7 ms·

> If the Republican party pivoted to being a fiscally conservative and socially apathetic they might actually do very well. Unfortunately, parties can't pivot

by maratd 14y ago

> If the Republican party pivoted to being a fiscally conservative and socially apathetic they might actually do very well. Unfortunately, parties can't pivot on a dime. It's going to take decades. However, the Republican party is moving in that direction. Most young Republicans are fiscally conservative and socially apathetic.

bendmorris 14y ago
Are any current Republican politicians socially apathetic? I can't think of a single example. It doesn't seem like that's a viable way to mobilize the conservative base in any part of the country right now. Jon Huntsman tried to run a campaign that wasn't so extreme on social policy and look how that turned out.
- gojomo 14y ago
  'Socially tolerant' or 'socially laissez-faire' are probably better terms than 'socially apathetic'. Schwarzenegger was. Rudy Guiliani, for the most part. Ron Paul has been, in most policy dimensions. When Romney was running for MA Senate and then elected as Governor, he was pretty socially tolerant, as well. And before him, another Massachusetts GOP governor, William Weld. Chris Christie isn't a socially-conservative crusader, and a number of the other GOP governors/senators are more pragmatic than anything else. It's always been there; it just needs a stronger hand versus the deeply socially conservative elements. However, as more issues have "nationalized" the parties have homogenized somewhat, with Dems successfully tarnishing even socially-tolerant Republicans as if they were the same as faraway hardcore religious conservatives, and liberal Republicans peeling away (as with Lincoln Chafee in RI and Charlie Crist in FL). I suspect the national parties (or perhaps mainly the GOP) will have to devolve into more than 2 brands for healthy regional competitiveness. While our system has a bias at every level towards 2-big-coalitions, having only two harmonized national brands doesn't offer sufficient competitive diversity. "Coke vs. Pepsi" is not enough for a nation this big, and especially damages the Republicans, as the more-stingy party.
  - AnthonyMouse 14y ago
    >I suspect the national parties (or perhaps especially the GOP) will have to devolve into more than 2 brands for healthy regional competitiveness. I think you're underestimating said bias toward two parties. Unless we switch to approval voting or the like, you'll never see a stable third party in this country. The simple math makes it so that given any three parties, the two most similar parties have the incentive to both back the same candidate, because the alternative of running opposing candidates invariably leads to those candidates splitting the vote and giving the election to the least similar party. And by the time they're both backing all the same candidates they might as well merge into one party. The thing that can happen, and could achieve a significant improvement, is for a new party to come about that replaces one of the existing parties. That allows you to throw out the old leadership and start over with a clean slate. The biggest difficulty is in building a stable coalition. If you want to eject the religious zealots and the climate change "skeptics" and the imbeciles who want to keep government out of Medicare then you need to replace them with something that supplies an equivalent number of votes and/or campaign funding. Tech is a good start, but it might not be enough on its own. But the nice thing is that once you've decided who you're not going to invite into the tent, you know exactly whose ox to gore. I have to imagine a fiscally conservative-leaning party would have a lot easier time capturing the votes of centrist Democrats if they were pro-choice, pro-science, pro-education, pro-alternative energy, etc.
    - ubernostrum 14y ago
      Amusingly, in most large "multi-party" parliamentary democracies, there are... two large, stable parties which actually govern (in the sense that no other party or coalition of other parties will ever be able to form a government) and occasionally a third which gets just large enough to play kingmaker before the system re-stabilizes.
