On Rachel Maddow last night, Arianna Huffington suggested that liberals should actually help the Republican Party re-build itself, to keep it from becoming even more crazy and dangerous.
Problem is, I don't know if the Republican Party can be made less crazy and dangerous without destroying it completely.
On the one hand, I do think there has to be a healthy two-party system.
Every time someone says, "We need universal healthcare!" someone needs to ask, "How are you going to pay for it?" And if the answer is something like, "Medicare's more efficient than for-profit insurance, people would save money on premiums in a single-payer system!" someone needs to say, "And what about all the people who work for the insurance companies who you'll unemploy with all that efficiency?" And so on.
Similarly, when someone says, "We should cut business taxes to create jobs!" someone needs to ask "How do we make sure the money saved goes into job creation? And how do we make sure those jobs are created here, instead of overseas where wages are lower?"
Okay, here's the problem: I don't know if the Republican Party is fixable.
One of the fundamental problems with the two-party system is that the parties end up chasing factions which have ultimately contradictory goals, but see short-term benefits from working together. Right now, the Republican Party has several of these factions welded together in an unholy alliance, including:
- The Libertarian Wannabes: We want government off our backs and out of our lives. Period.
- The CEOs: We want low business taxes, and little or no regulation, but we want government bailouts whenever the economy sags or we just screw up.
- The Religious Right: We want a moral government and a moral country, and we want to define what "moral" means.
- The Armchair Generalissimos: We want to advance American power all over the world; we have the best country and the best military, and we can kick anyone's butt -- we still think Vietnam and Iraq were failures of will rather than failures of our military power or policy.
- The Red Rednecks: We don't care about any of that other stuff, you just keep them n*****s where they belong.
- The Sheeple: We'll follow the big strong Daddy figure, whoever he is. (This group probably follows behind whoever is in Group #4.)
I'm sure there are several other mini-factions, but that should cover most of the party.
One example of the contradictory goals of these groups that I've thought about for years: I had a gay friend and co-worker at my last job who opined that if the Republicans were true to the "off our backs and out of our lives" principle, they'd be the party of the LGBT community, (Remember Goldwater's quote about not having to be straight to be in the military, just having to be able to shoot straight) but since they're so welded to the Religious Right, they're always treating that community as a threat instead of a potential source of support.
The same goes with minorities -- Republicans could court African- and Latino-Americans, they'd just have to abandon the Southern Strategy of the past 40 years.
You see the problem? If the Republican Party tries to extricate itself from racist politics, it will lose the support in the South which it has enjoyed for the past 40 years, and its only solid regional base. The Religious Right is more diffuse, but again, it's part of the Republican base -- they'd be scared to death of losing that faction. And winning the trust of the groups it would be courting in these situations would take many years, especially after the vicious rhetoric of the past decade or two.
So, I have to wonder if the Republicans will only just keep retreating into the crazy corner, until they fizzle out completely, or until we have to start invoking Godwin's Law...
As Rachel Maddow would say: Can anyone talk me down?