are ignoring this reality because they want to deny the past. Again, beginning in 1948, black people helped create the modern Democratic Party. Not because they were tricked or bribed or wooed, but because that’s where they turned for political power. Their political power within the Democratic Party was created by them, because they moved through the ranks. They’re not a separate entity that is courted. They’re integral, at every level.
Because Republicans decided to go with a short-term divisive and deeply offensive political strategy, they should not be permitted to re-write history, and absolve themselves of all responsibility by denigrating the group that they demonized and discarded as people who line up and “take goodies”. This is what happened.
El Cid
Very few “fiscal conservatives” are fiscal conservatives. Very few “fiscal conservatives” give a damn, either, what the likely economic impacts of their fetishistic emanations would have on the actual country and its people.
We could have saved a lot of money and had a better country and our people would have been better off continuing the New Deal public works programs throughout the last half century, but then, that was opposed by our political establishment as spending too much money (though it was less) and ‘big government’ and soci_alist, etc.
But since by definition in our political system the more irrational arguments are viewed as less irrational, this sort of stuff happens all the time.
inkadu
@superdestroyer: Democrats are the party that wants the government to do more to alleviate poverty and to address issues that make life hopeless or difficult for people, and to do things that only government can do efficiently.
Republicans are the party of the rich, who believe they should keep all the money they can and amass as much wealth as they can, and the poorer everyone else, the better it is for them. Weaker unions means lower wages means more money for them. Poor school systems mean their private-school educated children will do better. Stronger federal government means more regulation means less money for them. Increased legal immigration undercuts their ability to exploit and abuse illegal immigrants.
But these oligarchs have a problem. There aren’t that many rich people, and in the US it is people that vote, not dollars. In order to get people to be against all these government programs. So how do the Republicans fight against this? They say that those programs aren’t for “you” they are for “them.” “Your” money is going to pay for “those people” to get food stamps (welfare queens), to have health care (illegal immigrants!). And “you,” in this narrative, is white people, and “them” is everyone else.
But if you look at the way tax law is structured, and the way the majority of social benefits are written, there actually is no “white tax,” and there are no “black benefits.” Taxes come from people who have money (though not from people who have a lot of money, of course) and benefits are assigned (largely) by income.
Because the United States has such a history of racism, we’ve been unable to have a proper class war; instead any discussion about class quickly morphs into a discussion about race; but it’s a distraction and a politically useful illusion.
[Sidenote: It’s amusing the Republicans want to return to 1954. Socially, 1954 sucked; but there was lots more economic equality, more factory jobs that paid well because of unions, and less corporate control; none of which seem to be among the party’s goals.]
kay
@superdestroyer:
The same can not be “said for Hispanics”. This is silly and patronizing all by itself. “Hispanics” is HUGE.
Try to get it. Electing a Hispanic Senator and considering that “inclusive” of Hispanics is not how political parties work. They’re organizations. You’d begin with Hispanics at the county Party level. In order for Hispanics to join at the county party level, you should probably stop demonizing them at the national level, because they’re not going to see membership in the Republican Party as a viable path to political power. Start with the assumption that people have 1. free will and 2. make rational decisions. Am I joining the “Wise Latina” Party? Why would I do that? That’s nuts.
SGEW
From Mark Thompson’s write-up of the panel discussion (via Larison, natch):
I love reading Daniel Larison (one of the few intellectually honest peopl out there in the blogosphere), but he really is an idealistic dreamer who somehow believes that serious philosophy is what drives politics (or, rather, is what should drive politics). But the problem isn’t that those “conservatives” quote Burke’s philosophy (or Locke’s, or Hamilton’s, or Hume’s, or whomever’s), it’s that they either don’t actually care about what it means, or just don’t understand it. (cf.)
Larison probably actually understands the political philosophy he’s read. So does Sullivan[1], for that matter (note who he endorsed in 2008, and the reasons given). I’m sure that there are a handful of other public intellectuals out there who can parse out Aristotle and Aquinas, or know enough about Nozick or Rawls to be able to make coherent political statements based on their work (see, e.g., President Obama’s “role of government” soliloquy in his health care address). But, overall, politicos and pundits simply do not worry about the underlying philosophical justifications of their policy preferences, and the public has yet to notice.
