"We're fighting for the soul of the [Republican/Democratic/Libertarian/Very Silly] Party" is the sort of thing a certain group of people -- namely, people who don't know what souls are and who think politics is anything other than war by other means -- tend to say. It rallies their fellow believers, it inspires people who couldn't even cut it as English majors and so became communications/journalism/philosophy majors instead, and by golly, it makes one feel important as one sets about mustering votes to control the selection of the humans who will at most perform a fraction of the tasks they promised getting there.
But it's nonsense on stilts, because parties don't have souls; humans have souls, immortal ones, and Neo-Platonic nonsense notwithstanding, humans don't contribute to any kind of oversoul, nor do their partisan allegiances somehow forge their souls together like Superion forming from the Aerialbots.
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| Not pictured: The soul of any political party. |
This does not mean that the phrase is ineffective, even if it's stupid; a great many stupid things are very effective. As I say, it's a very good way to rally the ideological troops and to try to convince leaners that one is in the right in a fight over who gets what committee chairs and whether some future mildew-gathering upright ape will have to retire to a different profitable sinecure.
But it's still stupid, precisely because parties don't have souls; they don't even, in our system, have fixed ideological positions or tendencies. They necessarily move and shift as the humans who compose them do; and as they add or subtract humans, those things change in different ways, as well.
So if one says I'm fighting for the soul of the Republican party, it might not be a bad idea to be sure one knows what that means in practice.
I'm going to drop, very briefly, my smug jackass routine to put some cards on the table. I totally called it wrong in 2016. I was pretty sure JEB! (who was a great governor, and I mean that) was gonna run the table for the GOP nod; and when he faltered, I was sure everyone else would start dropping to keep Trump out of the nominee spot; and when that didn't happen, I assumed primary voters would wise up and get ahead of the Dorito Lord; and when that didn't happen, I was pretty damned sure Hillary would win -- not by a lot, but by enough, popularly and electorally, to be dispositive.
I made all of these mistakes because I totally misjudged the "soul of the Republican party" (and because I read stories about problems pollsters were having identifying where voters were and assumed that this represented statistical noise that campaign machines would cancel). I completely missed it. I thought partisan and ideological realignment were so complete that outside of a populist rump that swung between the parties, and that rump was enough for 1-2 percent of the vote in a handful of states, at most -- and that the margins weren't close enough for that to matter.
I was so, so wrong.
Part of adulthood is identifying one's mistakes and learning from them. So the lessons here, or two of them, are that insofar as the "soul of the Republican party" means anything, it's only a situational thing, variable over time and even instantaneously, which really means "nothing"; and insofar as that "soul" was post-World War II fusionist-conservative, that isn't and hasn't been the case in a while. I made this mistake because Republican presidential candidate after Republican presidential candidate had to at least pretend some level of conservatism in the primaries and the general election; because I was so immersed in conservative commentary that I forgot my own rules about identifying selection bias; and because of my own experience, in which the populist members of my exceedingly large family have by and large remained Democrats over time, meaning their votes were already accounted-for.
These were mistakes, the last particularly stupid, and I've corrected them.
These were mistakes, the last particularly stupid, and I've corrected them.
The Republican party, as currently constituted, is -- ideologically -- a fusion of true-blue conservatives, libertines-masquerading-as-libertarians-who-care-slightly-more-about-economics-than-sodomy, social conservatives who don't care about the rest, legacy Republicans, populists, foreign policy hawks, foreign policy isolationists, some racists who prefer the kind they think they sniff in dedicated arguments for vouchers more than the Democrat anti-Semitism variety, and single-issue voters of various stripes. Conservatives are not a majority. Populists, who tend to have at least some overlap with every one of those groups except the libertines and a handful of single-issue voters, are essentially in the catbird seat.
You may (quite fairly) blame Nixon, Reagan, and Gingrich for this state of affairs; you may blame Trump. You're blaming the people who won, which suggests the exact connotation of the word "blame" here. Each of these men intuited -- for different reasons at different times -- that there was and is a strong populist element in our country, and harnessing it is the key to electoral victory.
Populism is a corrosive force, destructive of institutions and republican governance (though whether that matters appreciably in a system with low institutional trust and devastated small-r republican governance is another matter altogether). It even eats away at civil society. It inevitably gives rise to clannishness and worse, anti-Semitism and other species of racism being prime examples. It is one of the things our system was designed to combat.
But it is very real, and it's been a very vital force in our system since the Democrats realized they could encourage and harness it two centuries ago. It is abetted by universal suffrage and by a thousand less noble things, none of which are going back in the bottle any time soon. And it's a driving force in both parties, where as recently as 2000, we thought it only Al Gore's latest firmware update. You can try to tame or redirect it, you can grab it by the tail and hold on for dear life, or you can get swallowed by it. Ignoring it is exactly as stupid as thinking that you can tell a great deal about millions of Americans based on the people you personally know.
