Having read it, I'm a bit disappointed. Aside from what I think is his
mischaracterization of the current Republican Party, "married white people"?
, I'm not sure that he said anything profound. It's been my impression that
the worry isn't that Trump is refashioning the Republican Party but rather,
that he's unleashing some very dangerous trends that have been somewhat
latent in a sector of our population.
Miriam
________________________________
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Richard Driscoll
Sent: Tuesday, April 19, 2016 2:29 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Where's the socialism in the Sanders
campaign?
Carl et al:
Recent conversations came to mind when I read the following historical
article by Michael Barone. I thought it might be of interest to our
readers.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-cant-break-the-republican-party-1460758576
?mod=trending_now_7
The material contained is historical in nature and generally applicable to
both existing political parties and a comparison of present external
conditions with prior historical conditions occasioned by presidential
elections.
Don;'t be mislead by the title.
Richard
Trump Cant Break the Republican Party
Republicans may be split temporarily, but there is no deep Trumpist
movement to push permanent schism.
Photo: Chad Crowe
By
Michael Barone
April 15, 2016 6:16 p.m. ET
969 COMMENTS
<http://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-cant-break-the-republican-party-146075857
6?mod=trending_now_7#livefyre-comment>
Republican primary voters and caucus-goers, we have often been told,
award their presidential nomination to the candidate next in line.
Conservative Christian Republicans are, as one national reporter once wrote
(and later apologized for), poorly educated and easily led. Not this year.
The normal pattern, to use a word from the Watergate era, is inoperative.
Republicans are not supposed to behave like this.
Donald Trump <http://topics.wsj.com/person/T/Donald-Trump/159> s
candidacy has proved as disruptive to the Republican Party as Craigslist was
to newspapers classified ads and Uber has been to taxi cartels. Its by no
means clear that Mr. Trump will earn the 1,237 delegates needed for the
partys presidential nomination. But the Republican Party seems likely to
suffer serious damage either if he is nominated (polls show him far behind
Hillary Clinton <http://topics.wsj.com/person/C/Hillary-Clinton/6344> ) or
if he is not (he predicts violence then and wont rule out an independent
candidacy).
Some historic perspective may be useful here in assessing how much
potential damage the Republican Party may suffer, and if it will be lasting.
Each of Americas two political partiesthe oldest and third oldest
in the world (Britains Conservatives are No. 2)has had a persistently
different character; political cartoonists appropriately depict them as two
different animals. The Democratic Party, formed in 1832 to re-elect
President Andrew Jackson, has always been a coalition of disparate
groupswhite Southerners and big-city immigrants in the 19th century, gentry
liberals and black church members today. The Republican Party, founded in
1854 to stop the spread of slavery, has always been supported by a core of
people who are seen as ordinary AmericansProtestant Northerners in the 19th
century, white married people todaybut who are by themselves not a majority
in an always culturally diverse nation.
As a result the Democrats have been more often at risk of
irreconcilable division. To hold a large and diverse constituency together,
the Democratic Party between 1836 and 1932 required nominees to get
two-thirds of national convention delegates votes. Republicans sought unity
by control of convention rules and the chairmans gavel, which usually
worked for a party with a temperamentally loyal dominant constituency.
Unapologetic manipulation of the rules produced the nomination of Dwight
Eisenhower over Robert Taft in 1952, the only election year between 1928 and
2004 that produced a Republican president, Senate and House. Gerald Fords
delegate majority over Ronald Reagan in 1976 was narrow, but it held and was
respected; Ford nearly won that fall and Reagan did four years later.
Serious division over major issues has been relatively rare among
Republicans, with arguments usually limited to tactics and timing. But once
every generation or so party opinion has been starkly divided. In the 1870s,
radical Republicans wanted to pursue Reconstruction to uphold blacks rights
in the South; they lost. In the 1890s, some Republicans favored the gold
standard, some inflationary silver; gold won. Twentieth-century Republicans
differed in their approach to Progressive and New Deal policies; they
pursued different policies in different states. Isolationist and
internationalist Republicans argued over foreign policy in the 1930s and
1940s; the internationalists won. In the 1970s, Republicans argued over
whether to cut back government and just how; in the 1980s Reagan Republicans
won.
