A couple of days ago, I had occasion to welcome to Daily Kos a former Republican who came to write a diary about that experience at the behest of one of the Daily Kos emails. It is a good diary, by dstock, telling of a life in the Republican ranks, that ended with the advent of the changes Reagan made to their electoral strategies and herd philosophy.
Since things have gotten so crazy, dstock (the new diarist) has voted a straight Democratic ticket. At the end of the diary, our new member hypothesizes on what changes Republicans could make to restore that former allegiance:
If intelligent Republicans regain control of the GOP during my lifetime, then I will likely return to voting the Republican ticket.
More below.
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The brief exchange made me think of a kind of fad concept from several years ago (though it is definitely not ‘gone!’), that for a time seemed convincingly bearish about our Democratic political prospects. For a while people wrote regularly about the 'Overton Window,' and how conservatives were using it to 'move' the electorate to the right. It was/is a theory, of course, a hypothesis, a model, and aspects of it seemed (And, I think, still SEEM!) to explain some of the things we see and have seen in recent and current politics. In real ways the electorate HAS moved to the right.
Here are a couple of diaries from that period (both by thereisnospoon).
Why the Right Wing Gets It ...
It’s OUR job to move the Overton Window, NOT Obama’s
I remember my ominous initiation to the concept, when it seemed as if it was a progression that could spell our political doom. Perhaps others reacted to it similarly.
I see it differently now. Perhaps the people have moved to the right, but not the way that political party has. Even such long-term party stalwarts like (my own state’s idiotic) Lindsey Graham have decried the ‘batshit crazy’ that has overtaken the Republican party.
It hasn’t surprised us. (What’s surprising is that people like Graham are a couple of decades LATE to the realization!) But why is this? Almost irrespective of the venue, we see them at pains trying to outdo each other with the crazy. To come across as the MOST conservative, the purest conservative. (Excuse me while I puke.)
That, in turn, reminds me of that old ‘Good Guy’ duel in Rustler’s Rhapsody, in which two ‘good guys’ try to win their duel by arguing which is the ‘most good’ ‘good guy.’ (No, NONE of these conservatives are good guys. Money, for them, is more important than people, and they worship poIitical advantage as their highest ‘gd.’)
How did this come to pass?
I think of it as the Revenge of the Overton Window. Yes, perhaps they were at pains to move the voters to the right. But, they moved themselves even FURTHER to the right. They took it, in their cowardly zeal, toward its ad absurdem extreme. The Overton Window may have pushed people to the right, but it pushed them much further. And they are more out of touch (with the people AND with reality) than they ever were. Yes, even in Reagan’s day.
In that vein, then, this is what I wrote to our new ‘Democratic-voting’ Kossack diarist. (Comment out of recomendability, I am not fishing for recs. ;x )
(To remind, I was replying to this sentence: “If intelligent Republicans regain control of the GOP during my lifetime, then I will likely return to voting the Republican ticket.”)
I am not sure that there are any viable prospects for the resuscitation of that party. It is full of purists who see only black and white, who define compromise as immoral weakness. They took Reagan’s comment about government being the problem, not the solution, as a thesis to be defended and advanced, rather than a challenge to improve it. They tout ‘free market,’ then, in electoral politics, use every trick imaginable to win power. I see no path from what now is to what you would like. Do you?
Talk about a party that has lost its way! And, the thing is, they keep pushing themselves ever further in the wrong direction. An Overton progression if ever I’ve heard one. They are the ones who have turned the phrase ‘intelligent Republicans’ into an oxymoron.
Thanks for reading! On to tonight’s comments! Formatted by my dear friend, brillig!
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