It is this complete misunderstanding that drives so much commentary in the, sigh, Never Trump universe. (I refuse to use a hashtag because screw you, I'm older than 16.) I was one of that group (no hashtag, even then older than 16), and the point was very clear: Stop the orange clown from getting the GOP nod and making the conservative and Republican labels even stinkier to impressionable children, ages 16-35. We failed. Anyone who cheered on the 2012 postmortem should have been enthusiastic about doing a 2016 one on conservative efforts to take down Trump, and the response has largely been ... being angry that Donald J. Trump is a conniving, lying, scheming, adultering, cheating, malicious, petty, vaguely racist, misogynistic boor who somehow grasped the brass ring despite himself, and carrying on as if nothing happened.
2016 happened. The ground shifted under us and we didn't notice until very late in the game. Pretending that excising the Trump Cancer will somehow both restore the GOP to c. 2003 A.D. forms and ideology, and also win elections, is madness, and yet here we are. You like Paul Ryan? Heck, I like Paul Ryan a lot. I like Marco Rubio, too. You know who doesn't? GOP voters and swing voters. You know who wins this debate? Let me give you a hint: Ryan is retired and Rubio is going to be a Senator, at most, for four more years; President Dorito Lord is currently reminding the Never Trump holdouts that a primary against him is a waste of time and money. And Bill Weld won't save you.
(Contemplate the absurdity of anyone imagining he would, even if he could.)
Populism's ascendance to parity or better with fusionist conservatism in the GOP is a problem if you believe in and want the old coalition back. Instead of dealing with this problem head-on, far too many of those wounded by it spend too much time in echo chambers on social media, participants or observers, reassured in their righteousness and shrinking farther from relevance not only today, but from the people who will be there post-Trump and are not going to put aside human nature to say, Your program that got clobbered by Obama twice and Trump once or twice sounds like a winner to us, sign us up. They're locked in the floor fight of the 1976 Republican National Convention, certain that Goldwater's pitchman is about to vindicate the doddering libertine.
Of course, that was 43 years ago. Someone, please let them know.
Identifying the problem does not mean surrendering in its face. Trump shamelessly employed populism to win and has precious little intention of using it as more than a prolonged marketing campaign. Nixon, Reagan, and Gingrich harnessed it to leverage their way to increasingly-conservative governing majorities and outcomes. Fox News uses it for ratings and very little else. Populism by definition isn't an intellectual exercise, it's a roar of righteous outrage, and emotions are much easier to channel than cold thoughts, for good and for ill. You might even say this isn't a new insight.
2016 happened. The ground shifted under us and we didn't notice until very late in the game. Pretending that excising the Trump Cancer will somehow both restore the GOP to c. 2003 A.D. forms and ideology, and also win elections, is madness, and yet here we are. You like Paul Ryan? Heck, I like Paul Ryan a lot. I like Marco Rubio, too. You know who doesn't? GOP voters and swing voters. You know who wins this debate? Let me give you a hint: Ryan is retired and Rubio is going to be a Senator, at most, for four more years; President Dorito Lord is currently reminding the Never Trump holdouts that a primary against him is a waste of time and money. And Bill Weld won't save you.
(Contemplate the absurdity of anyone imagining he would, even if he could.)
Populism's ascendance to parity or better with fusionist conservatism in the GOP is a problem if you believe in and want the old coalition back. Instead of dealing with this problem head-on, far too many of those wounded by it spend too much time in echo chambers on social media, participants or observers, reassured in their righteousness and shrinking farther from relevance not only today, but from the people who will be there post-Trump and are not going to put aside human nature to say, Your program that got clobbered by Obama twice and Trump once or twice sounds like a winner to us, sign us up. They're locked in the floor fight of the 1976 Republican National Convention, certain that Goldwater's pitchman is about to vindicate the doddering libertine.
Of course, that was 43 years ago. Someone, please let them know.
Identifying the problem does not mean surrendering in its face. Trump shamelessly employed populism to win and has precious little intention of using it as more than a prolonged marketing campaign. Nixon, Reagan, and Gingrich harnessed it to leverage their way to increasingly-conservative governing majorities and outcomes. Fox News uses it for ratings and very little else. Populism by definition isn't an intellectual exercise, it's a roar of righteous outrage, and emotions are much easier to channel than cold thoughts, for good and for ill. You might even say this isn't a new insight.
Pretending it away, however, won't merely fail to work, it will blow up in your face, and likely take your awesome magazine with it.
Stop. Be the grown-ups you've been before. Join us in the here and now; learn from the mistakes that made Trump's rise possible and your own, and Trump's and his thronesniffers'. We have a party to take back, even if it's different than the one we were sure we had.
This won't work if the past and the present are the undiscovered country.
Stop. Be the grown-ups you've been before. Join us in the here and now; learn from the mistakes that made Trump's rise possible and your own, and Trump's and his thronesniffers'. We have a party to take back, even if it's different than the one we were sure we had.
This won't work if the past and the present are the undiscovered country.
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Image of Superion is: Superion, by Atsuhiko Sugita of Studio OX. Scanned from Transformers Visualworks. Copyright TakaraTomy and Studio OX 1986, via tfwiki.net. Low-res image used for non-commercial educational/commentary purposes only. No advertising revenue is taken on this blog. Heck, virtually no one reads it. For takedown requests, please leave a comment below with contact information.
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