      - smsm42 14y ago
        More amusingly, the standard complaint in this setup is the disproportionate power which the small parties wield - since it is often necessary for the larger parties to form coalitions with the smaller ones, and the smaller ones, catering to specific niches, are not accountable to larger electorate and thus are not afraid to offend it by openly extorting the larger parties. The second complaint is an inherent instability of such system - as soon as smaller ones are paid, or as soon as larger ones are unable to keep paying (paying doesn't have to be money, of course - can be policies, appointments, etc.) the coalition breaks down and the shopping season starts again. I'm not sure which one is the better - having only two choices which are roughly equally bad or having multiple choices two of which are equally bad and then also must buy the votes of the choices which are even worse.
- zephjc 14y ago
  To quote The Simpsons: "You don't win friends with salad". That is to say, Republicans don't win voters with well-thought-out tax restructuring plans, they win them with "God, Guns and Gays" policies that appeal the the lowest common denominator. It's like a vicious cycle: they chase the LCD voters, who are typically less educated, and as a side-effect in the policies of the GOP, they vote down more educational spending, creating more less-educated voters who respond to these vacuous non-issues, and so on.
  - smsm42 14y ago
    If you look at the voting statistics, majority of uneducated and lightly educated (high school only) votes Democrat. College graduates lean Republican, while higher degrees (academia) leans Democrat. So it would be counterproductive for Republicans to have more less-educated voters, since those prefer Democrats. Education spending is another red herring - public schools spend no less and sometimes more than private schools, costs of K12 education per pupil tripled since 70s with little to no improvement in any measurable metrics, teacher employment has grown faster than enrollment for 40 years now. http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/president-we-need-more-teachers-reality-yoohoo-im-right-over-here-hellooo/ http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/president-we-need-more-teache... Sorry for ruining your nice theory with facts.
- DennisP 14y ago
  There are some libertarian types scattered around the party but I don't see them connecting with the base anytime soon. Gary Johnson was a socially-liberal Republican before he switched to Libertarian after a poor showing in the primaries. Ron Paul was socially conservative on some issues but "apathetic" was a pretty good description, he spoke a lot about foreign and monetary policy and very little about issues like abortion...and on some issues, like drug policy, he was very liberal.
mjn 14y ago
> Most young Republicans are fiscally conservative and socially apathetic. I might have completely nonrepresentative acquaintances, but the young Republicans I know are mostly evangelical Christians, and definitely not apathetic on social issues. They are however more socially liberal than older evangelicals on certain generational issues; e.g. you won't find many people under 30 who want to re-introduce laws criminalizing sodomy. edit: And actually on the flip side, I'm not sure they're fiscally conservative. Compared to older evangelical leaders who strongly support the Reagan-era evangelical/business-conservative-alliance, among the younger generation there seems to be more skepticism of markets, and focus on poverty/inequality as issues.
- eropple 14y ago
  This maps pretty well to my own experience. I find that the young Republicans in my slice of the Northeast are overwhelmingly social conservatives, for reasons they frequently cannot elucidate. I have encountered few genuine "fiscal conservatives" (that is to say, those who are not "cut everything I don't like, but keep spending on the military!"), and the few I have generally prefer to call themselves libertarians. I would also note that there are plenty of social regressives/fiscal apathetics who call themselves "libertarian" because it doesn't have the stigma of "Republican".

