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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please.In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. |
The institution of the GOP has to change or die. That simple.
*snort* If you say so.
It's far more likely that the Democratic Party's hodgepodge of interest groups combined only by their hatred of the GOP and hunger for free money will splinter over entitlement reform before the GOP dies because it isn't libertarian enough. I'm talking over a 20-30 year period here, the next 20-30 years.
The only "old" conservatism people rejected has been aspects of social conservatism, and that comes almost wholly from 18-30 voters. It remains to be seen if those voters will continue their high turnout after Obama isn't on the ballot anymore, and also if they will maintain their support for things like abortion as they get older. Gay marriage is a decided issue, and the GOP has already started to shift on it.
The real test is next year. If the implementation of Obamacare results in great difficulties for the people (reduced hours at work, the program doesn't run correctly because lots of people engage in civil disobedience against it - which is going to happen, the question is will it have a large effect on the program - people losing the health insurance they already have, etc.) then the Republicans will gain a few seats in the Senate, possibly retaking it, and keep holding the House, and the death of conservatism and the GOP will once again have been shown to be nothing but the triumphalist fantasies of the Left, as happened in 2008. If Obamacare works well and the GOP doesn't get any seats in the Senate and loses the House, then it will be time to either become a British Tory-style party, or go libertarian.
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Heh, I've always thought the right to be MUCH more cohesive and unified than the splintered left and all of its single issue and special interest advocates. A much larger spectrum of ideas than the right imo. The left always reminded me overall of the ents in LotR... slow to agree or act on anything and deliberate every detail ad nauseum.
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On March 09 2013 04:39 screamingpalm wrote:
Heh, I've always thought the right to be MUCH more cohesive and unified than the splintered left and all of its single issue and special interest advocates. A much larger spectrum of ideas than the right imo. The left always reminded me overall of the ents in LotR... slow to agree or act on anything and deliberate every detail ad nauseum.
Well it is true that the Right has mostly paid lip-service to libertarians for the last 30 years, Goldwater libertarianism birthed not a libertarian dominance of the GOP but a co-opting of libertarian language and some libertarian ideas by the Reaganites. This process also pretty much destroyed the Rockefeller Republicans, so what you had left were the religious revivalists (with their own factions, but when it came to politics they presented a united front more or less), the mainstream Reaganites, and a small group of neo-conservatives and libertarians and Rockefeller remnants.
Ever since 1964, until 2000, and resuming in 2010, the Republican Party has revived itself under the emotional pull of going back to Goldwater as their Moses and Reagan as their Joshua. The renewal has always been more Reaganite than Goldwaterian (or whatever). The question today with people like Rand Paul is whether the libertarians are going to marginalize the neo-conservatives and religious revivalists and adopt the Reaganites into the libertarian fold, giving the GOP a rejuvenation, for the first time, more Goldwater than the Gipper.
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On March 09 2013 04:39 screamingpalm wrote:
Heh, I've always thought the right to be MUCH more cohesive and unified than the splintered left and all of its single issue and special interest advocates. A much larger spectrum of ideas than the right imo. The left always reminded me overall of the ents in LotR... slow to agree or act on anything and deliberate every detail ad nauseum.
The Democrats are much more diverse with their whole Big Tent approach, and lack the party discipline of the Republicans, but at the same time the myriad interest groups under the Democrats are generally a lot easier to appease without a whole lot of substantive action. The Republican alliance of pro-life social conservatives and economic conservatives is much simpler, but the overlap in interests is a lot less and the whole thing makes much less sense ideologically. It seems like it should be more tenuous, but so far it hasn't been. Throwing the Tea Party into the mix might change things, however. I wouldn't be surprised if 20 years from now, the Democrats were the socially progressive party of business, like the Rockefeller Republicans, and the Republicans became a populist party. It really all hinges on how much lasting Libertarian influence there will be from disaffected voters, and what tactics Republicans use to deal with shifting demographics.
Remember that the Will Rogers quote comes from being the Civil Rights era even, but the New Deal Democrats and the Civil Rights Democrats and the New Democrats keep soldiering on. "I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat."
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meh, the left has been saying that the GOP will have to do A, B, or C to survive for 40+ years now. and despite the self-assured haranguing, the party has survived just fine without doing much moving left. the country is still divided pretty equally on gay marriage and abortion, they still support immigration reform that doesn't include amnesty, and fiscal conservatism has always been the winning side (when Democrats don't appear to run as fiscal conservatives, they lose).
