On 30 July I wrote of my profound disappointment in the GOP over its inability to select a top flight candidate that would promote a small government agenda in keeping with a coherent philosophy:
This, sadly, is the choice faced by the American voter: Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Fortunately the US economy can power ahead despite the incompetence in the White House, although it is more than capable of throwing sand in the wheels of the American economy. If I were a betting man, I would put my money on Obama to be re-elected. But the US voter is faced with Morton’s Fork. Can we hope for a strong write-in candidate?
Craig Shirley, who wrote two excellent biographies on Ronald Reagan, has made some telling points
Obama now apparently holds the more correct conservative position on the marriage issue. If the opposition party’s leader understands federalism better than the GOP does, is it any surprise that the Republican Party finds itself adrift, asking, “what do we do now?”
Since Obama’s first days in office, the GOP leadership has been content with the idea that opposing him is enough. It has saved the Republicans from the uncomfortable task of facing up to what the party really stands for.
If Ronald Reagan, Bill Buckley and Barry Goldwater were still living, they would be shaking their heads in disbelief at the party’s devolution. They gave the modern GOP its intellectual and political underpinnings: federalism (limited federal government) and fusionism (the notion that business interests and social interests are united in their aversion to big government). Although those concepts weren’t always an easy sell to the American people, together they formed a philosophy that put its trust in the individual over institutions.
But then came the Big Government Republicans of the George W. Bush administration. They preached a philosophy of “too big to fail”, surely one of the most frightening phrases – at least for conservatives – ever coined. Forget all that suff about conservatism, they said. We have a new brand of ideology – which, ironically, was an old brand of Republicanism that Goldwater once dismissed as “dime store New Deal”.
The midterm elections of 2006 saw a rejection of Big Government Republicanism, as polls showed an astonishing number of voters from the right going for the Democrats, if only to punish a Republican Party they no longer recognized. Modern American conservatism has always drawn its inspiration from Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, who believed that authority should routinely be challenged and that power flows upward rather than downward. But for some time now, the GOP has been going in the other direction. Indeed, by the 2008 elections, voters were choosing between two big-government parties.
Read it all here.
It’s also worth having a look back at this April 2006 article by the same author: How the GOP Lost Its Way
Seven months after that, the Dems did win control of both houses of Congress (for the first time since 1994).
sdog
13 Nov 12 at 5:55 am
To the punters ‘small govt’ is code for fewer cheques in the mail from govt. A prospect too horrible to contemplate.
Craig lives in cognitive la la land if he believes anything but the certainty of economic disaster tomorrow morning will change that. Get back to me when the USD does 10 cents down in a day.
Alfonso
13 Nov 12 at 6:38 am
We cannot expect to win until someone on the political right makes the full throated argument for smaller government.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for Abbott (paid parental leave etc) to make the case. Unfortunately the Left will always argue they can provide by taking more from the greedy rich to give to the needy poor. And there will always be a healthy chunk of the electorate to support this argument.
The West will need to be destroyed before people learn, and even then I am not sure they will learn. In fact, the worse it gets in California and Europe the more they vote for Left wing destroyers. And when Californians escape to the Western edge of Nevada to get away from the disaster of Democratic domination of California they go straight ahead and vote for Democrats. These people are too stupid to learn from there own repeated disastrous mistakes, let alone having the wisdom to learn from the mistakes of others.
Truly there is no helping when so many are affected by this level of cognitive dissonance. I am afraid the West has decided to destroy itself rather than save itself.
Just for a final reality check, name one Country where Western Culture is promoted above multiculturalism? We have consistently voted to destroy the West when we abandoned Western culture. The economics of the third world junta are just following the cultural change to promote the primacy of non Western cultures.
I am now more pessimistic than I have ever been … and I now tip Abbott will lose. He simply won’t fight back against the ALP – long ago he deiced to take the Romney route. The Romney route is the typical route of Conservatives and Libertarians and it almost always leads to defeat and losing unloseable elections at the national level. Even when morons like Cameron win them, they fail to win big.
The 47% are just too large a group, and so called Conservatives and Libertarians like to continually build this group in the hope that they will vote against their freebies. Unfortunately Conservatives and Libertarians are just too timid and too stupid to fight or learn.
John Comnenus
13 Nov 12 at 7:46 am
It looks like the Republicans are going to give Obama another break (like they did with Benghazi) and are not pursuing the way the mop up of Sandy is going.
