That’s what the gasping throes of modern conservatism has left in the tank. That’s what they’ve got. Twenty years.
Don’t be afraid by Michelle Malkin claiming two million people showed up: the police estimates are thirty thousand plus. (Besides, we already know what two million people on the Mall looks like.)
In twenty years, the majority of these stupid old white people – and it’s mostly stupid old white people, and where it isn’t all three it’s just about always two out of three – will be dead or senile (or more senile than they are now). The kids aren’t voting Republican, and they’re not voting Republican in massive numbers because it turns out the kids, while not perfect, generally disapprove of instititional racism, homophobia and sexism.
It’s the last gasp of insanity. So chill, everybody. The next couple of years might suck, but even in the worst case scenario there is simply no chance in hell that a Republican is elected President in 2012. No. Chance. In. Hell. If anybody wants to bet me money on this I will take any wager.
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I’m hopeful. Living in Texas, I can definitely say there’s another generation of conservatives coming up. But there is undoubtedly a sense that these high school and college students are just parroting what their parents have been telling them all their lives. At some point, all that hate and anger has to burn out, right?
One would hope that Nixon poisoning the well of American politics will end soon. Drain the swamp, to borrow their terminology.
I have a dream of thoughtful discourse taking place again. Perhaps a futile one, but someday…
Twenty years is more than enough to totally screw the climate.
There is the possibility that the GOP will reinvent itself in some way to appeal to kids who, while basically okay with homosexuals, still want to screw over poor people.
Remember, the economic war on the bottom 99% has always been the real agenda. The other shit is just window dressing.
Do you know, I would gladly bet $20 that a Republican would win in 2012.
Not because I think it would happen, but because I tend to expect the worst, and if I take the bet there’ll be good news no matter what happens Election Day.
Twenty years is a pretty wide window of opportunity for increasingly crazy rightists to screw considerably more than the climate.
I think your view is too narrow. Look at it this way: women got the vote in 1893 (in New Zealand; slightly later in less civilised nations); blacks in the US got the vote in either 1870 or 1965, depending on whether you’re paying attention; non-landowning people got the right to vote at various times in various countries… But what about the last great “minority”, Stupid People? The answer: the US provided them the vote in 1854, with the invention of the Republican Party. Now, you don’t need a working brain to be able to participate in democracy; all you need is a knee (to jerk) and a mouth (to flap) and a pair of eyes (to close tight against the incursion of Reality), and you’re set!
I am not going to take that bet.
The way the electoral college works, it it far too possible that they could squeak a near win.
Now, you have some automatic bonuses against them- black people, for some odd reason, rarely feel the need to vote for racist white people.
But I dont’ want to jinx it. It’s very unlikely. But never underestimate America’s ability to shoot ourselves in the foot.
I think that unless Obama pulls his head out of his ass and actually does something besides talk, the republicans could get someone inside the white house.
Basically the United States political “spectrum” works as follows:
Republican: Abusive assholes
Democrats: Useless drones
While useless is theoretically better than being abusive, its still not something rational people can rally behind – at least not with a straight face.
And even if the wrong-wing republicans fizzle out in the next several years, there will always be the incursion of the insane libertarians to deal with.
Case in point:
http://www.youtube.com/user/AriAri092
This girl attempted to convince me to remove my Sarah Palin t-shirt from Zazzle because I was being so mean to her idol.
How does one “hope to be like” Sarah Palin? Is there someplace a person can go to get a lobotomy voluntarily?
As long as a majority of Americans continue to have the sort of entitlement mindset that thinks that there is an invisible omnipotent being in the sky that is blessing everything they do, this sort of wackjob conservativism will continue to have a hand in the fate of the world’s most powerful nation.
That having been said: I see no problem with this “tea party” protest…. Well, aside from them being wrong on all fronts, and the outrageous hypocrisy of them not doing the same when Bush and Cheney were *actually* doing bad things… Right of assembly and right to opine are the great beauties of that US constitution we all admire, and we should respect that.
Even when the people using it aren’t really worthy of respect themselves…
It might look impossible for even the Democrats to lose but I’m confident they’ll once again find a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
the US provided them the vote in 1854, with the invention of the Republican Party.
This is just as bad as modern Republicans who go “What have we done for black people? How about freeing the slaves??”
Er, the kids don’t vote, but whatever. By the way, in many places (right here in Toronto, for instance) the police have stopped giving crowd estimates because they’re notoriously hard to do — for anyone. Media outlets are getting relucant to use them, either, since it opens them up to manipulation and endless complaints. For my two cents, if the photo on Matt Welch’s blog entry (http://reason.com/blog/show/136041.html) is from the protest, I’d say 30,000 looks pretty, well, conservative.