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On March 09 2013 06:26 sc2superfan101 wrote:
meh, the left has been saying that the GOP will have to do A, B, or C to survive for 40+ years now. and despite the self-assured haranguing, the party has survived just fine without doing much moving left. the country is still divided pretty equally on gay marriage and abortion, they still support immigration reform that doesn't include amnesty, and fiscal conservatism has always been the winning side (when Democrats don't appear to run as fiscal conservatives, they lose).
Do you have any sources for that?
At any rate, don't you think it's almost by definition that as the country progresses, it moves to the left?
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On March 09 2013 06:26 sc2superfan101 wrote:
meh, the left has been saying that the GOP will have to do A, B, or C to survive for 40+ years now. and despite the self-assured haranguing, the party has survived just fine without doing much moving left. the country is still divided pretty equally on gay marriage and abortion, they still support immigration reform that doesn't include amnesty, and fiscal conservatism has always been the winning side (when Democrats don't appear to run as fiscal conservatives, they lose).
The GOP actually is quite radically different than it was 40+ years ago, though of course it has moved rightward, not leftward.
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On March 09 2013 06:32 Roe wrote:Show nested quote +On March 09 2013 06:26 sc2superfan101 wrote:
meh, the left has been saying that the GOP will have to do A, B, or C to survive for 40+ years now. and despite the self-assured haranguing, the party has survived just fine without doing much moving left. the country is still divided pretty equally on gay marriage and abortion, they still support immigration reform that doesn't include amnesty, and fiscal conservatism has always been the winning side (when Democrats don't appear to run as fiscal conservatives, they lose).
Do you have any sources for that? At any rate, don't you think it's almost by definition that as the country progresses, it moves to the left?
The country has fairly steadily moved left on social issues (though this is not always the case, there are certainly rightward slides, such as after WW2), but the whole First World has moved quite to the right on economic issues since the 70s-80s.
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On March 09 2013 06:32 Roe wrote:Show nested quote +On March 09 2013 06:26 sc2superfan101 wrote:
meh, the left has been saying that the GOP will have to do A, B, or C to survive for 40+ years now. and despite the self-assured haranguing, the party has survived just fine without doing much moving left. the country is still divided pretty equally on gay marriage and abortion, they still support immigration reform that doesn't include amnesty, and fiscal conservatism has always been the winning side (when Democrats don't appear to run as fiscal conservatives, they lose).
Do you have any sources for that? At any rate, don't you think it's almost by definition that as the country progresses, it moves to the left?
Source for gay marriage
Source for abortion (not that equally divided)
And no, "progressive" is not by definition progressive.
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2nd Worst City in CA8938 Posts
Gay marriage is pretty close, but abortion isn't. Support for gay rights is a really recent phenomenon (not too long ago a majority of people disapproved of gay marriage), so the country is definitely moving left in that aspect.
'Pro-choice' and 'pro-life' are loaded terms. If you look at the percentage of people who support abortion to be legal in all circumstances/under certain circumstances, you'd see that a significant majority approve of abortion at least some times. Not even close.
To add, the term 'fiscal conservatism' is a load of crock. Most people care about how money is spent moreso than how much we spend. Of course no one wants waste, that's a given. Even the most liberal person doesn't want waste.
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The Justice Department is urging a court to affirm individuals’ rights to record police under the First Amendment, filing a statement of interest in support of a journalist suing over his arrest while photographing Maryland officers.
In the statement filed this week in a federal court in Maryland, the Justice Department argues that not only do individuals have a First Amendment right to record officers publicly doing their duties, they also have Fourth and 14th Amendment rights protecting them from having those recordings seized without a warrant or due process. The DOJ urges the court to uphold these rights and to reject a motion to dismiss from Montgomery Co. in Garcia v. Montgomery Co., a case that has implications for an increasing crop of litigation on the subject in the era of ubiquitous smartphones.
“The United States is concerned that discretionary charges, such as disorderly conduct, loitering, disturbing the peace and resisting arrest, are all too easily used to curtail expressive conduct or retaliate against individuals for exercising their First Amendment rights. … Core First Amendment conduct, such as recording a police officer performing duties on a public street, cannot be the sole basis for such charges,” wrote the DOJ Civil Rights Division.
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On March 09 2013 06:32 Roe wrote:Show nested quote +On March 09 2013 06:26 sc2superfan101 wrote:
meh, the left has been saying that the GOP will have to do A, B, or C to survive for 40+ years now. and despite the self-assured haranguing, the party has survived just fine without doing much moving left. the country is still divided pretty equally on gay marriage and abortion, they still support immigration reform that doesn't include amnesty, and fiscal conservatism has always been the winning side (when Democrats don't appear to run as fiscal conservatives, they lose).
