Trump Has Doomed the GOP

Like it or not, demographic change will be the undoing of the Republican Party.  Indeed, some Republican operatives believe that Trump - who they expect to lose dramatically - is only serving to expedite the GOP's death spiral  because he has championed the positions that will lead to the death of the GOP.  Moreover, many now believe that the party is incapable of reform.  One such doomsayer is Bruce Bartlett, adviser to numerous Republican officeholders, including Jack Kemp and President Ronald Reagan, for whom he was a domestic policy adviser.  Here are excerpts from Bartlett's op-ed in the Washington Post:

Last year, I wrote an article calling Donald Trump a godsend for moderate Republicans. Trump, I predicted, would lose so spectacularly that the GOP would be forced to transform itself, surrendering its mindless obstructionism, science denial, xenophobia and plutocracy. After a purge like that, the party would finally be able to compete in future national elections.

I was wrong. I now see that Trump’s candidacy has exacerbated the Republican Party’s weaknesses, alienating minorities, fracturing the base and stunting smart policy development. The party’s structural problems are so severe that reform is impossible. Even if Trump loses and the GOP races to forget him, the party is doomed. And very few of our leaders seem to care.

In the short run, it will be easy for Republicans to convince themselves that nothing needs to change. The establishment believes that Trump is an anomaly, an aberration. GOP leaders think the party’s next nominee will be a more typical politician who knows the issues, has well-developed debating skills and who will appeal to the elite and the Trumpkins. Someone like John Kasich or Marco Rubio.

Many leaders also assume that Hillary Clinton is an automatic one-termer.  . . . . . But Clinton’s chances of being reelected in 2020 are better than Republicans think. Already, Democrats have a virtual lock on 18 states, giving them analmost automatic 242 electoral votes. States such as Virginia, Colorado and Florida routinely vote Democratic, too.

Additionally, the Republican Party will have to contend with the Trump constituency, which will remain a powerful force in the presidential primaries (fueled, perhaps, by a Trump cable channel). White nationalists will continue to back racist candidates, alienating minority voters. It’s not hard to imagine another cycle with 17 candidates vying for the nomination. If that comes to pass, someone could win the primary race with less than half the vote, as Trump did.

If Clinton wins a second term, major progressive change becomes possible. Sixteen years of Democratic presidents will give the Supreme Court a solid liberal majority, making electoral reform doable. Restrictions on campaign contributions and gerrymandering could emerge, making it harder to draw districts that reliably swing one way or the other. If Democrats put resources into state legislative races, they may be able to undercut GOP gerrymandering after the 2020 census. 

By 2022, it’s possible that Democrats will control Congress and gridlock will be broken. Once that happens, the federal government will be able to tackle major issues.

These policies will, of course, be opposed by Republicans (even those who know better) because the GOP’s Trump/tea party wing will control the nominating and primary process for years to come, dooming any leader or lawmaker who compromises with Democrats.

As former U.S. deputy Treasury secretary Roger Altman showed recently in the Financial Times, busi­ness­peo­ple are already flocking to Clinton, and to Democrats more broadly.

Deprived of funding and business support, the national GOP will shrivel to what the party has become in California — irrelevant politically and unable to win outside its wealthy, right-wing enclaves.

When I began criticizing the GOP for pandering to populists and extremists, I was largely alone. But now, longtime Republican luminaries, including John McCain’s 2008 campaign manager, Steve Schmidt, and Washington Post columnist George Will, share my perspective. Many, such as Josh Barro, a columnist for Business Insider, have virtually washed their hands of the party, viewing the intellectual rot as terminal.

Because of the way our government is set up, the United States will probably always have two parties. But it is not foreordained that the GOP will be the center-right party. It could go the way of the Whigs or Canada’s Conservative Party in 1993 and literally disappear, or it could reconstitute itself so radically that it bears little resemblance to the Republican Party of today. One thing, however, is certain: A party that cannot capture the White House cannot survive.

Ex-Reagan Official: Fox News is Brainwashing Republicans into a Fringe Group

Fox News - or Faux News as I call it on this blog - is first and foremost a propaganda machine that seemingly thrives in a universe detached from objective reality and which is moving the GOP towards becoming a lunatic fringe group.  Or so says economist Bruce Bartlett, a former adviser to both Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.  Candidly, I agree with his assessment and continue to believe that the GOP is headed toward long term oblivion unless and until it throws off control of the Christofascists and their Tea Party first cousins.  A piece in The Raw Story looks at Bartlett's assessment.  Here are highlights:

Economist Bruce Bartlett, a former adviser to both Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, warned over the weekend that Fox News had damaged the Republican Party by creating a bubble for conservatives to brainwash themselves.

In his paper “How Fox News Changed American Media and Political Dynamics” published earlier this month, Bartlett theorized that watching the network was essentially “self-brainwashing” for viewers, making them believe that the United States was a more conservative nation than it actually was. And so the Republican Party had responded by running radical conservatives that representative Fox News viewers, but not the true state of the electorate.

“Many conservatives live in a bubble where they watch only Fox News on television, they listen only to conservative talk radio — Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, many of the same people,” Bartlett told CNN’s Brian Stelter on Sunday. “When they go onto the Internet, they look at conservative websites like National Review, Newsmax, World Net Daily.”