Glenn Beck supposedly hands out books by Hegel to his staff! George W. Bush read Camus! What more do you need?
Philosophy isn’t dead: it’s just ignored.
[1] Of course, there’s a question of consistency and clarity in regards to Sully’s adherence to or coherence of his political philosophy, but that’s neither here nor there.
jibeaux
@superdestroyer:
Well, there was that great blog, “What Up?”, but it was, sadly, short-lived.
It’s exactly the point that it is not there is nothing the Republican party could do, but just nothing it is willing to do to attract nonwhite people. And what they are willing to do, e.g. stick Michael Steele out there to get jiggy with it, is pathetic and meaningless, albeit highly entertaining. Hell, the party could decide to be SANE and try to attract SANE people of any color, but obviously it has not chosen this route.
jibeaux
@kay:
BTW, I’m really enjoying these responses, they’re great, k.
SGEW
Hrrm. WordPress ate my comment. Curses!
(Eh, it was too much of a holier-than-thou, elitist, philosophy graduate comment anyway (key take-away: most people in politics who quote political philosophy don’t understand political philosophy), so maybe it’s for the best that the comment disappear into the aether.)
inkadu
@jetan: Maybe Larrison is frequently disturbed that he would agree with you?
I miss the days when political discussions began by both sides acknowledging reality. If you can find a conservative who can do that, you’ll probably agree sometimes. Or maybe you’re just bi-curious.
SGEW
Also: I distinctly recall seeing a somewhat recent poll (Pew? Gallup?) that actually placed Hispanics as the second least religious demographic in the U.S. (less religious than African-American and White, but more religious than Asian). Can’t find it right now (oh Google, why can you not immediately find what I want?).
matoko_chan
Also, too.
When the Rapture is arriving, how Americans can use school vouchers to buy Discovery Institute textbooks and whether Bush’s Gog/Magog strategy in Iraq is working.
inkadu
@SGEW: That not-religious thing about Hispanics is probably a Catholic effect — where you’re just Catholic by baptism and after that, you’re set.
And almost every time I see a Catholic winger, you know those pro-life protesters, they’re always white. So maybe even the Hispanic Catholics can’t save the GOP.
But evangelicals are making inroads into the Hispanic community, too… we’ll see how many decades the population can keep out the crazy and if the Catholic church can prevent itself from becoming radicalized.
kay
@superdestroyer:
My point with Hispanics, if we’re pretending they’re a monolithic block, which hasn’t been my experience, but I’ll accept your premise, is that Republicans could change the approach today.
You’re not. Instead, you’re doubling down. Look at any portion of the Sotomayor hearings and tell me that was about legal doctrine. It was about repeating “wise Latina” 50,000 times. It was about pretending the litigious fireman was a victim of Sotomayor. Watching that was sort of amazing for me. I was thinking “do they really think people are this stupid?”
That’s a political strategy. You’ll ramp it up if we get to immigration reform, in anticipation of the midterms.
I’d like it if conservatives would own that, instead of slamming Hispanics for being “takers” who mysteriously gravitate to the Democratic party because those wily Democrats are tricking them, again.
Uloborus
Ds, to your many comments:
Let me try and rephrase the opposing viewpoint and see if that convinces. You are describing what the party elites and financial conservatives did for years. They talked up their own mild racism and social conservatism a little louder, to keep the crazier parts of their base energized to vote, yet hoped to do it quietly enough to not turn off non-whites, moderates, and so forth. It wasn’t working all that well. Hispanics and blacks generally voted Dem. But, certainly, playing it skillfully got Bush in the door the first time.
The problem is that they were skating the edge of a catastrophe curve, and now they’ve fallen in. After ramping up their rhetoric for a few years for other reasons, the SoCons are TOO motivated. The craziest, most extreme wings of the Republican party have realized they have a voice. They’re no longer voting for the guy who’s kind of like them over the guy that’s Other. They’re using their status as the biggest, most reliable voting block in the party to influence primaries, even threatening to split on general elections to their own, crazier third party candidates. GOP leaders who try to play the old game you’re describing are brought to heel by their own angry constituents. How many were forced to apologize to Rush when they talked down extremist rhetoric in the hope of bringing some moderates back?