by maratd 14y ago

bendmorris 14y ago

Are any current Republican politicians socially apathetic? I can't think of a single example. It doesn't seem like that's a viable way to mobilize the conservative base in any part of the country right now. Jon Huntsman tried to run a campaign that wasn't so extreme on social policy and look how that turned out.

gojomo 14y ago
'Socially tolerant' or 'socially laissez-faire' are probably better terms than 'socially apathetic'. Schwarzenegger was. Rudy Guiliani, for the most part. Ron Paul has been, in most policy dimensions. When Romney was running for MA Senate and then elected as Governor, he was pretty socially tolerant, as well. And before him, another Massachusetts GOP governor, William Weld. Chris Christie isn't a socially-conservative crusader, and a number of the other GOP governors/senators are more pragmatic than anything else. It's always been there; it just needs a stronger hand versus the deeply socially conservative elements. However, as more issues have "nationalized" the parties have homogenized somewhat, with Dems successfully tarnishing even socially-tolerant Republicans as if they were the same as faraway hardcore religious conservatives, and liberal Republicans peeling away (as with Lincoln Chafee in RI and Charlie Crist in FL). I suspect the national parties (or perhaps mainly the GOP) will have to devolve into more than 2 brands for healthy regional competitiveness. While our system has a bias at every level towards 2-big-coalitions, having only two harmonized national brands doesn't offer sufficient competitive diversity. "Coke vs. Pepsi" is not enough for a nation this big, and especially damages the Republicans, as the more-stingy party.
- AnthonyMouse 14y ago
  >I suspect the national parties (or perhaps especially the GOP) will have to devolve into more than 2 brands for healthy regional competitiveness. I think you're underestimating said bias toward two parties. Unless we switch to approval voting or the like, you'll never see a stable third party in this country. The simple math makes it so that given any three parties, the two most similar parties have the incentive to both back the same candidate, because the alternative of running opposing candidates invariably leads to those candidates splitting the vote and giving the election to the least similar party. And by the time they're both backing all the same candidates they might as well merge into one party. The thing that can happen, and could achieve a significant improvement, is for a new party to come about that replaces one of the existing parties. That allows you to throw out the old leadership and start over with a clean slate. The biggest difficulty is in building a stable coalition. If you want to eject the religious zealots and the climate change "skeptics" and the imbeciles who want to keep government out of Medicare then you need to replace them with something that supplies an equivalent number of votes and/or campaign funding. Tech is a good start, but it might not be enough on its own. But the nice thing is that once you've decided who you're not going to invite into the tent, you know exactly whose ox to gore. I have to imagine a fiscally conservative-leaning party would have a lot easier time capturing the votes of centrist Democrats if they were pro-choice, pro-science, pro-education, pro-alternative energy, etc.
  - ubernostrum 14y ago
    Amusingly, in most large "multi-party" parliamentary democracies, there are... two large, stable parties which actually govern (in the sense that no other party or coalition of other parties will ever be able to form a government) and occasionally a third which gets just large enough to play kingmaker before the system re-stabilizes.
    - smsm42 14y ago
      More amusingly, the standard complaint in this setup is the disproportionate power which the small parties wield - since it is often necessary for the larger parties to form coalitions with the smaller ones, and the smaller ones, catering to specific niches, are not accountable to larger electorate and thus are not afraid to offend it by openly extorting the larger parties. The second complaint is an inherent instability of such system - as soon as smaller ones are paid, or as soon as larger ones are unable to keep paying (paying doesn't have to be money, of course - can be policies, appointments, etc.) the coalition breaks down and the shopping season starts again. I'm not sure which one is the better - having only two choices which are roughly equally bad or having multiple choices two of which are equally bad and then also must buy the votes of the choices which are even worse.
zephjc 14y ago
To quote The Simpsons: "You don't win friends with salad". That is to say, Republicans don't win voters with well-thought-out tax restructuring plans, they win them with "God, Guns and Gays" policies that appeal the the lowest common denominator. It's like a vicious cycle: they chase the LCD voters, who are typically less educated, and as a side-effect in the policies of the GOP, they vote down more educational spending, creating more less-educated voters who respond to these vacuous non-issues, and so on.
- smsm42 14y ago
  If you look at the voting statistics, majority of uneducated and lightly educated (high school only) votes Democrat. College graduates lean Republican, while higher degrees (academia) leans Democrat. So it would be counterproductive for Republicans to have more less-educated voters, since those prefer Democrats. Education spending is another red herring - public schools spend no less and sometimes more than private schools, costs of K12 education per pupil tripled since 70s with little to no improvement in any measurable metrics, teacher employment has grown faster than enrollment for 40 years now. http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/president-we-need-more-teachers-reality-yoohoo-im-right-over-here-hellooo/ http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/president-we-need-more-teache... Sorry for ruining your nice theory with facts.
DennisP 14y ago
There are some libertarian types scattered around the party but I don't see them connecting with the base anytime soon. Gary Johnson was a socially-liberal Republican before he switched to Libertarian after a poor showing in the primaries. Ron Paul was socially conservative on some issues but "apathetic" was a pretty good description, he spoke a lot about foreign and monetary policy and very little about issues like abortion...and on some issues, like drug policy, he was very liberal.

mjn 14y ago

> Most young Republicans are fiscally conservative and socially apathetic. I might have completely nonrepresentative acquaintances, but the young Republicans I know are mostly evangelical Christians, and definitely not apathetic on social issues. They are however more socially liberal than older evangelicals on certain generational issues; e.g. you won't find many people under 30 who want to re-introduce laws criminalizing sodomy. edit: And actually on the flip side, I'm not sure they're fiscally conservative. Compared to older evangelical leaders who strongly support the Reagan-era evangelical/business-conservative-alliance, among the younger generation there seems to be more skepticism of markets, and focus on poverty/inequality as issues.

eropple 14y ago
This maps pretty well to my own experience. I find that the young Republicans in my slice of the Northeast are overwhelmingly social conservatives, for reasons they frequently cannot elucidate. I have encountered few genuine "fiscal conservatives" (that is to say, those who are not "cut everything I don't like, but keep spending on the military!"), and the few I have generally prefer to call themselves libertarians. I would also note that there are plenty of social regressives/fiscal apathetics who call themselves "libertarian" because it doesn't have the stigma of "Republican".