53 Comments
Feb 22, 2021Liked by Patterico

Excellently well written as usual.

I don't really understand what the GOP has to offer me to make up for the downsides. the area where they best differentiate with the DEM's has been disintegrated with Trump. Where the Dem's display an "obsession with dividing the populace by categorizing them into groups based on race, sex, sexual orientation, wealth, income, and other factors, and punishing those who are deemed to be the most “privileged” in each sphere, in many cases by using government to disrupt the workings of the free market."

The GOP displays "An obsession with dividing the populace by categorizing them into groups based on race, sex, sexual orientation, wealth, income, and other factors, and punishing those who are deemed to be" disrespectful to the GOP Tribe, in many cases by using government to disrupt the workings of the free market.

Also, based on my interaction with him on line Beldar is a fantastic person. Just wanted to add that.

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With regard to Beldar feeling that Patterico’s blog is a “hostile forum” for those who want to reform the Republican party from within: I wish he understood that for those of us who attempted to hold the GOP/Trump accountable, we also faced hostility from Trump supporters and Republicans who remained in the party. It was a two-way street. And I know that because, as a guest contributor, I have faced it on a regular basis.

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My question is: who in the GOP am I supposed to be following right now....and what specifically is their rallying message? Maybe David French but his voice is still pretty small....and he's not an elected official. Where I've been most disappointed by the GOP is that May 2016 should have launched an unambiguous alternative vision to Trump. It didn't. And one-by-one supposedly rock-solid conservatives.....gave up. Yes, you can give individuals like Mitt Romney significant credit....but why did we not even have one alternative to Trump in the run-up to 2020? Not one.

Now I've long railed on that right-wing media effectively muted and castrated any opposition. Trump critics would quickly be made persona non grata, lose broad-based financial backing, and be primaried into oblivion. Only a few in special circumstances could weather it, Romney being one. The most troubling thing here though is that at its heart....this isn't really a battle over serious ideas....it's a battle about emotional venting....and having the vilest serpent fighting at the head of the party because that's what these times require. That's a wildly hyperbolic thesis....that doesn't really lend itself to rational discourse. I thought it would run out of gas...but here we are.

The current GOP wants me to follow a man who does not hesitate in lying, distorting the Constitution, and pushing against the rule of law....from obstruction to abuse of power to failing to enforce the law. I can't pretend that that is insignificant....or made up by the fake media. Truth isn't winning when people falsely see their neighbors...and democracy....presenting an existential threat to their well being. No one wants to hear that they were conned...that their facts are wrong.....that they've exaggerated the situation. The GOP needs to find an honest optimistic message....and a way to get it out broadly. I'll get behind that. Right now it still feels like 2am closing-call at the bar....we still need some serious sobering up to happen....

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When the Republican Party embraced a wholly corrupt individual, who then essentially became the head of the party, I became unable to remain affiliated with the Republican Party. Any political concerns were overshadowed by the corruption and narcissism of Trump. I could no longer remain part of a any group that chose to look the other way. To me, it’s right that politics took a backseat to my own conscience. Everyone has their line. But after Trump’s efforts to overturn a legitimate election and the travesty of Jan 6 and the aftermath, I don’t see how anyone can think that they can co-exist with the rot that clearly needs to be excised. The question is, can it be done, and is there the will to do it. Right now, I don’t think it can, nor is there the will.

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I disagreed with Beldar's reason for leaving back then, and I still do. Yes, there was increasing "hostility" to Trump and the party (I would call it blunt criticism) at Patterico, but that hostility did not extend to him personally (for the most part).

I came back to the GOP after the 2018 midterms, and I'm in the party for similar reasons as his. We are a two-party system, and we need good conservative men and women to get us back to more traditionally conservative principles, part of which involves rejecting Trump and his nationalist-populist-xenophobic schtick.

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As another who also left the Republican party the day after the 2016 primary, to me the "hostile forum" argument isn't a very good analogy. Very few of us, I think, actually participated in the internal deliberations of the Republican (or any other) party.

I asked Beldar more than once what it would take to motivate him to leave the party, and I don't ever recall getting a straight answer. When I originally inquired, Beldar might well have chastised me for strawman argumentation had I somehow presciently proposed as a hypothetical scenario what has since actually come to pass.