The GOP did this to themselves with the Southern Strategy, and pushed themselves over the edge with Bush’s hyperpartisan xenophobia. I personally think they’ll dig themselves out, but that’s only a comment on history. I honestly can’t see any way. The merely conservative (the simpleminded, the assholes, the greedy, the gullible) thought they were using the wackos. Now the wackos are using them.
El Cid
You could certainly imagine a hypothetical conservative political party able to appeal to more conservative African Americans as well as more conservative Latinos.
However, instead of a hypothetical, origin-free modern conservative political party, we have instead the actual, baggage-chained party of Republican scoundrels and neo-Confederate loons, who have gone so far off the deep end that they’re losing their right wing ex-Cuban Florida former supporters.
matoko_chan
Uloborus, the background is demographic evolution.
20 years ago the electorate was 90% white.
In 2008 the electorate was 75%,
In 2020 the electorate will be 50% white.
A third of whites, at a minimum, vote democrat.
In 2008 the grouped minorities plus 1/3 of the white vote achieved electoral parity with the white republican vote.
This country was founded as a WHITE (anglo-saxon) nation.
It simply isn’t anymore.
Republicans have always loathed ToE….perhaps this is why.
;)
ericblair
@Uloborus: In other words, the inmates have taken over the asylum. Yep, pretty much. I don’t know if the Republican party as a whole can recover from this, and seems to have no intent in doing so in the near future. I’d like to hear some historical analysis of when the Whigs packed it in to see how that went down in comparison.
What interests me is what will happen to the extremely large and well-oiled infrastructure of the Republican party. Even if the party itself turns into a rump Southern reactionary minority, the organization it has throughout the country has an incredible amount of value: it would take decades to build up a new modern party apparatus like that one. We may get a rather amusing view of the hyenas fighting over a carcass.
inkadu
@Uloborus: An additional influence on the crazification of the GOP: The Republican party had 8 years to demonstrate that its major ideas were absolutely and horribly wrong. Since they can’t run on political ideology, they have to run on the culture war — hence the sidelining of the more traditional voices.
Of course, it all feeds into itself… less political success, fewer political supporters, more power to the remaining culture warriors…
matoko_chan
Srsly…Larison and Frum talking about Burke and Hayek and the “future” of conservatism is about as relevent as talking about genetic drift and schwarzschild radius at a Baptist ministers convention.
El Cid
@inkadu: One of the worst fates ever to befall modern, New Right, post-Goldwater, Southern Strategy, Reaganite, Free Market Baptist Republicanism was gaining absolute power in all branches of government and ( a ) showing the vast majority of the population how absolute shit it was, and ( b ) failing to deliver to their craziest followers who had always been promised paradise if only absolute power were delivered that we did not in fact roll back the entire country to their 1950s / 1920s / 1840s / Old Testament fantasy un-fun world.
inkadu
@El Cid: I wish I could agree with you. 54% isn’t a “vast” majority, unfortunately; I fear the pattern will be Democratic presidents building the economy and government regulation to the point where people take them for granted and vote a Republican president in, who quickly dismantles them, and then another Democratic president.
The worse scenario is 8 terms of Republicans, followed by only four years of Democrats because the Dems can’t clean up the mess fast enough.
At least we’ll still have elections.
Jason Bylinowski
@bellatrys: Wow, what a non-serious argument.
Corner Stone
I’m never sure why Larison is praised as an intelligent person, or writer?
I can’t tell – did he say this with a straight face? Was it a primer leading up to a larger, more substantive point?
Because if he actually, truly said and believes that, “Conservatism rebels against the concentration of power and wealth” then it’s pretty clear he should be abandoned as he is deeply confused.
Conservatism is by definition the maintenance of the status quo, and adapting to changes in the environment by adopting incremental changes in implementation of maintenance of the status quo. This ideology has only one outcome – concentration of power and wealth.
matoko_chan
inkadu…..you assume steady state demographics.
False.
Asymptosis
bellatrys
@alien radio:
Aw shucks :) Naw, I been thinking about it forever, is all. It made sense when I discovered Open Secrets – why was the National Catholic Reporter diluting our pro-life messages with anti-Social Security rants…and pro-DDT-rants by the Olin Chair of Wherever? Gee, follow da money!
you missed out the necessity of the propaganda in ensuring that both groups of peasants attack each other instead of their fuedal overlords, but otherwise great comment.