Do you have any sources for that? At any rate, don't you think it's almost by definition that as the country progresses, it moves to the left?
This is a dangerous and incredibly false continuation of the Enlightenment myth. It certainly doesn't hold up to how global politics has developed over the 20th century into the 21st. This kind of thinking is why the left (to which I certainly belong to) has become, still is, and hopefully will not continue to be complacent.
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On March 09 2013 07:09 Souma wrote:
To add, the term 'fiscal conservatism' is a load of crock. Most people care about how money is spent moreso than how much we spend. Of course no one wants waste, that's a given. Even the most liberal person doesn't want waste.
"Waste" is the loaded term here, not fiscal conservatism. Nobody wants waste but reasonable minds might disagree on what constitutes waste. When the military spends $50k to install coffee makers on a stealth bomber, some people say that's waste, others say it's a necessary expense for pilots flying 26 hr missions.
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2nd Worst City in CA8938 Posts
On March 09 2013 07:21 coverpunch wrote:Show nested quote +On March 09 2013 07:09 Souma wrote:
To add, the term 'fiscal conservatism' is a load of crock. Most people care about how money is spent moreso than how much we spend. Of course no one wants waste, that's a given. Even the most liberal person doesn't want waste. "Waste" is the loaded term here, not fiscal conservatism. Nobody wants waste but reasonable minds might disagree on what constitutes waste. When the military spends $50k to install coffee makers on a stealth bomber, some people say that's waste, others say it's a necessary expense for pilots flying 26 hr missions.
While people may disagree on what 'waste' is,' fiscal conservatism just makes it seem like what liberals want is 'waste' while the conservative opinion is correct. This is why I call 'fiscal conservatism' a crock, because Republicans love to spend money fighting immigration, drugs and loads of money on defense, but everything else is 'waste'. Fiscal conservatism has much a leg to stand on as Mariah Carey at a shoe store.
btw didn't call fiscal conservatism a loaded term, just called it a load of crock. :>
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Mmm, don't mistake Republicans for fiscal conservatives. Fiscal conservatives are a wing of the Republican Party but the GOP is not fiscally conservative.
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2nd Worst City in CA8938 Posts
In reality yeah I'd agree. However, the way they present themselves, it seems like there are only social conservatives who are also fiscally conservative, libertarians who are of course fiscally conservative, and moderates who lean towards fiscal conservatism (although it pains me to have to use this term).
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On March 08 2013 11:14 Souma wrote::3 Show nested quote +Elizabeth Warren on Thursday demanded answers from top banking regulators over the possibility of shuttering financial firms that flout federal anti-money laundering laws or violate international trade sanctions. Referencing the penalties leveled against HSBC after the company was caught being used to funnel billions in drug money, the Massachusetts Democrat questioned regulators about why they did not consider forcing the British bank to shut its doors on U.S. soil. “What does it take?” Warren said. “How many billions of dollars do you have to launder for drug lords? Regulators fined the company $1.9 billion over the laundering, but Warren questioned why no criminal prosecutions were aimed at the company or its employees, saying they were not being held to the same standard as common Americans. “If you’re caught with an ounce of cocaine, the chances are good you go to jail. If you’re caught repeatedly, you can go to jail for life,” Warren told regulators during a Senate Banking Committee hearing. “Incidentally, if you launder nearly a billion dollars in drug money, your company pays a fine and you go home and sleep in your own bed at night.” Officials from the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency hesitated to weigh in on when it was appropriate to shut down financial firms, saying the decision to shutter a bank would follow prosecutions by the Department of Justice. “I’m not going to get into some hypothetical line-drawing exercise,” David Cohen, treasury’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, told Warren. Fed Reserve Governor Jerome Powell was more direct: “I’ll tell you exactly when it’s appropriate” to consider pulling a bank’s license, he said. “It’s appropriate when there’s a criminal conviction.” Warren’s attack comes at a touchy time for the Obama administration, following Attorney General Eric Holder’s admission Wednesday that the size of the biggest banks complicates efforts to hit them with criminal prosecutions. “I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if we do prosecute — if we do bring a criminal charge — it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy,” Holder told the Senate Judiciary panel Wednesday. That line of thinking poses a direct challenge to Democrats’ Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law, which is intended to ensure that the collapse of a single firm does not threaten the economy. And the tensions over “too big to jail” were further inflamed Thursday when Cohen conceded that federal prosecutors had consulted with treasury over the potential economic consequences of going after HSBC. Cohen told the panel that his department declined to provide a summary of the economic impacts because they were impossible to forecast with any certainty. But the fact that the Justice Department even asked the question left lawmakers fuming, as they wondered whether Justice’s question revealed that major banks are too big to jail. Warren’s line of inquiry became a bipartisan chorus, as several other members on her panel took up the grilling when her time ran out. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) asked regulators how they would explain to the American people why no HSBC officials faced criminal charges and whether they had played any role in Justice’s decision not to prosecute the bank or its officials. And Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) was scathing in his critique of the regulators, sarcastically suggesting to Warren that they collaborate on a bank that dealt solely with money from drug cartels and terrorists. “We’d have nothing to fear from the U.S. government,” he said. http://www.politico.com/story/2013/03/elizabeth-warren-bust-banks-that-launder-drug-money-88565.html?hp=r6
This is a good point. Where are all of Obama's prosecutions of corrupt wall street bankers? No where that I can see. The Bush justice department was far more effective. Obama's justice department's priorities are people like Bradley Manning and Aaron Swartz.
