It’d be lovely to be a bug on the wall of the Republican post-mortem of the Moore loss in Alabama. No doubt they’ll identify the surface problem – an extremist candidate who appealed to the zealots who voted in the primary over his rivals. But will they understand that Moore, who defeated establishment candidate and appointee to the seat Luther Strange by more than 9 percentage points in the final GOP run-off, was nearly inevitable as the Republican candidate?
As long-time readers know, I put a lot of the blame on the team politics practiced by the Republicans, along with the RINO culture. These two recent additions to the Republican operating procedure has caused the character of the Republican party to run rapidly to the right, as demonstrated by FiveThirtyEight’s review from a few years ago – the trend has only gotten worse, as Moore disparaged various American Constitutional Amendments, as well claiming he’d never met any of his accusers, who promptly began displaying documentation disputing that claim. As moderate Republicans are run out of the Party or side-tracked via RINO-tactics, and team politics silences the critical voices within the Party that would function to deny extremists candidacies and, often, electoral victories, we see those who are most focused on power gaining access to Party support.
And – just as a personal observation – those with the most extreme ideologies seem to have the fewest restraints on their personal behavior. I’d speculate it has to do with the extraordinary self-confidence necessary to hold extremist positions in the face of widespread community disapproval. In turn, this leads to the belief that what they do is always right, and also, dismayingly, they come off as very confident, which can seem charismatic and even convincing to those whose positions are not well thought out. Intuitive folks can often be taken in by such people.
Anyways, I’m going to guess that it’ll be extraordinarily difficult to take a decision to dissipate the team politics pillar, because it has led to some amazing victories for the Republicans, including dominating government at the current time – and using electoral victories seems like an easy proxy for measuring success, doesn’t it? Yet, they have little to show for it – no signature, quality legislation, some leading members not just disagreeing with the President, but publicly denigrating him, and a clutch of young, conservative judges who are not impressing anyone with their quality.
Will the Republican leadership – which may be distinct from the donors who really may be running the show – have the insight to realize that things are just not going very well, and it’s a systemic problem, not a spot problem?
My money is against them.