I feel like I missed something.
Are people already talking about 2012? We haven’t even gotten to the midterms yet!
But yeah, no way in hell does a conservative take the presidency in 2012. Not enough people have THAT short a memory.
Although, I am inclined to bet with MGK on this. If I lose my bet, I still get (probably) the best man for the job. If I win, woo currency.
Eugh, I read the comments there.
Apparently people with pre-existing conditions need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps…
That’s why the qualms about a coup won’t go away any time soon…
The things you need to remember:
1) Never underestimate the Democrats’ ability to screw things up;
2) Never underestimate the traditional media’s (AKA The Villagers’) desire to be suck-ups to those with wealth and power (AKA The ultraconservative corporate owners of FOX, CNN, NBC…)
That said, the thing you have to look at right now is the 2010 midterms, and outside of reclaiming a handful of pro-Republican districts that went Democrat on Obama’s coattails the GOP has no chance of reclaiming control of either House of Congress.
Ya know…the ONLY thing positive that came out of the reign of G.W. was this: I didn’t have to hear douche-bags constantly telling me why Clinton was the Anti-Christ – they were all too busy telling me how Bush was the second coming.
With all the propaganda rolling right now – the Birthers, Palin, the Health Care Liars, etc. – it just fills me with huge amounts of rage. It seems like nothing EVER gets done no matter who is in charge!
I don’t know – I am pretty sure we are screwed at this point. America is so based on greed for greed’s sake, I don’t know that it will ever recover.
Honestly, the biggest problem Obama faces is that… he didn’t win in 2008 as much as the Republican party didn’t try. As such, Obama came to power based on a combination of the unity among the Democrats (which is like herding cats) and the contempt of Republicans by the undecideds and the many “non-Republicans” who now turn to folks like Glenn Beck to get told how to think.
See, nobody like the Republicans anymore, not even the Republicans, but they really really don’t like Obama. And all that hatred (and outright fear) directed at him personally is what people are seeing.
It seems to me the biggest problem of the Administration is that they refuse to admit just how fearful and ignorant the American people are; when your constituents are afraid of having affordable health coverage that can’t be taken away, something’s very wrong. I keep waiting for somebody to screw up and make an actual, honest-to-god politically motivated assassination attempts because they actually thought the Democrats want to kill senior citizens. Either that or for someone to refer to Logan’s Run as “Obamacare”. It feels like the country’s getting to either point.
Remember, the Baby Boomers of today were the hippies and flower children of yesterday. So I wouldn’t count on the twenty-somethings of today to stay the same politically in twenty years. The Republican party was failed a lot of moderate Republicans and Independents these last years, so I’d love to see the extreme far right of today replaced with more moderate people.
There’s a list of things I don’t like about the Democrat party and a list of things I don’t like about the Republican party, but for me and most of my friends we lean toward the right. And it’s amazing for someone like me that works at a university hospital how many of the staff are Republicans.
…now turn to folks like Glenn Beck to get told how to think.
I’m going to be off in the corner crying for humanity…
I’d say ten to fifteen, myself. Think about plausible Republican presidential candidates in 2016, seven years away. The U.S. chooses them from a very limited pool: representatives, senators, governors, and the occasional general.
The current crop of Republican representatives has little broad appeal. I haven’t crunched the numbers, but many of them came in under Gingrich or W and are pre-radicalized, i.e. nuttier than a pecan pie. I can only think of one current representative that might be able to pull it off, Paul Ryan (R-WI), who did well despite his district going for Obama. But he’s Catholic, and much of the Republican Party base is still uncomfortable with Catholics.
Let’s look at the Senate. Only name I’m seeing there is Kay Bailey Hutchison. Americans love Texas so much!
Generals, I think we can pass over. People talk about Petraeus, confirming in my mind their longing for a man on horseback. (If one of Obama’s generals because really famous, the U.S. is screwed for other reasons.)
Governors, that’s a broader category, and that’s why the analysts have been focusing on them for a Republican comeback. There’s Charlie Crist in Florida, Bobby Jindal in Louisiana, and Tim Pawlenty in Minnesota. Let’s include Tim Huntsman of Utah as well, even though he’s currently Obama’s ambassador to China. Huntsman probably would have the broadest appeal, but would be unlikely to get through the GOP primary, because he’s a Mormon and much of the Republican base is skeptical about that faith. Jindal is Catholic, ditto, and also much of the Republican base is dubious about people who don’t come from free pre-Civil War stock. Crist is a Greek-American mainline Protestant who has been dogged with rumors about his sexuality (but who probably will win Florida’s Senate seat in 2010); while Pawlenty is a Polish-German Midwestern Catholic convert to evangelical Christianity.