I would have thought, if the party's leader and a solid majority of the party's elected officials in Washington, along with attorneys general from 18 states, were willing accomplices to a corrupt attempt to steal a presidential election, throw out tens of millions of legally cast votes on the basis of pathetically obvious lies, incite and give aid and comfort to a mob attacking the capitol to prevent final certification, leaving 5 dead, and then vote to whitewash the whole disgraceful affair, no one of good will and patriotism would continue to identify themselves as a member of an organization that had openly turned to fascism.

But apparently I was wrong. Voluntary affiliation with a subversive and seditious criminal enterprise operating under the cloak of a political party does not reflect well on the moral judgment of those who choose to go along to get along for the sake of party unity. As Republican founder William H. Seward famously said in reference to slavery, "There is a higher law the Constitution," and there is surely a higher law than interests of any political party. I hope that people of conscience and integrity will come to the light eventually, but in the meantime we must continue to call evil what it is.

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founding

The Beldar analogy resonated with me and made me see the issue more clearly, but the next question is: Why did Beldar leave your website if the point is to keep trying to make a difference? There are likely several reasons, personal and principled, but we choose where we think we can do the most. Beldar knows he made a difference at your website but maybe it didn't seem like enough. I hope he can make a difference in the Texas GOP.

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DRJ, how exactly do unhappy members staying in the Part magnify Trump's political power? Asking for a friend. :)

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founding
Feb 21, 2021Liked by Patterico

A Trump-dominated GOP is not going away for now so unhappy members staying in the Party only magnify Trump's political power. I think most of those unhappy Party members see Trump as a passing fad but after his 4 years as President and the Republican politicians' surrender since then, this is no fad.

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Excellent article. I particularly enjoyed the recap of your move away from the GOP, which was not unlike my own. I found the Beldar analogy interesting but ultimately wanting, in that it conflated one's binary choice of party affiliation with the anything-but-binary choice of which forums to frequent. As voters, none of us can vote in more than one primary. As advocates, none of us can credibly claim in one forum to be a Democrat, while claiming in another to be a Republican, an independent in another still, and so on. Each of us must choose an affiliation, or lack thereof, and live with it. Either we try to reform from inside the tent, or try to do good from outside. You've chosen one path, Beldar has chosen another, and each has to live with the fact that there are certain things you can do from that position, and certain other things you cannot.

Commenting in one forum vs. another, however, is not one of those things. As a commenter, Beldar is perfectly free to comment in the "hostile" territory of your blog, where he'd only reach certain people (but would surely reach some!), while *also* commenting to his heart's content in other, more friendly venues like his own. None of that "have your cake eat it too" problem; his situation is better summed up by the popular meme, "Why not both?"

Bottom line: Beldar should return to your blog, but you should not return to the GOP.

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I'm not a big joiner, so my opinion probably isn't worth much on this subjects, but here it is: I find that not belonging to either party gives me more freedom on a sort of mental/emotional basis. I don't feel obligated to support things or people that I find abhorrent or ridiculous. I also feel freer to make a more objective assessment of both parties and less likely to think the sky is falling over any given policy or politician. I think it gives me more of an ability to see things in a more objective light and be more flexible in dealing with people and issues, where I might feel more guilty or be more influenced by group-think if I chose one or the other. Maybe that says more about me than anything else, but that's my viewpoint.

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I was a Republican Party official in Houston until the day after the 2016 election. I stuck around precisely because I believed that the time would come to clean up and reform the party after Trump lost. But he won. It was clear that there was not a critical mass of Republicans interested in reforming the party. There was no place for me in it.

In the years since, there has been an effort by a small cadre of local Republicans to get me fired from my teaching position in a public school. It was doomed to failure, but at least once every few months my principal gets a barrage of emails about something I've said on Facebook or Twitter that is "contemptuous of the president" or "disrespectful of a majority of the taxpayers of the state of Texas" -- either one of which allegedly makes me "a bad American" who is "unfit to influence the minds of school children in taxpayers supported schools." I even had one tell me that he would make those efforts stop if I would simply stop exercising my constitutional right to speak out on the political matters of my country -- and that if I didn't, they looked forward to hearing that I had buried my wife after I lost my health insurance and she died of her chronic degenerative medical condition and that I should know that her death would be entirely my fault.

My state's party has also become active in trying to overturn the results of the election as well as supportive of my state's seceding from the Union.

Why, exactly, would I want to reassociate myself with such a party? Why, exactly, would I wish to be associated with such people, especially those who are in leadership and will be difficult to dislodge? I'd rather stay outside and work to destroy the Republican Party and wait for the organic development of a replacement.

