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Lawrence Glickman Profile picture
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26 Mar, 6 tweets, 2 min read
Interesting that neither the obit in the WaPo or the Times mentions Brock's role as RNC Chair in helping to found the journal, "Common Sense: A Republican Journal of Thought and Opinion." /1
nytimes.com/2021/03/25/us/…
When I interviewed Bill Brock in May 2018, he told me that he thought of his work as RNC Chair as "the most meaningful work I've ever done," emphasizing both outreach and openness to ideas./2
He also told me that the GOP "focus on social issues has made us limited" and that, too often, "we define our opponents as immoral."/3
Mr. Brock emphasized that his main goal was less the promotion of new ideas than in diversifying the GOP, to make it attractive for non-WASPs, as he put it. /4
The organizational and intellectual influences he mentioned to me as influencing his thoughts as RNC Chair were: Ray Bliss, Mike Baroody, who he said was thoughtful and "wonderful with words," Michael Novak, and Jeanne Kirkpatrick. /5
I found Brock to be thoughtful, engaged, and deeply concerned about the current state of the GOP. I'm very much looking forward to the biography of Brock that @SethBlumenthal is working on. /6

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More from @LarryGlickman

Lawrence Glickman Profile picture
14 Mar
Terrific article by ⁦@jimtankersley⁩ and ⁦@JasonDeParle⁩ on the transformational nature of the Biden relief plan. I continue, however, to question the framing of backlashes as a reflexive response “generated” by, in their example, the 2009 Obama stimulus. 1/
I disagree with this framing at least for 2 reasons. First, The claim that the “law could provoke a backlash” denies agency to those who participate in backlashes and attributes the causal factor to be demands for equal rights or progressive legislation. /2
Second, the history of backlashes shows them to often be pre-emptive rather than reactive. To take one example, the so-called “white backlash” to the Civil Rights Movement got its name In 1963, a year before the passage of the Civil Rights Act. /3
Read 5 tweets
Lawrence Glickman Profile picture
9 Mar
What I'd add to this great @jbouie piece is that despite a lot of hype about divisions between "populist" and pro-business flanks, the GOP is remarkably ideologically uniform, witness the unanimity on repealing ACA, Trump's tax cut, and Biden's ARP. nytimes.com/2021/03/09/opi…
Remember that in Trump's CPAC speech, he defined the living heartbeat of Trumpism as "low taxes and eliminating job-killing regulations," and Ohio's Josh Mandel conflated a "Trump America First Agenda" with "economic freedom and individual liberty." /2
rev.com/blog/transcrip…
In other words, even the faux populism is fading and we are getting a convergence of Trumpism with long-term GOP orthodoxy, which existed in practice during the Trump years, if not always in rhetoric. /3
Read 4 tweets
Lawrence Glickman Profile picture
4 Mar
In her CPAC speech, Kristi Noem quoted a JFK speech from 1962 as evidence of "a time when both political parties clung to certain fundamental principles" and before Ronald Reagan was forced from the Democratic Party. This is humorous for two reasons./1
rev.com/blog/transcrip…
First, because Reagan joined the GOP in 1962, the exact year of JFK's speech./2
Second, a few years earlier Reagan wrote of JFK to Nixon: "Under the tousled boyish haircut it is still old Karl Marx -- first launched a century ago. There is nothing new in the idea of a government being Big Brother to us all." /3
upi.com/Archives/1984/…
Read 5 tweets
Lawrence Glickman Profile picture
3 Mar
Trump's definition of "Trumpism" at CPAC showed the mistake of assuming that he carved out a distinct ideological path for the GOP. His message was more boilerplate conservative than "populist." /1
"It means low taxes and eliminating job-killing regulations," he said. He also mentioned strong borders, law and order, and "great trade deals." Only the latter can be seen as a divergence from mainstream conservatism./2
While he has been (inaccurately) said to have "outlanked" Democrats, his invocation of the "slippery slope" was even more extreme than typical postwar GOP rhetoric: "We will fight the onslaught of radicalism, socialism, and indeed it all leads to communism once and for all."/3
Read 5 tweets
Lawrence Glickman Profile picture
2 Mar
Commenters has been making similar observations for almost sixty years./1 washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-g…
In 1963, Joe Alsop wrote, “a Goldwater candidacy will automatically make the Republican Party into the ‘white man’s party’.” /2
Robert Novak offered similar analysis in his 1965 book, THE AGONY OF THE GOP, 1964. /3
Read 6 tweets
Lawrence Glickman Profile picture
28 Feb
Trumpism certainly represents a departure from “traditional conservatism,” but there are also continuities that are worth noting./1 washingtonpost.com/politics/balzt…
“Owning the libs,” for example, is not a departure from traditional conservatism./2 ImageImage
Also, the cultivation of grievance and victimhood are not departures but continuities, as I show in my book, and I don’t think it is much of a stretch to consider them constitutive ideas./3 ImageImage
Read 4 tweets

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