In each case Republicans argued heatedly, then reached a conclusion
and stuck with it. Similarly, as Republicans adjusted to events and opinion,
their party shifted from one more supportive of economic intervention in the
19th century to one more opposed in the 20th. The party that was the more
cautious about military intervention in the half-century between 1917 and
1967 has become the party less cautious about it in the half-century since.
In each case Republicans, operating with a core constituency confident that
it embodied much that defines America, emerged with a unified and more
politically sustainable position.
It is generally agreed that the presidential nomination process is
the weakest part of our political system. One reason is that it leaves the
two great political parties vulnerable to disruptive
candidatescontroversial political figures who threaten to reshape the party
to which they have attached themselves.
Usually that has happened to the Democratic Party. Beginning in
1896, William Jennings Bryan took a party that had electoral parity with
Republicans and led it into extended minority status. Huey Long threatened
to hijack Franklin Roosevelts party in the 1930s. George Wallace disrupted
national Democrats to varying degrees in four consecutive elections from
1964 to 1976.
Interestingly, the great disrupter this year, Donald Trump, has a
background not in Republican but in Democratic politics. His father was
entwined with the leadership of the Brooklyn Democratic machine, and the
Trump familys timely contributions to a Democratic mayor in 1973 and
Democratic governor in 1974 paved the way for his sons initial foray into
Manhattan real estate (including a 40-year tax abatement just now expiring).
Mr. Trumps jump to first place in polls of Republicans during the
2016 campaign, and to first-place finishes (though no absolute majorities)
in 17 party primaries and two caucuses have owed much to tactics no other
candidates have seen fit to employ.
Denouncing Mexican immigrants as murderers, ridiculing a handicapped
reporter, announcing that prisoners of war are not heroes, threatening to
spill the beans on another candidates wifesuch defiance of political
correctness has enabled this celebrity, familiar from 14 years on reality
TV, to get double the news coverage of all his rivals put together. His
attacks on policies backed for decades by presidents of both
partiesfree-trade agreements, legal immigration, the NATO alliancehave
been met with many cheers and assertions of confidence that this one man,
simply by making deals, can make America great again.
Many have written about how Republicans failure to produce policy
results their voters expected and yearned for has opened the way for the
Trump appeal. So hasand this also is visible on the Democratic side in the
persistent support for Bernie Sanderss candidacya dull sense of discontent
after 15 years of mostly sluggish economic growth and unsuccessful foreign
military interventions.
Republicans have faced a similarly, or even more, disruptive
candidate only once in the partys long history: another rich man from New
York with an unusual intellect, universal celebrity and a freedom from
ordinary political constraints. This was Theodore Roosevelt, who in 1912
challenged his more-or-less handpicked successor William Howard Taft, first
for the Republican nomination, and then as a candidate for the newly formed
Progressive Party. Roosevelt was the author of some three dozen books, a
serious scholar (his naval history of the War of 1812 is still considered
definitive) and rugged outdoorsman, a veteran of military combat and a
one-time police commissioner in New York City.
Roosevelt was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in his case for
actually making peace, between Russia and Japan after their 1904-05 war.
Succeeding to the presidency after William McKinley was assassinated in
September 1901, Roosevelt served for seven years with high job approval and
won a full term in 1904 with the highest popular-vote percentage and
electoral-vote total of any Republican up to that point. A comparison of his
credentials and those of Donald Trump brings to mind Karl Marxs comment,
prompted by Napoleon IIIs coup détat, that history tends to repeat
itselfthe first time as tragedy and the second as farce.
Roosevelt won nine of the Republican Partys 13 recently created
presidential primaries in 1912, but the Taft forces held the gavel and the
delegate majority and renominated the president. Roosevelt then got the
nomination of the new Progressive Party, while Democrats chose Woodrow
Wilson, the New Jersey governor and former president of Princeton
University. Tafts support flagged and he finished third, with 23% of the
popular vote and eight electoral votes; Roosevelt had 27% and 88. So even
though the two Republicans got 50% of the popular vote, Wilson won with 42%
of the popular vote and 435 electoral votes.
