(no subject)

[seekingferret]

I got a begging letter from the national RNC last week and have been mulling it over. I've been a registered Republican my whole voting life, have voted twice for George W. Bush, once for John McCain (though that was a close one), and once for Mitt Romney. Locally, I threw my vote to Democrat Rush Holt a few times for Congress, but switched back to voting Republicans after he became a vocal critic of Israel on the floor of Congress.

I'm extremely mistrustful of the economic theories of the Democratic party. I'm even more mistrustful of their approaches to foreign policy. I think Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton represent a really dangerous kind of liberal internationalism, whose consequences are playing out in the mostly unchecked nuclear proliferation of North Korea and Iran, as well as in Russian expansionism.

With that being said, there's a hell of a lot of ugly in the Republican Party right now. The worst economic move either party has made in the past decade was the Republican-led government shut-down, and there isn't even a close runner up. There's explicit homophobia in the party ranks, there's explicit anti-semitism in the party ranks, there's explicit racism in the party ranks, and those are problems I don't see a way to resolve. I get nervous throwing my support to a party when its highest ranking Jew was primaried out for 'spending too much time with Wall Street types'. It is ugly out there.

And the Republicans I admire most- people like Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, Colin Powell, Michael Steele- can't seem to get any consistent traction on the national stage. The Republicans with influence may praise them, may praise their ideas, but they don't hesitate to call them out as party traitors and RINOs any time any of those ideas stray from the ludicrous amalgam of nonsense that is our present party Orthodoxy.

If there were any particularly prominent local or national Republican (or even moderate Democrat) figures who I admired and thought had a chance of being elected, I would see throwing money their way as a viable alternative to sending money to the RNC, but at the moment there aren't any I know of. And I see the RNC as a strong partisan of that great moderator of idealism, 'electability'. For that pragmatic reason, I'd much rather a Republican Party dependent on a strong RNC than a Republican Party dependent on the Tea Party and/or individual SuperPACs.

So I think I am leaning toward making a donation to the RNC, and encouraging right-thinking Republicans to hold their noses and do likewise. But it's frustrating to see where the party I've always supported has drifted.

Comments

[lokifan]

Not to be snotty (I'm British so I'm sure I'm missing context) when you say "where the party has drifted" - do you mean on the economic front, especially the Tea Party? And/or issue of prejudices? Because while progress can be lost, as far as I can tell the Republicans' racism/homophobia/anti-Semitism etc hasn't got worse, and is less overt at least compared to say 20 years ago. Or is it that the Democrats have improved faster (if they have. Like I said, not American) so the GOP suffers by comparison?

[seekingferret]

Hmm... I don't think this is a question that begs a simple answer, and I'm not sure I have the energy for a thorough one at the moment, so I'll leave it at Yes and No, and maybe I'll come back to this later.

[seekingferret]

So I think I would say that the simplest answer I can give is that American political parties are, by the nature of the two party system, big tents. The Republican Party must contain within it many different conflicting identities in a way that British parties don't, at least to the same degree. So when I'm speaking of the drift of the party, I'm not speaking about policy. I disagree with some of the policies advocated by the Tea Party, but not all, but that's not my problem with them. My problem with them is that they have pulled the party into an all-or-nothing approach that diminishes the size of the tent, and which compels them to impose incredibly foolish policy decisions like the government shutdown which nobody in or out of the Tea Party really thought were good ideas.

My problem with the racism/anti-semitism/homophobia isn't about rhetoric. There have always been racists, antisemites, and homophobes in both parties, and there still are, and don't believe any propaganda that says that the Democrats are the party of diversity and social justice, because it's nonsense- the Democratic party is, also, a big tent with many views. What's different now is a series of coordinated campaigns to purify the Republican party of such corruptions- When Eric Cantor, senior Jewish Republican, faces a primary challenge from a Christian minister whose campaign rhetoric is all about how Cantor spent too much time with 'Wall Street types', and his challenger succeeds, there is something sick in the Republican Party.

It's all of a piece. It's not the policies that scare me. It's that the people running the party are no longer moderated by the sensible fear that if they build a party only around one wing, they will never win national elections, and so they are driving out anyone who represents a different part of the party. That's the drift I'm talking about. Before, I could exist within the Republican Party and feel like even though I didn't agree with every platform plank, I could work for the things I did believe in. Now, I think we need to reestablish a sane establishment before we can even contemplate that.