Future of the GOP

[Tollen]

There's really not much difference between these things.

You get shades Trumpism from national level Republucabs as far back as Herbert Hoover circulating photographs of Al Smith dancing with black women. Nay further - there was a Republican Southern Strategy from about 1880 on the Stae level (the lily-whites etc.).

Reagan let himself be read as a libertarian ideologue ("To me, the heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism") despite not being particularly libertarian about anything.

Trump didn't "destroy the neocons"; he elevated them to power and then shadowboxed them in public to retain his outsider appeal. None of this is real.

The Republican Party, like the Democratic Party, is a corporate brand. This is all it is. It represents nothing.

[Tollen]

There's really not much difference between these things.

You get shades Trumpism from national level Republucabs as far back as Herbert Hoover circulating photographs of Al Smith dancing with black women. Nay further - there was a Republican Southern Strategy from about 1880 on the Stae level (the lily-whites etc.).

Reagan let himself be read as a libertarian ideologue ("To me, the heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism") despite not being particularly libertarian about anything.

Trump didn't "destroy the neocons"; he elevated them to power and then shadowboxed them in public to retain his outsider appeal. None of this is real.

The Republican Party, like the Democratic Party, is a corporate brand. This is all it is. It represents nothing.

That's a pretty activistic way of looking at America's political parties. 

What do you mean?

[Tollen]

The future for the GOP is clearly a multiracial working class coalition, so I voted #2 and #4. This is easier said than done, though, and will eventually entail them dropping both their hard right economic positions and racial dog-whistling, which will be hard for many in the party to do.

The electoral results of the past few years have been glorious for this. It's so exciting to see all the fiscal conservatives who told the other parts of the right to shut up for the sake of electability getting told that they are the ones who need to tone it down.

DC, you're one of the smartest, most well-grounded posters on this site, and you know perfectly well that there is a big difference between simply being a social conservative and preaching the type of anti-intellectual, intolerant message that the worst elements of Trumpism have espoused.  One does not have to choose between a heartless, Ayne-Rand-inspired right wing and a classless, intellectually dishonest and ideologically confused brand of Trumpism.  I get that SoCons feel vindicated right now (for some reason), but Dwight Eisenhower was a social conservative.  Ronald Reagan was.  Our ideas as a center-right party need to be presented with dignity, and to rile up the masses with emotional appeal is a direct affront to our political heritage and betrayal of the good conservatives who have served America in the past.  When American Republicans claim to cherish things like the Constitution, they should appreciate the intellectualism behind the document and the rejection of rash populism that it endorses.

There was not much intellectualism behind the Constitution. It was almost entirely a knee jerk response to the uprisings that followed the end of the Revolutionary War. The sole object of the document was to facilitate Hamiltonian capitalism in the face of popular defiance.

[Tollen]

Does it bother either of you, or any of you, that so much of your time in political discussion is taken up by talking about the A E S T H E T I C S of this movement or that?