Has Charming Billy and the rest of Professional ConservatismTM finally been pointed in extremely roughly the generalish direction, give or take a mile any way, of perhaps, with any kind of luck, keep your fingers crossed, finally figuring out Why They Got Trump?
Probably not. GOP? As far as Drew McCoy is concerned, you're going to keep getting "Trumps" again and again and again and again and again as long as you deliberately refuse to understand why you got the "Trump" you have now.
I'll give you two clues. The first one's John McCain. The second one's Mitt Romney.
Go.
Probably not. GOP? As far as Drew McCoy is concerned, you're going to keep getting "Trumps" again and again and again and again and again as long as you deliberately refuse to understand why you got the "Trump" you have now.
I'll give you two clues. The first one's John McCain. The second one's Mitt Romney.
Go.
2 comments:
The GOP has had some brief shining moments when they actually accomplished things in Congress, but they've been mostly a study in failure theatre for three generations. The exceptional periods were the 80th Congress after the war, the early Reagan years, and the Gingrich interlude of 1995-98. Reagan's most notable accomplishments in the domestic sphere were achieved by changing the composition of the regulatory commissions.
A common story is that the GOP wins a majority in a legislative body, but one insufficient to actually pass reform legislation because there is within the caucus a bloc of careerists and terminally vacuous people who are numerous enough to sabotage these efforts. So what the caucus defaults to is a tax cut that has to be rescinded later because they couldn't agree on any spending cuts and bon bons for business lobbies.
Years ago, there was a computer animated road movie which drew on the old 'Bullwinkle' series. One of the funny parts of it is Bullwinkle saying, in one town after another, 'Hey, Rocky, haven't we been through this town before'. It's remarkable how alike trashy commercial real estate is from one place to another. If a burg has a signature, you find it in its pre-war architecture, pretty much always and everywhere. By the same token, it's amazing how pervasive institutional pathologies are in this country. Is there one state where a Republican legislature has repaired the state system of higher education, effected improvements in primary and secondary schooling which you could detect without an electron microscope, made salutary repairs to the system of financing medical care, or gelded an officious appellate court? You do have Republican politicians who got some things done - Rudolph Giuliani, Tommy Thompson, and Scott Walker to name three. They are rare birds, and Giuliani is anything but a conventional Republican (and much of what they did hasn't been replicated elsewhere or was replicated only when Newt Gingrich got the ball rolling in Congress).
That's you 'successful' Republican Party.
Jonah Goldberg insisted 18 years ago that Jerry Falwell should leave public life after Falwell offered a viewpoint on 9/11 that Goldberg thought inapposite. Leaving aside the issue of whether the engagement with the larger world that he and Pat Robertson had was optimal in its characteristics, both men were builders. They build colleges, congregational ministries, and communications platforms. Jonah Goldberg has been plankton in the non-profit blob his entire adult life.
Kristol, Goldberg, French, Frum and the rest of them have spent the last three years recycling Democratic talking points (with most of the rest of the NR crew assisting about half the time. We've had escalating abuse of the political opposition by federal agencies the last 10 years (see Lois Lerner, operation Chokepoint &c) and they busy themselves throwing darts at the President (who is yet another target of the Washington insider nexus). We're all in this foxhole here, and they're sitting around bit*hing and moaning about the lieutenant while we're all taking flak. They'd do everyone a favor if they'd leave public life. Tomorrow.
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