I remember reading an article about this a month or two ago. It's actually very frustrating. It's like Obama's liberal in all the ways that I'm conservative and conservative in all the areas that I'm liberal. lol
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/23/untouchables-wall-street-prosecutions-obama
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In the emerging GOP civil war between Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Rand Paul (R-KY) over the government's use of drones, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich made it clear Friday that he's siding with the Kentucky libertarian.
Earlier this week, McCain blasted Paul's 13-hour filibuster over the nomination of John Brennan to lead the CIA. But while McCain and his old ally Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) criticized, other Republicans, such as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), rushed to join Paul's cause. Gingrich said he was "saddened" by McCain's response.
"Well, I'm really disappointed in John McCain. And I'm very saddened by it," Gingrich told CNN's Wolf Blitzer. "McCain, in his younger years, was a great maverick. He took on his party all the time. The idea that he's now lecturing the next generation because they have the guts to stand up, which is I -- I would have thought John McCain we do have applauded them and he would have said, I may not agree with you in detail, but I'm proud of the fact that you're standing up for your beliefs, you're fighting. I don't know what's happened to John McCain. But I find this very sad."
McCain contended on Friday that his vision of national security, not Paul's, upholds the legacy of former President Ronald Reagan. But Gingrich said when it comes to the use of drones on American soil, Paul is right.
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
i honestly am very interested in how obama will explain his stance on the drone thing after this presidency is over.
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On March 09 2013 04:31 DeepElemBlues wrote:*snort* If you say so. It's far more likely that the Democratic Party's hodgepodge of interest groups combined only by their hatred of the GOP and hunger for free money will splinter over entitlement reform before the GOP dies because it isn't libertarian enough. I'm talking over a 20-30 year period here, the next 20-30 years. The only "old" conservatism people rejected has been aspects of social conservatism, and that comes almost wholly from 18-30 voters. It remains to be seen if those voters will continue their high turnout after Obama isn't on the ballot anymore, and also if they will maintain their support for things like abortion as they get older. Gay marriage is a decided issue, and the GOP has already started to shift on it. The real test is next year. If the implementation of Obamacare results in great difficulties for the people (reduced hours at work, the program doesn't run correctly because lots of people engage in civil disobedience against it - which is going to happen, the question is will it have a large effect on the program - people losing the health insurance they already have, etc.) then the Republicans will gain a few seats in the Senate, possibly retaking it, and keep holding the House, and the death of conservatism and the GOP will once again have been shown to be nothing but the triumphalist fantasies of the Left, as happened in 2008. If Obamacare works well and the GOP doesn't get any seats in the Senate and loses the House, then it will be time to either become a British Tory-style party, or go libertarian.
I seriously doubt this.
Yes, Democrats are far more diverse, but the thing is that they usually come to a general agreement on most issues. The problem for Republicans is that it's pretty much two different parties that agree on one or two issues that have combined so they have the numbers to challenge Democrats.
The main problem is our voting system. Whether it's in 20 years or 200, eventually it'll change, and it'll actually be a system that is conducive to more than two parties. Then, we'll finally see parties that aren't just hodgepodges of various ideas that can vaguely agree so that they can have enough numbers to gain seats in Congress.
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EPT