“And so, they are completely in a universe in which they are hearing the same exact ideas, the same arguments, the same limited amount of data repeated over and over and over again. And that’s brainwashing.” 

Bartlett asserted that it was a bigger problem for conservatives than liberals because they did not have their own network for a long time, and then they “drank very heavily from the Fox waters.”

Sadly, some of my once upon a time Republican colleagues fit within Bartlett's description and have become so brainwashed that it is impossible to have an intelligent conversation with them.  Ironically, they claim that I am the one who has been brainwashed when, in fact, they need to look in the mirror at themselves.  Yes Karen, I am talking about you!!

Revenge of the Objective Reality-Based Community

Some times nothing is sweeter than telling someone "I told you so" after they have crashed head long into reality after proceeding in lunatic like fashion on a course to disaster after encouragement from and incitement by those whom they should have known were crazy in the first place.    It is certainly something I have done of late to some of my friends from my days as a GOP activist who either (i) derided me for being a "one issue voter" because I cannot support a political party that wants LGBT to be permanent 4th class citizens or (ii) got in a huge huff every time I reminded them that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan's math on the deficit and tax cuts for the immensely wealthy simply did not add up.  In a very long piece in The American Conservative, Bruce Bartlett does pretty much the same thing to those in the Republican Party who should have known better and who many us tried to warn as they clamored into bed with the Christofascists and the Tea Party.  Here are some excerpts from Bartlett's piece (sorry for the length of the quote, but it was needed to get the feel of the piece and the way Bartlett's experience paralleled my own):

I know that it’s unattractive and bad form to say “I told you so” when one’s advice was ignored yet ultimately proved correct. But in the wake of the Republican election debacle, it’s essential that conservatives undertake a clear-eyed assessment of who on their side was right and who was wrong. Those who were wrong should be purged and ignored; those who were right, especially those who inflicted maximum discomfort on movement conservatives in being right, ought to get credit for it and become regular reading for them once again.

I’m not going to beat around the bush and pretend I don’t have a vested interest here. Frankly, I think I’m at ground zero in the saga of Republicans closing their eyes to any facts or evidence that conflict with their dogma. Rather than listen to me, they threw me under a bus. To this day, I don’t think they understand that my motives were to help them avoid the permanent decline that now seems inevitable.

For more than 30 years, I was very comfortable within the conservative wing of the Republican Party. .  .  .  .  But as the Bush 43 administration progressed, I developed an increasingly uneasy feeling about its direction. Its tax policy was incoherent, and it had an extremely lackadaisical attitude toward spending. In November 2003, I had an intellectual crisis.

All during the summer of that year, an expansion of Medicare to pay for prescription drugs for seniors was under discussion. I thought this was a dreadful idea since Medicare was already broke, but I understood that it was very popular politically. I talked myself into believing that Karl Rove was so smart that he had concocted an extremely clever plan—Bush would endorse the new benefit but do nothing to bring competing House and Senate versions of the legislation together. That way he could get credit for supporting a popular new spending program, but it would never actually be enacted.

I was shocked beyond belief when it turned out that Bush really wanted a massive, budget-busting new entitlement program after all, apparently to buy himself re-election in 2004. He put all the pressure the White House could muster on House Republicans to vote for Medicare Part D and even suppressed internal administration estimates that it would cost far more than Congress believed.  .  .  .  .  . It’s worth remembering that Paul Ryan, among other so-called fiscal hawks, voted for this irresponsible, unfunded expansion of government.

Suddenly, I felt adrift, politically and intellectually. I now saw many things I had long had misgivings about, such as all the Republican pork-barrel projects that Bush refused to veto, in sharper relief. They were no longer exceptions to conservative governance but its core during the Bush 43 years.

I began writing columns that were highly critical of Bush’s policies and those of Republicans in Congress—all based on solid conservative principles. In other words, I was criticizing them from the inside, from the right.

In 2004 I got to know the journalist Ron Suskind, whose book The Price of Loyalty I had praised in a column. He and I shared an interest in trying to figure out what made Bush tick. Neither of us ever figured it out.

The day after the article appeared, my boss called to chew me out, saying that Karl Rove had called him personally to complain about it. I promised to be more circumspect in the future.  Interestingly, a couple of days after the Suskind article appeared, I happened to be at a reception for some right-wing organization that many of my think tank friends were also attending. I assumed I would get a lot of grief for my comments in the Suskind article and was surprised when there was none at all.

Finally, I started asking people about it. Not one person had read it or cared in the slightest what the New York Times had to say about anything. They all viewed it as having as much credibility as Pravda and a similar political philosophy as well. Some were indignant that I would even suspect them of reading a left-wing rag such as the New York Times.  I was flabbergasted. Until that moment I had not realized how closed the right-wing mind had become.

My growing alienation from the right created problems for me and my employer. I was read the riot act and told to lay off Bush because my criticism was threatening contributions from right-wing millionaires in Dallas, many of whom were close personal friends of his. I decided to stick to writing columns on topics where I didn’t have to take issue with Republican policies and to channel my concerns into a book.