That’s the new 2016 crop, not including the also-rans. (Several of whom might die in the meantime, like Huckabee or McCain.) And it’s possible, but not probable, that the GOP might try to recruit some current media property, like the dry-drunk Mormon Glenn Beck or the thrice-divorced substance abuser Rush Limbaugh (who polls extremely poorly with women for some reason).
Barring some GOP superstar appearing out of nowhere — which could happen! — who do you think is going to draw in 50% + 1? As Obama has shown, the GOP can’t even count on the old Confederacy any longer.
Seven years from now, the eleven-year-olds will be able to vote; the college students will be pairing off and having kids. (And some of them will be in same-sex marriages; many of them will be interracial marriages.) What Nicolae Carpathia is going to draw them to the dark side?
Carlos, one thing you should also note, is that Crist and Huntsman are both fairly pragmatic, and far closer to “classic moderate-right Republican” than “Legion of Batshit Insane” Republicans we have now.
I really hope you’re right, but I tend to doubt. As my Operations teacher used to say, “Never bet against stupid.”
Obama’s problem, is that people have vested too much hope in him. There is too much inertia in the American political system to fix everything people want him to fix, and these ‘failures’ are going to come back and bite him. Will it be enough to unseat him? I don’t know, but there will be an opportunity for the Republicans if they can keep their religious and lunatic fringes quiet long enough too run a moderate campaign. Of course, stupid works against them too. Just look at Sarah Palin.
A couple of points on the discussion here. Eric, I think it’s important to point out for the historical record that in 1854 the old, white institutional racists were in the Democratic Party. Those old racists left when the Dixiecrats left and became republicans when the Republican Party in Nixon made a calculated decision to court those voters. Of course, at this late date that’s pretty much all that’s left in the party.
Zen, I take exception to the “do anything but talk” criticism of the President. Obama has been president for less than 250 days. It probably seems longer because the Primary process was more than a year long. Think about what Obama has accomplished in that time: A massive recovery program, a massive health care proposal, and a successful nomination and confirmation of a supreme court justice all while dealing with an obstructionist congress that prevented one Senator from being seated until recently and STILL hasn’t ok some cabinet appointments.
Dirge, I disagree in the strongest possible terms. That long primary process let Obama build a grassroots network in EVERY STATE. That was a massive effort that resulted in not only an Obama win, but wins down the ticket in lots of places. I’ve used the example of my state before, but North Carolina went blue for the first time since 1976 and without that effort the Democratic Party would not have retained the Governor’s Mansion. I don’t disagree that McCain was a poor candidate who didn’t have a lot of lower-tier party support before the VP announcement, but that shouldn’t discount the incredible effort Obama and the network of volunteers he created on the ground.
The conditions necessary for a Republican to win the White House in 2012 would be so catastrophic that a person would have to be insane to want the job.
To Erif TF Bat: You need to understand the big sea change in the Republican party that occurred between Teddy Roosevelt leaving office and the rise of Taft and his cronies to positions of leadership . From 1854 onward, the Republicans were the radical party in American politics, proposing abolition, emancipation, equality, pure food & drug laws, and breaking up various monopolies and business trusts. Jim Crow laws were enacted by Democrats to regain political power in reconstructed Southern states and subsequently spread westward (The Democrats began loosing Southern votes in the 1940s when Roosevelt and Truman began enforcing the few civil rights laws on the books, and they really went over to the GOP following the 1964 Civil Rights Act).
Teddy was a notorious foe of big business and a stalwart defender of the common working man and the environment. Taft & co. were in the pockets of big business and it’s been that way ever since (with the occasional odd exception, like Goldwater, of all people).
I have always tried to not underestimate humanity’s ability to act illogical or ridiculous.
Perhaps the Republican party is dead by that name but I’m not quick to believe that it’s far from over. There are plenty of young conservatives who can grow up to be the old conservatives you know today. I mean… old conservatives had to come from Somewhere, no?
I wouldn’t count out Obama losing in 2012 for one reason no one’s brought up here yet. Namely, to quote Carville/Clinton, “It’s the economy stupid”. If we go into a double-dip recession and/or jobless “recovery”, or if there’s substantial inflation/tax hikes to burn off some of the deficit, I can see Obama having trouble. Keep in mind how Carter and Bush I lost.
I’m from Pennsylvania, the State Without A Budget, so brother you better believe my opinion of politics, and people in general after those “town hall whinefests”, has gone downhill tremendously in the past few months.
