Thread. Geoff Kabaservice (@RuleandRuin) of @NiskanenCenter discusses the image of conservatism. @delong has a liberal’s rebuttal thread at the end. An observation:
2. Both Kabaservice and Delong give much attention to race and racism in the Republican Party. The current leader of the GOP, after all, is an overt, unsubtle racist to whom much of the Republican rank & file is devoted. It is logical to ask how deep this root runs.
3. This is a complex subject. What isn’t that complex are the reasons for the Reagan Republican ascendancy in the 1980s. By 1984 the profoundly disorienting inflation that had plagued Americans for the last decade had been vanquished.
4. By 1988 the Soviet Union was as much an US negotiating partner as an adversary. One can debate how much credit Reagan deserved for either development, but in fact he did get a great deal. Reagan was judged to have a successful Presidency that reflected well on his Party.
5. This was exponentially more important than the conservative critiques of “liberal overreach” to which @RuleandRuin assigns great importance. Reagan didn’t maintain his popularity by nursing the overt racism of which @delong suspects him, either.
6. Fast forward two decades: to bloody, wasting wars in Iraq & Afghanistan George W. Bush started & was unable to either win or end, and to a devastating recession, the worst in 80 years, that Bush’s neglect of finanacial services regulation made possible.
7. Just as success in government has political consequences, so does failure. The Republican Party rarely misses a chance to celebrate Reagan. But it has never come to terms with the catastrophic failure of the second Bush Presidency. This is what opened the door for Trump.
8. Republicans’ scorched-earth opposition to everything Barack Obama tried to do would have been impossible had they acknowledged any responsibility for Republican failure in government during the Bush period. The Bush years had been wonderful for many people’s careers;...
9... Bush had led his party in championing the interests of large donors to whom Republicans are passionately attached. So short-term incentives to pretend the disasters arising from Bush’s Presidency had nothing to do with the GOP were very strong.
10. But in the long run all this pretending discredited the relative restraint about race and enthusiasm for American international leadership that had characterized the Bushes and other mainstream Republicans. Eight years of massive resistance to Obama bred tolerance of...
11...the one Republican candidate least like Obama. Much of this will dissipate as the Trump Presidency dies. Conservatives will then have another chance to reckon w/how failure in government breeds political weakness, and another choice to make as to what to do about it. [end]
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