Jon Wright at
mushin no shin is peeved at the GOP's primary rhetoric. He posits ("On The Subject of the Day…") that there is no consensus among members of the GOP (or among members in the more Conservative party). Wright writes:
"I keep hearing this dialog about who is the “real conservative” along with various attempts to explain the dynamics of that race. Listen folks, it’s so painfully simple that you should all be ashamed of yourselves. There is no “real conservative” because there’s no such thing as a “real conservative”. Conservatism is a coalition of war mongers, mercantilists, and theocrats. These factions don’t give a rats ass about the other factions, and to each of those factions, you’re a “liberal” if you don’t support *their* faction, even if you’re 100% on both of the other two, and it is impossible to support all three without contradiction. In this race, McCain has the warmongers, Romney has the mercantilists, and Huckabee has the theocrats. That’s all there is to it. There is no “real conservative” because “conservative” has no precise definition, despite every single conservative’s attempt to proscribe their own viewpoint as “the” viewpoint."
Not exactly. I think there are many differences between America's two major political parties, but the most fundamental distinction is that the Democratic Party is a
coalition party and the GOP is a
consensus party.
From the WiV archives:
The GOP is a consensus party, not a coalition party.
I have often argued this point (here, here), but Republicans agree on a set of core policy views, while Democrats' various sub-groups agree on one thing--being in power. Union workers and open-borders-types and "gays" and Black Evangelicals and feminists and Union workers and Environmentalists make an odd assortment, and the only thing they have in common is that they want a seat at the table and must subvert their own interests to get there.
Jon often says some profound stuff . . . this simplistic pap is not typical.
4 comments:
I have to speak in simplistic terms when trying to speak down to the level of the network news talking heads I was addressing...
As far as consensus vs coalition, that's a distinction without a difference. Consensus is the result of the compromise between members of the coalition. The only parties that aren't both consensus & coalition parties are the ideological third parties, eg Green, Libertarian, Constitution, etc -- and even that argument falls apart at a micro-policy level.
I disagree that there's not a difference . . . unless one thinks that "needing to ignore other groups' interests enough to enable us to have a large voting bloc" is a sufficient raison d'etre for a political party.
So what exactly is a Romney or a Giuliani doing when they ignore the abortion prohibitionists in order to get elected in MA or NY? What is Bush or a Huckabee doing when they ignore the fiscal conservatives in order to keep themselves in power?
Not every Republican agrees with every other Republican or agrees with every tenet of the GOP platform. And pointing to examples of GOP candidates who either tailor their message for a particular electorate (or are well-suited for election in a part of the country typically more amenable to candidates of the Democratic Party) isn't evidence that the GOP is more of a coalition party than a consensus party.
By the way, I disagree with the implication that Dubya or Huck were doing anything other than merely advancing their vision of gov't, and the fact that they are widely criticized for those policies reflects that they are departing from the Party's ideals.
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