Democrats and Left Leaning Posters: If National GOP was more like the Atlas GOP

[RI]

Arch is right. 

Even absent Trump, the GOP has ceased to try and find solutions to actual problems and instead prefers to deny that they exist, blame the constitution for inaction (which actually threatens said constitution and is very dangerous and stupid thus) or resort to tried and failed methods (cut taxes and let the market sort it all out). That is why just getting rid of Trump to go back to Scott Walker and Paul Ryan, with the Koch Brother's perpetually on line 2 is not going to solve the GOP's fundamental electoral problems, nor appeal to any self respecting person who is hostile to the present arrangement.

There are a lot of respected Republican posters who have been mentioned in this thread and my objective here is not to criticize them. At one point or another all of them have expressed some level of dissatisfaction with the direction that Trump and/or the GOP has taken on at least some issues.

The hardest part of achieving some kind of grand restructuring of the GOP along the lines of "my ideals" as Tartarus Sauce put it, would be to do so without completely alienating libertarians. Because I do think they bring a lot of perspective to the discussion (particularly on war and disruptive effects of the war on drugs etc), that being said above all else if you want an actual conservative party that does its job and tries to preserve American society and culture, you have to be realistic and understand the massive amounts of disruption that has occurred to the family, to societal stability, to education and so forth from complete, un-checked creative destruction.

You don't have to be a socialist to come to that conclusion. You can still be a capitalist, you can still be a fiscal conservative (in terms of balancing budgets), but at the same time be a realist in terms of the disruptive effects caused by these policies and then search for actual, honest solutions that will address declining revenues for schools, and rising crime/drug use that comes in the wake of good paying jobs being outsourced. The biggest problem with the conservative approach to free trade in the past twenty years, was that it basically advanced a policy where all the benefits went to other people, meanwhile large numbers of "Conservatives" people who voted for Conservatives expecting to be done right by, were left TO DIE on the beaches so to speak with vague and empty promises that never amounted to a damn thing.

A policy is only as good as the number of people that it benefits and if it disrupts and damages your own people, your own supporters to such a large degree then your policy or its supporting polices have FAILED and need to be changed in some manner.

The reason why this "adjustment" has not occurred is because of the torrent of big money flowing into the GOP and forcing it to remain strident and unyielding. It must constantly cut taxes, it must downsize the government wherever they have power and it must ignore the facts and consequences on the ground that down fit the narrative. As any realist student of history will tell you, this is the road to REVOLUTION and this why is either Bernie or Warren are coming to burn your sh**t to the ground. You cannot boil people in oil and expect them to not rise up and fight back.

Most people who have advanced these policies did so I think with the best of intentions, especially I think most people on this forum, including myself for many years. Eventually, I took a clear look around myself and realized this isn't working and hasn't been working. The more instability created by creative destruction, without the slightest mitigation, increases proportionally the appetite for radical change, and that radical change will be devastating to the whole pie of conservatism and its goals and objectives, whether it be the pro-life movement, or indeed the movement for reducing dependency in favor of work. When you destroy good paying jobs and replace them with crap, when you push people to move across the country for phantom jobs that don't exist (and in the process break apart familiar, community and religious ties leading to a massive agglomeration of disconnected, isolated and desperate people), it invariably leads to 1. INCREASED dependency on Gov't, 2. Increasing Crime and Drug Use, 3. Broken Families and Divorce, 4. Rising suicide Rates and 5. Growth in support for left wing populism and socialism because they are the only ones offering solutions". 

This isn't conservatism, certainly not conservatism for the long term. It is a short term surge of neoliberal excess followed quickly by a leftist reaction. Conservatives have defeated themselves long term and they only have themselves to blame for it. Not the media, not the left, they wrecked the economics of their own base and drove an entire generation to embrace the far left.

If you want conservatism to succeed long term, it requires good paying jobs for everyone, it requires stable communities, with families getting ahead and being able to have and raise children, and send them to quality schools. That will reduce the size of gov't by getting people off the roles the responsible way (not kicking them off to die in the streets or kill or be killed survival of the fittest social darwinism) and thwart the rise of socialism and/or the far left. Aside from ensuring that all or most expenditures are actually paid for (true fiscal conservatism) and entrepreneurship is still encouraged without breaking the bank for it (still capitalist), every policy be it economic, entitlement, education, health care, etc should be crafted with this objective in mind, with results based in reality, not falsified studies produced by the same corrupt think tanks that take money from the people who benefit from said policies.

When is the last time you had Republicans talk about expanding the EITC? When is the last time Republicans talked about reforming and improving public education as opposed to just gutting it? When is the last time they had actual solutions to health care, that actually involved spending some money instead of just using it as a opportunity to gut medicaid? We could abolish medicaid and replace it with premium support if people had confidence that we wouldn't just use it as piggy bank to raid to fund more tax cuts to nowhere, but who in their right mind would trust a Republican with that kind of power with their track record? No one. You see, extremism stands in the way of your own success.

The problem with Conservatives today, is that they have forgotten what it truly means to be a conservative. It is not about abolishing the gov't and every facet of it, it is about building, and preserving civil society, and sometimes you have actually have to spend money to do that and some times you actually have to pay for that spending with taxes.

Fantastic post.

[RI]

1.) Non-Interventionist Foreign Policy---- no elective wars overseas (Iraq 2.0, Central America '80s, Vietnam/ Cambodia '68+).

2.) Support for US and Global Labor and Environmental Rights

3.) Opposition to unfair trade policies that promote a "race to the bottom", but still recognize a role that international trade has in terms of a "rising tide lifts...."

4.) Opposition to the Social Conservative Movement's attempts to roll-back the gains that the LGBTQ and Women's Movements have made over the past 50 Years.

5.) Support for a Progressive taxation policy, as opposed to a Regressive taxation policy, with the added revenue directly supporting programs that have been gutted over the past 40 years at Federal  and State levels.... (There are a ton of such programs).

6.) 100% rejection of racism and xenophobia as an attempt to cynically exploit resentments against minority populations within the United States because of race, religion, ethnicity, and country of origin.

7.) Support for some type of Universal Health Care system that expands financial access leveraging existing Federal programs that both lower costs, and provide a high level of service.

These are just a few items on my wish list....

You're requesting a Democrat. You'll never find an actual Republican (someone like Badger doesn't count) who will give you all seven of those things. The more moderate Republicans typically are either a bit more libertarian (meaning 2,3,5, and 7 are out) or they're a bit more fiscally leftist (in which case one or both of 4 and 6 are out).