There are many reason for the ineffectiveness of the Republican Party, but the primary cause of their failure is they are not a real political party. Instead, it is the off-Broadway version of the liberal party. Instead of offering a compelling alternative to the liberal party, based in real ideological differences, the Republicans assume the liberal moral order is the correct one. They just try to work within it to placate different constituencies. Their first instinct is to bend the knee to the Left. You see it in this post at National Review.
“The group is there, believe me, and it’s growing by the day, maybe by a factor of 50 times more than what it was in 2011,” Langone tells me. “He’s getting traction with people because people want to win. After 2012, it dawned on a lot of us that we need to have a better candidate, somebody who can connect, and Christie is the person who can do that.” Langone doesn’t make much of criticism of Christie’s handling of Hurricane Sandy: “I know some people say [Christie] got too close to [Obama], but it wasn’t a time for politics and pandering. It was a crisis! I saw it firsthand at NYU’s medical center, and people who get that aren’t unhappy with him.”
This is why the Republicans have been called the “stupid party” for decades. The people in it always make unforced errors. Almost always, those errors stem from their habit of taking advice from the liberal party. A Democrat uses a crisis like a hurricane to attack his political opponents. Republicans use a crisis to embrace their opponents and concede all sorts of things to them in an effort to make friends. That’s Chris Christie. He thinks hugging on Obama will score him friends among the Democrats, but it never does.
This is why the Republican Party always loses. The other guys never permit one of their own to wander off the reservation. They never excuse it. They know that only encourages disloyalty. That’s a basic organizational technique. You enforce all of the little rules dogmatically and the big stuff takes care of itself. The young liberal knows he is done for if he does not toe the line. By the time he gets to leadership, he is invested in the cause completely. So much so he is willing to ruthlessly impose those rules on the junior guys.
The Republican Party has it backwards. Their junior members are always competing with one another for who can get a pat on the head from Lefty. In fact, it is how they rise through the ranks. By the time they become senior guys, they are invested in nothing but stabbing their fellows in the back to score points with liberals. The party is like a life boat and the game is to keep tossing people over the rail to make room for new people throw off the liberal cruise ship. The result is guys like Christie becoming Republican leaders.
“His early moves have been good,” says Steve Schmidt, a veteran Republican operative who managed the McCain-Palin presidential campaign. “He’s now looking at a decisive reelection victory this year in a blue state, and then he becomes chairman of the Republican Governors Association next year, which will enable him to build all of his relationships to an even greater extent than he has done already. There will always be commentary about [the Sandy controversy], but I don’t think a photograph from five years ago will be an issue in a primary that’s driven, as almost all Republican primaries have been, by electability over ideology.”
In 1992, every said pat Buchanan was not electable, even though most conceded he was right about things like immigration and trade. In 1996, the argument for Bob Dole over Buchanan and the libertarian Steve Forbes was electability. In 2000, Bush was electable and he ushered in eight years of government expansion and endless war. In 2008 McCain was the electable choice and was crushed by Obama. In 2012, Romney was the electable guy and it was his turn to lead the party. He lost to a badly wounded Obama.
That means in the last two decades the GOP is 2-for-5 and their one winner was a complete loser in terms of policy. If you are a small government conservative, a social conservative or a libertarian, the success of the Republican Party means you lose in a slightly different way than when the GOP loses an election. To people on the Right, and let’s face it we’re are talking about white people here, politics has been a heads they win tails you lose proposition for a couple of generations, maybe even longer.
Frankly, I hope that Christie wins the nomination and gets clobbered by that old crook Hillary Clinton. The problem we have is that about 40% of the voters want something not offered by either party. About 80% of whites would prefer something to the Right of the most extreme conservative. In America, the GOP keeps these voters in a ghetto, so they can make deals with the Democrats. The way forward for the American Right, and again, we’re talking about white people here, is to destroy Conservatism Inc. and the GOP.