Blast from the past
I just found my way (via LGM) to this old American Prospect article by Matt Yglesias and Mark Leon Goldberg from July 2005. I have to say, even with a wildly unpopular White House and Democratic majorities and the end of Lincoln Chafee, their conclusions are holding up pretty well:
It is only a small exaggeration to say that there are no moderate Republicans at all. There are grandstanders who enjoy the notoriety and media access that can be gained from the occasional off-message statement to the press. There are vulnerable Republicans who need to move to the left every so often in order to win elections. But there is no group of Republicans that, through real actions with consequences and meaningful policy engagement, makes any significant effort to block the conservative agenda or implement a centrist one. That people who say different things from their co-partisans but act the same when the votes are counted can acquire reputations as independent-minded mavericks says a great deal about the culture of our political media -- and very little about where the legislative balance of power lies.
The real reason all this matters so much is this: The myth of the GOP moderates has led the Democratic Party and liberal advocacy groups to accept an idea about them that is completely backward. Democrats and liberal groups tend to see moderate Republicans as precious models of sanity with whom they can work. Instead, given the districts and states the moderates tend to represent, Democrats and liberals should view the moderates as people who can be beaten, thereby building a Democratic majority.
It is only a small exaggeration to say that there are no moderate Republicans at all. There are grandstanders who enjoy the notoriety and media access that can be gained from the occasional off-message statement to the press. There are vulnerable Republicans who need to move to the left every so often in order to win elections. But there is no group of Republicans that, through real actions with consequences and meaningful policy engagement, makes any significant effort to block the conservative agenda or implement a centrist one. That people who say different things from their co-partisans but act the same when the votes are counted can acquire reputations as independent-minded mavericks says a great deal about the culture of our political media -- and very little about where the legislative balance of power lies.
The real reason all this matters so much is this: The myth of the GOP moderates has led the Democratic Party and liberal advocacy groups to accept an idea about them that is completely backward. Democrats and liberal groups tend to see moderate Republicans as precious models of sanity with whom they can work. Instead, given the districts and states the moderates tend to represent, Democrats and liberals should view the moderates as people who can be beaten, thereby building a Democratic majority.
3 Comments:
And then there's that 27% riding the Crazytrain who love them.
That article influenced me a lot. It's part of the reason that I've always been skeptical of the whole Obama 'unity' spiel. The era of bipartisanship is over, and you don't try to form coalitions with moderate Republicans. You crush them.
I've seen this argument a number of times now (it's also made by Kos, who, in his usual manner, makes it with less logic and more sneering than Yglesias and Goldberg do), and I'm still on the fence about it.
On the one hand, those who make it have a point. On one leve, it makes little sense to endorse moderate Republicans who, for all of their alleged "moderation," will still vote at the end of the day for a congressional leadership much worse than they are, thus undoing any effect of said moderation. (One friend of mine, who lived in liberal Montgomery County, Maryland when it was still represented by moderate Republican Connie Morella, commented that he liked her, but was still bothered that a vote for her ultimately meant a vote for Newt Gingrich.)
On the other hand, as proud as I am to be a Democrat, and as hard as I defend the Democratic party against Naderite arguments that it's identical to the Republican party, I'm not comfortable with the idea that the Democratic party is the only place anybody finds progressivism. There is some validity to the idea that Republicans who embrace even some liberal ideas should be commended for that, and that the goal of advancing liberalism is bigger than either party. Furthermore, I'm not sure that interest groups that fight for a better environment, women's rights, and so on should put all their eggs in one party's basket. (I'm also not sure that they should simply become rump think tanks that provide ideas to MoveOn, as Kos once suggested.)
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