I’m with the bunch who will take that bet. Hell, I’ll bet YOU $20 that a Republican wil at least make a very strong showing in 2012. It’ll be a platform of the squeaky wheels (hate, fear, bullshit) drowning out the reasonable side of the party (whatever’s left) but it will happen. And on that night, even if Obama wins, I will begin to drink heavily.
Which country we talking about?
There is an increasing rift in the political right, between the old school hardliners, and the majority of conservatives who just want the government to do its thing and more or less leave them alone.
There are a lot of people who identify conservative and are disgusted with partisan attacks and fear-mongering, who don’t have problems with gays, or minorities, or anybody, but think that people should take care of themselves, rather than relying on a dole. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that’s the majority of blue-collar America. White, Black, Brown, Yellow, they go to work to support their families, they don’t want to be taxed any more than they have to be, and they don’t want to pay for folks that don’t work like they do.
Do they want to outlaw gay marriage? No. They don’t care what the gays do, so long as they don’t make a ruckus.
Do they want socialized medicine? Maybe, but they don’t want to have to pay for it, and they are a little dubious because the word “socialist” has a bad taste in the US, ever since McCarthy.
The Republican party will not go away in twenty years or fifty. If they are smart, they will get rid of the dead weigh of the old guard and move themselves back to a slightly-right-of-center position that actually reflects the majority of red state voters. Even if they aren’t smart, they have the corporate support to last the long haul, and the democrats can always be counted upon to lose touch with reality over a period of eight years, and piss off enough people to elect a mess of unlikeable republicans.
Obama has set himself up to stand for change, and as much as I’m nervous about what he wants to change, reform is needed, I hope he succeeds, and I am embarrassed to be associated with the right at times like this, as they play the politics of fear and opposition for its own sake.
Twenty years to go?
It’s the other way around. Conservatism has reached aporia, an intellectual dead end. It needs twenty years in the corner to think about what it has done. It needs to ask:
Given that race does not exist, and that most North Americans, including most White North Americans, including especially most Neo-Confederates, would fail the “One Drop test,” what was actually behind the racism?
What is a conservative socialist? Feminist? Environmentalist?
Why am I a conservative?
Why the heck did I start pretending that adolescence (also known as libertarianism) was a political philosophy?
When those questions have been answered, we will bring balance to the Force.
Casinos make their living betting against stupid. They don’t go bust because the house doesn’t win.
Will the North American economy pick up by 2010? Probably, though the crisis is very deep and the response necessarily lags. Will it be back on track by 2012? Also probably. This is a painful recession, but I’m not sure it’s more painful than the recession in Reagan’s first term, and you all know what happened then.
What would be clinch it would be income growth, and not the bogus “oh technology and consumer choice has improved you couldn’t get an iPod in 1980 or curry paste at the grocery store” purchasing power growth, because that doesn’t help anyone make rent.
One last thing: the Republican base has become larger in proportion to the people who would vote Republican, and it’s also become crazier.
Case in point: Colin Powell, if he were the Republican candidate in 2000, probably would have won. He might or might not have made it through the primaries, due to the baser instincts of the base, though I think commentators would have written off the early South Carolina primary because you-know-we-can’t-say-they’re-racist-asswipes-but-wink-wink. He probably would have won everything up to and perhaps including Virginia (but probably not Georgia), at which point it would have been a lock, and even the creepier southern Republicans could grit their teeth and tell themselves, okay he’s one of the good ones, maybe even pat themselves on the back for their open-mindedness.
Today? Hollow laugh. He’s a RINO, he’s from [not-the-letter-J]ew York City, et cetera.
In all the discussion about how the Republican party has changed in a century and a half, I’d like to point out something that Xander said: that the flower children seemingly all grew up to vote for Reagan. This is one of those things that makes people nervous for the future of the seemingly liberal youth voters.
But I’d like to float a radical suggestion: that the counterculture warriors of the 60s were not neccessarily ideologically geared towards the Democrats. Certainly they weren’t at the time–people forget now, but in the early 60s it was the Democrats who were the warmongering, pro-defense party. They were the ones who got the US into the Vietnam war, for Pete’s sake. Likewise, a lot of the 60s counterculture (I don’t want to reduce it to “hippies” because there were many many different groups with often competing ideologies) were modelled, first and foremost, on libertarian principles. Others were strongly religious. These people didn’t need to alter their philosophy all that much to start voting for the Republicans, especially under Reagan.
The main appeal of the Democrats to the counterculture was that they were the party of civil rights, but once those had been achieved the Republicans started to look more palatable to the types who came later. Even the people who declared themselves socialists or Marxists tended to grow out of their ideology once the 60s were over, though they probably stayed as Democratic voters.