I naïvely thought that a conservative critique of Bush when he was unable to run for reelection would be welcomed on the right since it would do no electoral harm.  .  .  .  . As I wrote the book, however, my utter disdain for Bush grew, as I recalled forgotten screw-ups and researched topics that hadn’t crossed my radar screen. I grew to totally despise the man for his stupidity, cockiness, arrogance, ignorance, and general cluelessness. I also lost any respect for conservatives who continued to glorify Bush as the second coming of Ronald Reagan and as a man they would gladly follow to the gates of hell. This was either gross, willful ignorance or total insanity, I thought.

My book, Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy, was published in February 2006. I had been summarily fired by the think tank I worked for back in October 2005.  . . .  He [my boss] never detailed, nor has anyone, any factual or analytical error in the book.

Among the interesting reactions to my book is that I was banned from Fox News. My publicist was told that orders had come down from on high that it was to receive no publicity whatsoever, not even attacks. Whoever gave that order was smart; attacks from the right would have sold books. Being ignored was poison for sales.  .  .  .  .  Other dissident conservatives, such as David Frum and Andrew Sullivan, have told me that they are banned from Fox as well. More epistemic closure.

Seeing the demographic trends toward an increasingly nonwhite electorate, which were obvious in easily available census projections, I decided to write a book about how Republicans could deal with it. I concluded that the anti-immigrant attitude among the Republican base was too severe for the party to reach out meaningfully to the fast-growing Latino community. Recall that Bush’s proposal for immigration reform was soundly rejected by his own party.

After the failure of my race book, I turned my attention again to economics. I had written an op-ed for the New York Times in 2007 suggesting that it was time to retire “supply-side economics” as a school of thought.  .  .  .  . After careful research along these lines, I came to the annoying conclusion that Keynes had been 100 percent right in the 1930s. Previously, I had thought the opposite. But facts were facts and there was no denying my conclusion. It didn’t affect the argument in my book, which was only about the rise and fall of ideas. The fact that Keynesian ideas were correct as well as popular simply made my thesis stronger.  I finished the book just as the economy was collapsing in the fall of 2008.

I even wrote another op-ed for the New York Times in December 2008 advocating a Keynesian cure that holds up very well in light of history. Annoyingly, however, I found myself joined at the hip to Paul Krugman, whose analysis was identical to my own. I had previously viewed Krugman as an intellectual enemy and attacked him rather colorfully in an old column that he still remembers.  For the record, no one has been more correct in his analysis and prescriptions for the economy’s problems than Paul Krugman. The blind hatred for him on the right simply pushed me further away from my old allies and comrades.

The final line for me to cross in complete alienation from the right was my recognition that Obama is not a leftist. In fact, he’s barely a liberal—and only because the political spectrum has moved so far to the right that moderate Republicans from the past are now considered hardcore leftists by right-wing standards today. Viewed in historical context, I see Obama as actually being on the center-right.

At this point, I lost every last friend I had on the right. Some have been known to pass me in silence at the supermarket or even to cross the street when they see me coming. People who were as close to me as brothers and sisters have disowned me.

So here we are, post-election 2012. All the stupidity and closed-mindedness that right-wingers have displayed over the last 10 years has come back to haunt them. It is now widely understood that the nation may be center-left after all, not center-right as conservatives thought. Overwhelming losses by Republicans to all the nation’s nonwhite voters have created a Democratic coalition that will govern the nation for the foreseeable future.

Tellingly, a key reason for Obama’s victory, according to exit polls, is none other than George W. Bush, whom 60 percent of voters primarily blame for the nation’s economic woes—an extraordinary fact when he has been out of office for four years. Even though they didn’t read my Impostor book, voters still absorbed its message.

At least a few conservatives now recognize that Republicans suffer for epistemic closure. They were genuinely shocked at Romney’s loss because they ignored every poll not produced by a right-wing pollster such as Rasmussen or approved by right-wing pundits such as the perpetually wrong Dick Morris. Living in the Fox News cocoon, most Republicans had no clue that they were losing or that their ideas were both stupid and politically unpopular.

I am disinclined to think that Republicans are yet ready for a serious questioning of their philosophy or strategy. They comfort themselves with the fact that they held the House (due to gerrymandering) and think that just improving their get-out-the-vote system and throwing a few bones to the Latino community will fix their problem. There appears to be no recognition that their defects are far, far deeper and will require serious introspection and rethinking of how Republicans can win going forward. The alternative is permanent loss of the White House and probably the Senate as well, which means they can only temporarily block Democratic initiatives and never advance their own.

Don't expect to see either me or Bartlett invited back to the GOP any time soon.  The GOP once was a party of ideas, some intellect, and respect for objective reality.  That all flew out the door once the Christofascists and their Tea Party cousins overran the GOP.   And Bartlett is correct: the GOP held the House because of gerrymandering and little else.  Frankly, I do not know how the GOP will recover.  The Christofascists will never see objective reality because it will cause their fantasy world to collapse.  Meanwhile, what's left of the party establishment lacks the spine to challenge the crazy people who make up the party base.