You’re right, I sort of implied it but it can’t be stated enough. Omnium contra omnes, hurling the little streets upon the less, is and always was the MO of the plutocrats – and assassinations for the class traitors, just ask the Gracchi.
All “fiscal conservative” really means is “Fuck The Poor” – and all it’s ever meant.
I should really try to draw a comprehensive Venn diagram of the intersections between Xenophobia/Anti-Sex Puritania/Godbothering/Pure Mammon Worship and their subdivisions into stuff like Throw a Crappy Little Country Against The Wall/ Red Scaring/Repeal Griswold vs CT/ Pro Death Penalty/ Anti-Abortion/ Atheists! Atheists Are Everywhere/ Pro Drug Warz/ ZOMG Unisex Bathrooms/Heather Has Two Mommies/ Long Hair Bad/ Eek, Women In Trousers/ More Prayer In Schools/ Scary Brown People/English Only Legislation /SocSec Ruins America/ Unions Are Teh Ebol/ MOAR GUNZ NAO/ Girl Cooties in my Skiffy / Suffrage Was Bad/ WOLVERINES but I already have stress problems & no money/insurance…
geg6
@superdestroyer:
Wow. Just…wow.
bellatrys
@Jason Bylinowski:
Wow, Jason, what a non-argument.
bellatrys
@inkadu:
…unless you were female, black, Native American, poor Southern white guys without mill jobs, poor New England ex-millworkers whose jobs had been moved south by anti-union Yankees, etc, etc, etc….
See? You can’t separate the social from the fiscal. Just doesn’t compute, really.
SGEW
@Corner Stone: Larison’s definition of “conservative” is very, very different than what most people think of as “conservative.” He freely and repeatedly admits this, and acknowledges that his voice is on the very fringe of things.
We must make a concerted effort to delineate the extremely divergent “conservatism” as espoused by such different people as Larison, Sullivan, Frum, Brooks, Douthat, Cheney, Limbaugh, Beck, Buchannan, Palin, Gingrich, Boehner, Snowe, etc., etc.. We cannot say that Daniel Larison is in the same political camp as Rush Limbaugh, or that Olympia Snowe believes in the same things as Sarah Palin; I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it – we need new words to describe their respective positions. “Conservative” simply doesn’t make any sense anymore (and Larison himself falls prey to this false labeling).
“Progressive,” on the other hand, is a surprisingly coherent phrase for a sizable plurality of the polity.
slag
@bellatrys: Bravo!
zoe the dyke in pittsburgh
Firstly, I find it amusing that anyone believes that conservatism “rebels” against anything. It’s all about maintaining the status quo.
Secondly, in what universe do conservatives anywhere reject the concentration of power and wealth? Did he mean to add “in the hands of the government” or “in the hands of anyone who isn’t a republican”? Because otherwise the deregulation party clearly has no issue whatsoever with the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of the few. I’ve never met a conservative who seemed at all worried about corporate power or monopolies. In fact, most of them view any regulation of the free market as oppression of individual liberty and/or free speech.
It’s something that most liberals I know are very concerned about, however. It really is puzzling.
LD50
@tc125231: Wealthy Christianists also get around that by not using the word ‘rich’. Their new euphemism is ‘productive Christians’, which also has the GOP-friendly bonus of implying that nonrich people are unproductive.
geg6
@Corner Stone:
This.
bellatrys
@inkadu:
bellatrys
@SGEW:
Then he’s just incoherent/in denial and shouldn’t be lauded as a “Rational conservative” but treated as someone who calls himself “an intelligent alien from Delta Quadrant”…
matoko_chan
Look…..the demographic timer is running out on non-hispanic caucs.
The GOP is wholly composed of non-hispanic caucs.
Non-religious republicans have been leaving the party to become independents.
The GOP has devolved into a religious party in a country that prominantly features separation of church and state.
The influence of the increasingly concentrated WEC base mandates the selection of candidates that are electoral poison for the demographics the GOP needs to survive…minorities, youth, and the college-educated.