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founding

Eric, in no order of importance

Voter ID

2A

Protect ALL speech

End Racialization

Break public employee unions

Develop Nuclear power

Develop energy independence

Stop treating China as a developing nation

Develop upon Trumps mid east peace building

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There are two groups of Republicans. One is the set of Republican voters; those who go to the polls intending to vote (mostly) for Republicans. Then there are the Republican politicians, who compete for the hearts and minds of the first group. Most of the time this is fairly straightforward, primary voters choose on the basis of policy preferences (tough on crime, 2nd amendment, low taxes, etc), and the politicians attempt to either lead, or more commonly, adapt to the GOP voters and their needs

Trump has made this process a binary one, rather than a continuum of choice. You cannot be wishy-washy about Trump as a voter, and a politician who tries that will probably fail. So we see politicians who normally would slowly adapt to changes in party positions having to respond to a Trumpian litmus test. As Patterico points out, even politicians whose POLICIES one might still support have chosen the pro-Trump bandwagon and turned a blind eye to his excesses. And in doing so damaged their brand considerably to those who oppose Trump while remaining vulnerable to Trump discarding them at a whim.

Truth be told, had the policies of the Trump administration been taken by someone without Trump's myriad defects, fewer people would be finding themselves outside of the party. But Trump's insistence on abject surrender to his cult of (for lack of a better word) personality makes it very hard to find a middle ground, or even wait for the storm to pass. The only GOP politicians who have managed to stay true to whatever principles they had either had a solid base (Romney), or left politics for the duration (Paul Ryan, Amash). Some few have dared to rebel, now that Trump is out of office. We shall see how that works out.

I have been one to hold out hope for recovery. I had refused to believe the depth of Trump's disreard for political norms, thinking that, once he lost, he'd just fade away like all other defeated candidates do. November's contesting was bad, December's dismissal of the election was terrible, and Jan 6th was nothing short of treason. If the GOP had chosen to hang together at that point, they might have been done with Trump. Instead they chose to hang separately.

And with the politicians again returning to the cult, the GOP voters have only stark decisions. Joining the Democrats is still unthinkable to most, although some (e.g. Jennifer Rubin) have already done that. Follwoing the Trumpist Party forward is equally unthinkable, if slightly less so. The truth though, as Patterico points out, is that both parties have become Statist, only differing on the focus of the State's attention. The current third parties are worthless, as they vie at all timnes for the deeper fringes. The only two options that seem reasonble, from an organizational point-of-view, are a new centrist, or centrist-Libertarian party, or fighting a GOP civil war in earnest.

I don't know which seems less hopeless.

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founding

I'm one of those CA (R) registered people who votes the GOP party ticket in protest to the one party rule this state has. CA style progressivism is extremely unbalanced and it needed balance yesterday. I'm a lifelong CA resident who has been blessed with living in good weather surrounded by beauty in my immediate location and am going to leave CA when I retire.

Main reason for leaving is progressive taxation. Dennis Miller once noted that his taxation tolerance threshold was 50%. 39% federal and 13% state plus near 10% sales taxes all the other fees, taxes, assessments amounts to well over 50%. Progressives eventually will need ALL of the money because when it comes to taxation they are like a truck without a reverse gear.

I've written before that a big test for conservatives who left the GOP because of Trump loathing is going to be 2024. Hypothesize that you live in a very tight Electoral College swing state and your choice is Cruz or Lee vs. Harris. Both hypothetical GOP candidates are considered sell outs to Trump. Can you forgive them for kissing Trumps ring in order to hold the 48% of the vote Trump got?

If not, maybe you shouldn't rejoin the GOP

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A good article. An interesting exercise would be to have everyone list what they want to see done by the next Republican administration. my top ten in order of importance

1. Voter ID an absolute. Without that we cant have a functioning democracy

2. Term limits 3 for president (but only two concurrently) 3 for the senate, and 5 for congress

3. 2nd Amendment rights - end conceal carry limitations.

4. Bi annual sessions for budget and congress (Like Texas)

5. revoke section 230 immediately, replace it with something that protects bloggers but not big

media

6. End the National Guard - end restrictions on use of military to patrol crime and the border

7. End all immigration - temporary three year work visas is what the entire world uses, they can

be renewed, but they require a employer sponsor and a 50% tax on the wages they pay

8. End corporate taxes

9. End income tax, replace with vat tax, invest ss taxes with some survivorship benefits - those

with 100K in post employment benefits do not get ss tax

10. Combine the NIH, CDC, Fort Dix, and other medical agencies under the US Army.

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