Posted on 01/09/2016 12:39:15 PM PST by Mariner
The Republican Party is facing a historic split over its fundamental principles and identity, as its once powerful establishment grapples with an eruption of class tensions, ethnic resentments and mistrust among working-class conservatives who are demanding a presidential nominee who represents their interests.
At family dinners and New Year’s parties, in conference calls and at private lunches, longtime Republicans are expressing a growing fear that the coming election could be shattering for the party, or reshape it in ways that leave it unrecognizable.
While warring party factions usually reconcile after brutal nomination fights, this race feels different, according to interviews with more than 50 Republican leaders, activists, donors and voters, from both elite circles and the grass roots.
Never have so many voters been attracted to Republican candidates like Donald J. Trump and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who are challenging core party beliefs on the economy and national security and new goals like winning over Hispanics through immigration reform. Rank-and-file conservatives, after decades of deferring to party elites, are trying to stage what is effectively a people’s coup by selecting a standard-bearer who is not the preferred candidate of wealthy donors and elected officials.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I like both tea and pastries.
But when I gather with friends to discuss politics and the course of the nation, I prefer meat and whiskey.
In accordance with the American Way, time honored and proven.
Boo-frickin’-hoo. RINOs are done.
After what the GOP pulled in MS to get Cochran back into the Senate, there won’t be any reconciliation here
The way the party showed their collective gratitude for the Tea Party getting rid of Reed and Pelosi and giving Boner the biggest majority in like 100 years. I mean to say knifing the Tea Party in the back.
For me the RINOS of the Establishment GOP can go to Hell.
They only lost or gave us failed presidents since Reagan, and he got there on his own.
Trump wing principles in order of importance:
1. Win power
2. Built wall
3. Trade control, job control (many things in this)
4. Big government is great so long as it is repackaged with their own label and not the left’s label
5. Social issues don’t matter. Appease the Christians with “Merry Christmas” and they’ll be too stupid to notice they lost everything else.
For liberals, mounting fears of a populist tsunami ...
The party has already split.
The GOP-e tried to kick the conservatives out of the party - by promoting abortion, gay marriage and legalized pot.
Well, Trump kicked THEM out of the party - and not by promoting those things.
Good riddance.
The split in the Republican party goes back to well before the time of Teddy Roosevelt, the most prominent maverick to arise from the time of the founding of the GOP, with its “Whig” faction and the “Radical” Republicans (later the “Progressives”), divided, for the most part, on how the recent insurgency of the Confederacy should be managed to re-integrate it with the Union. The Radical Republicans won, and Reconstruction was forced upon the South, causing a very long-term situation where the South was almost solidly Democrat until the latter part of the 20th Century.
Teddy Roosevelt led the Progressives to form its own “anti-Republican” party, known in 1912 as the “Bull Moose”, and which catapulted the minority Democrats into the White House, not as Progressives, but as what in England were known as “Fabian Socialists”, the intellectual foundations of which were very much like those of the various National Socialists parties forming in countries elsewhere around the world. Egalitarianism, Fraternity and Liberty were conflated with some Utopian idea of what later proved to be an extension of the proposals of Karl Marx. The Great War (World War I) exploded all the old “normal” beliefs in the “conventional wisdom”, with Europe sunk in turmoil and despair, and the United States on a rampage of lawlessness fueled by the widespread disrespect of the law, most notably the defiance of Prohibition, the forbidding by law of the consumption of alcohol in just about any form.
Prohibition was formed in people’s minds as being due to the “old school” Republicans, but it was nothing of the kind, it was a construct of the Wilson years in the White House, which also brought us into the First World War, a fight we would have done well to have stayed away from.
The Progressives, now a very distinct splinter away from the older Republican philosophy, latched upon Teddy Roosevelt’s very distant cousin, FDR, and uncle to Eleanor Roosevelt (both her maiden and married name, didn’t have to change the monograms on the silverware and linens at all), and formed a de facto alliance with the Democrats, to pass the New Deal. The old school Republicans (the “Stalwarts”) were pretty much locked out of the legislative process for years, as Robert Taft (”Mr. Republican”) wandered largely in the wilderness, until after the end of the Second World War, a fight we could not have stayed out of, considering our support given the British for years before the outbreak of hostilities.
The drafting of General Eisenhower in 1952 put the Republicans back in the White House for the first time since Hoover departed in 1933, but Ike didn’t even know if he was a Republican or not. One does not become a general officer without playing some political strings somewhere, and Ike rose to his position under the tutelage of some pretty big names in the FDR Administration. So even if the Republicans had regained the White House, there was not much incentive or willingness to repeal a lot of the New Deal programs, and disenchantment was widespread, especially when it looked like there was going to be a state of “perpetual war” with the forces of Communism.
The Progressives, who by then had fully departed from the Republicans and integrated mostly into the Democrats, changing their party designations and everything, were also so riddled with Communist influence, they had become totally suspect in every initiative they undertook. Much of the FDR Administration had Communist agents or sympathizers at every level, and it looked like the nation was being slowly but surely subverted from within, and would fall to Communism with a slow but sure certainty.
Then Ronaldus Magnus happened. “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” For a while, it was “morning again in America” and OK for people to say so. The Soviet Union and its empire were splintered, and the enemies of America were thoroughly discombobulated.
What has happened since? The old looming tyranny, Communism, has morphed somehow into the Islamic Caliphate, and we stand at a crossroads again.
Probably more wishful thinking than concern.
begone gopes! we want a clean start for true conservatism.
Not really. We take the lesser evil fork every election so it’s more that we are already walking straight into our own demise.
McCain, Lindsey Grahm etc will bolt to the Democrat Party.
John Cornyn and John Carter are taking notes.
One more light bulb bill or a veteran bill isn’t going to cut it.
Plenty of well considered posts here.
Plenty of well considered posts here.
As if the "demographic death spiral" is some force of nature and not a very specific policy of the last 50 years. FU Graham and anybody like you! Immigration in not supposed to be a form of genocide!
If you're talking about big ideas -- maybe. If you're talking about the actual people who supported Roosevelt in 1912, they ended up in a variety of places politically. Some moved over to FDR and the Democrats. Others went back to the GOP. Still others gave up on the two major parties. TR himself rejoined the Republicans and may have been considering running again as a Republican.
Trump/Cruz = 40 state landslide
‘And who’s ever going to vote for the GOPers if that happens? They clearly don’t . . and won’t . . have the numbers.’
That’s their ace in the hole. The GOPe would be equally pleased if the Dem won. Notice how happy they’ve been to accommodate Obama. As long as their power and perks continue apace, they’re good to go.
Yeah, my Dad said the GOP he remembered wanted to avoid foreign wars and not seek them out. The idiotic "nation-building" that H.W. and G.W. advocated, with his idiot advisers is what re-aligned the party.
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