Larison is just throwing intellectual chaff.
The tattered remnants of the conservative intelligentsia are completely divorced from their base……..and from reality.
Corner Stone
@SGEW: I believe I understand the distinction you are making here.
But to further my point a little re: Larison (or anyone who espouses a ‘rational’ Conservative viewpoint) –
I’m not calling him off his rocker because he belives something different than I do, but because it seems that all facts in evidence would force a rational person to utterly reject anything associated with a Conservative label.
To me it’s like saying, “Of all the individuals in the ideas marketplace who state that 2+2=5, Larison is the brightest and most reasoned thinker.”
Well…ok. But he’s still reasoning from a provably false premise.
Corner Stone
@bellatrys:
This is what I was trying to say previously. Anyone who approaches an argument while basically accepting that 2+2=5 might as well just not be bothered with.
jetan
“Conservative” has meanings that predate the Reagan era. Based on Larison’s comments on the topic, I suspect that he sees himself more in the Kirk/Chesterton/Tolkien tradition. Clearly, he views nationalism and militarism as an an almost unalloyed evil and I don’t see that he makes a fetish of flatter taxation. But I suspect that he might argue that none of that is a litmus test for what constitutes a conservative. The nationalism in particular is mostly a hangover from the cold war era – a brief blip in the conservative tradition, from his point of view.
What he does share with all conservatives is a skepticism that government solutions, however well intended, will usually be effective or can avoid horrible unintended consequences. To be honest I often share some of this skepticism. The flap about the “blogger endorsement” regulations being a good, though extreme, example.
But then again I’m old enough to remember when toilets didn’t require multiple flushings based on a stupid regulatory requirement respecting water volume.
matoko_chan
jetan, the topic was “The Future of Conservatism”.
what relevence do any of those old dead intellectuals have to the current instantiation of the GOP, and to its projection into the future?
LD50
Protestant missionaries have made huge inroads among Hispanics. My wife teaches in a school district that is perhaps half Hispanic, and many of her Hispanic students are from evangelical families, and often they converted down in Mexico or Guatemala or wherever. My wife thinks that a lot of it is just that Hispanics are sick to death of being told that using birth control is sinful. Not everyone *wants* 9 kids.
As for whether becoming Protestant will make Hispanics vote Republican? Well, that’s not the way it’s worked out with African Americans, is it?
matoko_chan
correct.
The GOP base is WHITE evangelical xians.
Black evangelical xians vote democratic.
In cognitive anthropology and evolutionary biology, ethnicity/race trumps religion.
jetan
Honorable Matoko_Chan, that doesn’t seem like a very serious counter-argument. I think that you and I -and for that matter Frum, Douthat and Larison -would agree that if folks like Beck, Goldberg and Levin define the conservative movement then that movement has no future at all. But the argument that I hear being urged is that conservatism needs to throw that kind of Kingfisher demagoguery overboard. That would be a very good thing for the country. I would suggest that those old, dead white guys had some value and I would encourage the GOP to rediscover their virtues.
That could happen, though it won’t happen overnight. There is a little blowback from the Southern Strategy and the alliance with the evangelical community and it will take quite a while for that to dissipate. It may be that the Republican party is too compromised for that to ever happen with them. But, as they used to point out ad nauseum, there is a difference between conservatism and party ID.
For my part, I think Frum is wrong headed and Douthat is an out-and-out fool. Nonetheless, I applaud any of those folks who will stand athwart the NRO and Weekly Standard nuttiness and cry Stop.
matoko_chan
jetan-sama
my objection is that they know the truth and continue to whistle in the dark.
it is unhelpful.
LD50
@matoko_chan: It makes me smile when wingnuts claim that if you’re a Good Christian you of course vote Republican. The GOP ignores another 12% of the American population, quelle fucking surprise.
jetan
Matoko_Chan- sensai, I would of course like it if all of these conservatives would confess that they have been utterly wrong about everything the whole time and then commit seppuku. But it’s dashed unlikely, old man. I fete Larison because he was not on board for our crazy military expeditions nor for what I consider to be our cynical alliances with Israel. Those positions are more than we have had cause to expect in a long time from our “loyal opposition”. What would you have them do? Absent the seppuku option, I mean.
matoko_chan
Tell the truth.
jetan
Well, all right. If you want to be that way about it.