For a moment, in the aftermath of Roosevelts independent campaign,
the Republican Party looked to be in danger. Progressive Party candidates
won 5% or more of the vote in 216 House races in 1912 and 156 House races in
1916. But the schism was temporary. In 1916 Roosevelt and Taft both
supported Republican nominee Charles Evans Hughes, who lost a narrow raceby
12 electoral votesto Wilson. Two years later Republicans won majorities in
both houses of Congress. Roosevelt was considered the favorite for the
partys 1920 nomination but he died in January 1919, at age 60. The nominee
that year, Warren Harding, was elected by the largest popular-vote
percentage margin in history, 60%-34%. Roosevelt, the strongest disruptive
candidate imaginable, had not permanently disrupted the Republican Party.
Still, differences on issues divided Republicans along regional
lines in the first half of the 20th century. Heavily German/Scandinavian
Upper Midwest states like Wisconsin and Minnesota were isolationist and
progressive domestically. Older Midwest states such as Ohio and Indiana were
isolationist, antiprogressive and anti-New Deal. Northeastern states were
internationalist and more open to big-government policies.
Increasing Republican strength in the South and West helped secure
the nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Ronald Reagan in 1980. In more
recent presidential primaries we have seen divisions between evangelicals
and others, and between affluent suburbs and strapped small towns.
Those divisions have not been replicated in the response to Donald
Trumps disruptive candidacy. It has been noted often that his 37% of
primary and caucus votes so far come disproportionately from downscale,
non-college-graduate, modest-income voters. But not uniformly. My
examination of the results suggests that Mr. Trumps support comes
disproportionately from those low in what the scholars Robert Putnam and
Charles Murray call social capital or social connectednesspeople who are
not likely to participate in civic activities, or regularly attend church or
social clubs. Republicans with high social connectednessmost notably
Mormonshave given Trump very few votes.
People of low connectedness seem unlikely to be the basis of a
movement to permanently transform the worlds third oldest political party.
Even if Donald Trump secures the Republican nomination and somehow overcomes
current polls to be elected president, there will be few Trump clones among
Republicans in Congress and in state and local office.
If he is nominated and defeated by a wide margin, he will not leave
behind a Trumpist movement with the popular and intellectual depth of the
conservative movement following Goldwaters defeat 52 years agohis legacy
may be little more than an impulse toward opposition to trade agreements and
legalization of illegal immigrants. If he is not nominated and tries to run
as an independent, he will not have the support of as significant a
third-party apparatus as Theodore Roosevelt did 104 years ago.
As this is written, it seems likely but not certain that Mr. Trump
will fall visibly short of the 1,237-delegate majority, and that he will
inflict significant damage on the Republican Party by protests or perhaps an
independent candidacy. But probably nothing like the serious, though
temporary, damage inflicted by that vastly more talented, experienced and
intellectually serious disruptive New Yorker, Theodore Roosevelt.
Mr. Barone, longtime co-author of The Almanac of American
Politics, is the senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner and a
resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Richard
Your choice of, "outside parties" was exactly the right
expression.
They are "outside" because the Two Headed Monster will not permit
them
to play on Its playing field. That should say volumes about how
tightly controlled our political system is. Reform is a pipe dream
if
there ever was one. Restructure , is closer to what we need to do.
I
say, restructure, in place of the more emotion laden word,
Revolution.
Carl Jarvis
On 4/18/16, Bob Hachey <bhachey@xxxxxxxxxxx>
<mailto:bhachey@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Miriam,
I agree with you here.
No doubt that parties like the SWP and the greens have been
around for many
election cycles with very little impact to show for it. AT
least the
Sanders
campaign and the outspokenness of folks like Elizabeth
Warren have a chance
to impact policies going forward. The hope is that it may be
easier for
outside parties like the SWP and the Greens to get media
coverage going
forward.
One thing that does seem to be different this time? The
number of Americans
who think our system is broken is growing rapidly.
Bob
Bob Hachey
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