At any rate, I’d argue that the cultural contortions happening now are going to do MUCH more to drive young people away from the right, and keep them there even as they grow older. It’s true that there’s a certain type of conservativism that appeals to older voters, but I think the modern Democrats have that covered too.
How much money are we talking about here, and are we talking American dollars or Canadian?
I’ll take the bet on the condition that the Republican’s name is Joe Scarborough. He’s got the right kind of voting record from his time in Congress to keep the hardliners happy, as well as being a vocal cheerleader for the Bush administration’s foreign policy, including the use of torture. That being said, he’s also been a pretty harsh critic of Bush’s financial practices, and compared to the likes of Beck and Limbaugh, he’s practically the very personification of serene rationality on his TV show, which would bring in the moderates and independents.
Make no mistake, I don’t think he has an eighth of Obama’s intellectual acumen, but Americans don’t have the greatest track record of voting for smart people. So yeah, if he runs, I think Scarborough very well could kick Obama’s ass, especially if, as Tom Galloway pointed out above, the economy hasn’t come back.
Of course, he may not want to take the pay cut, but he’s definitely someone to watch.
Google autofill is fun for Joe Scarborough:
Joe Scarborough dead intern
Joe Scarborough dead girl
Joe Scarborough dead aide
Joe Scarborough dead woman in office
The medical examiner ruled it a tragic accident (fainting, desk). That hasn’t stopped the rumors, which started almost immediately, since it was also the summer of Gary Condit (D-CA) and Chandra Levy. Michael Moore *and* Kathleen Harris (R-FL) have both referred to it.
And people are still googling it.
At this point I’m just worried about the healthcare thing.
If it gets gutted, Obama and the Democrats will be hurtin’ in 2012 and a lot of time and capital and energy will have been wasted. Now, the speech helped, and it’s likely that something will pass, but I’m afraid that the protests two days after will spook the “moderates” and we’ll get bupkiss.
I’m okay with co-ops instead of a fully public option, for the time being anyway, I’ve never thought of single payer as anything but a distant dream, but I really hope this doesn’t go off the rails entirely.
John,
Which will do nothing as long as companies feel validated in cutting hours, benefits and salaries. Their economy rests in how low they can keep their costs. The real economy depends on how much disposable income the rest of America obtains.
Which has no public option and is therefore a waste of time.
Meaningless and you know it. If Clarence Thomas could make the bench anyone could.
If you are talking about Al Franken, that had nothing to do with Congress and everything to do with Norm Coleman being a little bitch after losing the recount.
The public option has not been eliminated yet, and if what’s passed doesn’t have it and still makes it illegal for insurance companies to terminate coverage or deny it based on pre-existing coverage it would still be an improvement. (And I’m not convinced co-ops would be the worst thing in the world.)
This would be an accurate prediction if we lived in a parliamentary system wherein the party’s fortunes affected the careers of individual politicians. In our system, the careers of individual politicians affect the success of the party. If the majority of the party is negative fear-mongering and crypto-racism, that’s not popular, but a handful of popular moderates in key states can tip the balance of congressional power. Olympia Snowe might be very popular in Maine for her independence and moderation, but a vote for her does not imply that she is a moderating force on her caucus, but that her presence as a sidelined moderate empowers the idealogues who share her side of the aisle. And there’s a hard core of nuttery in the south the middle west that will always elect folks like James Inhofe, and if enough moderates can convince their constituents that they’re not like those racist bastards, well, all the same it means those racist bastards get to be in charge of everything.
This is the opposite of how it works for the democrats, incidentally, where the fringe is drowned out by the moderates, who are disproportionately empowered at the expense of the party’s ostensible core principles. This is not to mention the fact that only in America would the leftmost fringe even be considered particularly liberal. The right screams about the radical left but they obviously have no idea – or are conveniently eliding – the fact that the really radical leftists are still around and have no real representation in national politics. This cannot be said of the radical right, who do have a disproportionate influence on national policy. I say, fuck it might as well be hanged for a wolf as a sheep – if the right is going to hang out with birfers and tea partiers, let’s put some Adorno in our platform.
A ( pretty distressing ) counterpoint, by Frank Schaeffer:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-schaeffer/glenn-beck-and-the-912-ma_b_284387.html
Hey- the Tories in the UK have made something of a comeback since Labour has spent the last few years shooting itself in the foot (or so I read; I’m American and don’t have any first-hand perspective on UK politics). So there’s a model for the front-running party to nonetheless fumble in a big way. And didn’t the part that was running Canada totally implode in around 1993?
Why would the Republicans want a candidate from a state that could LOSE electoral votes in the 2010 census?