Anne Laurie
“Amusing” isn’t the word I’d use in this context — more like sad or desperate. Archie Bunker’s political offspring know, in some corner of their embattled minds, that letting the Erik Princes and Mitt Romneys steal their futures by distracting them with tales of scary ‘gooks’ and ‘queers’ was an epic mistake. (And this includes a lot of working-class and lower-middle-class women, who remember their mothers and grandmothers as being “allowed” to stay home and take care of their own kids rather than piecing together multiple minimum-wage jobs just to stay afloat, but not the terror of being forced to depend on a husband’s good will and temperament as the only bulwark against homelessness.)
matoko_chan
ketan-sama
if there is a way back for conservatives it is not Daniel-socons-aren’t-the-problem-Larison or Virginia-the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend-Postrel or David-throw-burkean-chaff-to-obscure-the-ideological-bankruptcy-of-conservatism-Frum.
The way back is Charles-throw-the-racists-and-fascists-and-creationists-and-Rush-and-Beck-out-of-our-goddam-party-Johnson.
For CJ, the enemy of my enemy is still the enemy.
matoko_chan
ketan-sama
if there is a way back for conservatives it is not Daniel-socons-aren’t-the-problem-Larison or Virginia-the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend-Postrel or David-throw-burkean-chaff-to-obscure-the-ideological-bankruptcy-of-conservatism-Frum.
The way back is Charles-throw-the-racists-and-fascists-and-creationists-and-Rush-and-Beck-out-of-our-goddam-party-Johnson.
For CJ, the enemy of my enemy is still the enemy.
superdestroyer
@matoko_chan:
Why do the Republicans have to worry about the creationist while the Democrats are content to have the very creationist blacks and Hipsanics inside their party. Why do the Republicans have to worry about Rush and Beck while the Democrats have Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who have both been candidates and spoken at their conventions.
Throwing out the religious activist does not solve the demographic problems that the Republicans have but just makes them worse. There is not enough white, college educated libertarians to keep a party going. Getting rid of the anti-government types still does not help in appealing to academics, government employees, or union employees.
The question is whether the more conservative party can ever appeal to any group that makes up the Democratic Party and the answer is definitely no.
Mike Furlan
Folks who are impressed with Mr Larison need to investigate his membership in the League of the South.
matoko_chan
superdestroyer, there are creationists and crazies in both parties.
The problem is the GOP is distilled down to pure WEC.
The crazy is pure, full strength, and undilluted.
And they have the controls.
matoko_chan
wow……Larison is a member of the League of the South.
euwwwwwwww
no wonder conservatives can’t woo teh black folk.
I would run from Larison like a scalded cat.
jetan
The League of the South thing is disturbing and unfortunate. But, cripes, I just can’t laud Charles Johnson either. He just now noticed that his erstwhile allies were nuts? He was one of the worst voices on the right for ages. I’m grateful for his tardy conversion or remission, but jeez.
matoko_chan
jetan-sama
you are not getting it.
Charles is telling his commentariat that his old allies are nuts.
And they are not leaving his site in droves.
Instead of pandering and sukkin’ up to to his base….he is telling them the truth.
racism is not excusable.
fascism is not excusable.
Homophobia is not excuable.
Lying and demagoguery is not excusable.
He treats his base like grownups, not like retarded petulant children.
And I haven’t seen his traffic fall off.
Rather than telling them “they are not the problem” like Larison, he is saying, yeah…..you are the problem. Change your behavior.
what a concept.
matoko_chan
And no, Dougj, we don’t gotta love Larison.
KKKlanner sessionists?
And Michael Steele wonders why the GOP can’t attract teh black folk.
matoko_chan
Other people in the League of the South.
Sarah Palin’s ghost writer.
RS McCain.
If there is going to a new conservative movement that rises from the ashes of the obsolete and demographically doomed GOP, a new party that can attract youth and minorities, it is going to be Charles Johnson’s movement.
Not Daniel Larison’s.
matoko_chan
On parle du diablo.
RS McCain is a white supremicist — Huffpo
This is the demographic doom of the old GOP….simply can’t attract minorities while you are racists pretending not to be racist.