Once again the Conservative Blogosphere has to do the heavy lifting. Instapundit:
At a similar point after Katrina The Demoncrats were blaming the man made disaster on racism at FEMA & Bush even though the local administration which had been controlled by the Democrats since 1936 were responsible for the situation as they had not maintained the levy banks.
Token
13 Nov 12 at 8:05 am
Link to 28 Days Later
Token
13 Nov 12 at 8:07 am
There is no 2 party system in the states, its one party system telling 2 stories. Government gets bigger, the debt gets bigger, civil liberties continue to decline, no matter who you vote for. The blue team will spend ot one way, the red team will spend it another. You want fries with that?
banz
13 Nov 12 at 9:17 am
@ John – Pluralism means that every lifestyle, opinion or method is right. All at the same time. In other words, chaos.
Who the hell cares about balancing the budget? Its live cattle sales, gay marriage, to celebrate our sexual/multicultural diversity, facebook, Iphones, AGW, everyone has an attention span of 3 days, come play.
The republicans were no different, we need to fix this, and oh yer, lets spend another couple of Trillion on our military. I personally liked Romney and Ryans statement of balancing the budget, just for the giggles.
Its over.
banz
13 Nov 12 at 9:31 am
Breaking up the big banks and blowing up Wall Street is part of his solution to the Republican Party’s problems. Shirley, he can’t be serious.
m0nty
13 Nov 12 at 10:04 am
Fitzgibbon’s saying the RC could take up to 10 years to complete. Maybe this is simply a way of stopping Abbott from calling one himself on the Unions once he gets into office.
The Beer Whisperer
13 Nov 12 at 10:29 am
monty the banks were already blown up. Being a lender of last resort contributes to moral hazard and encourages the risky lending that blew it all up in the first place.
You want to bail people out but for them to somehow ignore the cap on losses you are offering them.
Never going to work, sorry.
.
13 Nov 12 at 10:33 am
I must have missed the news when Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo disappeared.
m0nty
13 Nov 12 at 10:56 am
Get a grip.
Obama won narrowly offering free stuff to the self-same demographic of hobos he and the Democrats created. There’s nothing more to it than that.
C.L.
13 Nov 12 at 10:59 am
QE monty
It allowed the banks to maintain liquidity. Their had massive liquidity problems. You are not educated in finance or economics and so we don’t expect you to remember.
.
13 Nov 12 at 11:04 am
Has Fisky explained Romney’s failure yet? Doing worse than McCain requires some explaining.
dover_beach
13 Nov 12 at 2:00 pm
The hand waving evangelicals stayed home. Perhaps it WAS a Mormon thing in the end.
Alfonso
13 Nov 12 at 2:11 pm
The answer is fairly easy. The Republicans have deserted their Right of Center voters. The RoC voters stayed home in their hundreds of thousands while their party picked up a few thousand from the Left camp.
Until the GOP understands this, it won’t win another term.
Winston Smith
13 Nov 12 at 2:41 pm
He did better, he was a better candidate, but too centrist. The data says so. Review the data and it will tell you to go right.
.
13 Nov 12 at 2:49 pm
What a hoot. The Republican’s didn’t go hard Right enough?
I wonder how many in the US think so too…
steve from brisbane
13 Nov 12 at 2:53 pm
How does that justify your claim that they were blown up? They are still there.
m0nty
13 Nov 12 at 2:56 pm
Dot, he attracted 3M fewer votes than McCain.
dover_beach
13 Nov 12 at 3:19 pm
From what I’ve read the evangelicals voted in the same numbers they always do. It’s the rest of the moochers and the grifters who stayed home.
Infidel tiger
13 Nov 12 at 3:21 pm
Whilst Shirley made some reasonable points, they are clearly not at the root of the problem.
The voters chose permanent diminution of
America.
If the did it unknowingly then that is the GOP’s problem.
If the did it knowingly then nothing really matters.
Romney garnered 2 million less votes than McCain.
Too many state GOP organisations are appallingly bad.
The House Republicans, given the size of the backlash to Dems in 2010, did very well.
I’m not sure what Shirley is on about there.
Newt Gingrich had an op-ed in leftist Politico today which is sensible:
Stop talking and spend some time thinking
Some Republican analysts and strategists are rushing around with new explanations of what happened and what we must do.
The fact is less than an a week after the election they don’t know what happened and they can’t possibly know what we should do.
JamesK
13 Nov 12 at 6:29 pm