AHC: Prevent U.S. Republican near-split between conservatives and super conservatives.

or middle-of-the-road conservatism a al President Ford continue as a bigger part of the Republican Party?

I think the only real constituency for that was in the Northeast, but with the rise of air conditioning, I daresay you'd still see the Snow to Sun Belt transition of seniors that did a lot to turn the North bluer than it was pre-Civil Rights era. Once that happened, the traditional country club Republican was doomed to steady decline.
 
Democrtats could compete with Republicans on jobs. For example:

1) entrepreneurship, including leveling with people and giving the honest, realistic advice that 80% of new businesses fail. And rebutting Republicsns on this "gov. regulation" claim. For smaller businesses, not so much federal regulations, it's the ticky-tack state and local regulations.

2) Making environment and cleaner energy a job winner. I'm not entirely sold on this. For example, if you test ground water like you should with fracking, you might take away a big chunk of the boom aspect, which is a big part of what creates new jobs. So, not totally convinced, but liberals and progressives could certainly give it more of the good 'ol college try.

3) Infrastructure. Big One. And I think a clear majority is all in favor of it. Democrats could be all in favor of trying to get a B or B+ on the American Society of Civil Engineers report card. Going for an A might be where you start hitting diminishing returns on jobs, as well as a lot of things. B+ might be the sweet range to aim for.

With Democrats not doing this too much, does leave open field for Republicans.
 
Honestly, I think you'd need to avoid the Cold War somehow, because it forced us to define ourselves as a society, and we did so in a lot of ways that were ultimately fatal to the New Deal consensus, since we were determined to be everything the USSR wasn't. The USSR was atheistic - America is Christian, screw E Pluribus Unum, we're the country of In God We Trust. The USSR was communistic - America is the nation of capitalism, and Adam Smith didn't say nothin' about Social Security. We built up (or rather resuscitated) an entire Horatio Alger mythology around our country, and, well, the problem with propaganda is that even if you only see it as a means to an end, you can bet that your children will come to accept it at face value. This myth structure came to being in the 40's and 50's, reinforced by pliant mass media, and the emerging Baby Boomers bought it all hook, line and sinker. Once they came of age, they'd demand politics in line with the religious and capitalistic nation they'd been taught represented ideal freedom.
I'd modify this by saying that the Cold War was what put a brake on things in both parties, because no matter how much you hated the other guys, you didn't want the Reds attacking. With the end of the cold war, the forced civility is dead. One gets the sense that the two major parties are fighting it out in a divorce court, and that they only stayed married for the sake of the children.
 
What if a liberal Democrat wins in 1992? Reagan wasn't near godhood then, Bush Sr a traitor for increasing taxes. Rather than more conservative Presidents (Clinton was to a degree after 1994). Paul Tsongas (spelling?) perhaps?
 
What if a liberal Democrat wins in 1992? Reagan wasn't near godhood then, Bush Sr a traitor for increasing taxes. Rather than more conservative Presidents (Clinton was to a degree after 1994). Paul Tsongas (spelling?) perhaps?

That won't stop the conservative South from becoming the core of the party; it may speed it up, if anything. Either Republicans avoid becoming the party of the South, or the South becomes less conservative. A lot boils down to that choice.
 
What if a liberal Democrat wins in 1992? Reagan wasn't near godhood then, Bush Sr a traitor for increasing taxes. Rather than more conservative Presidents (Clinton was to a degree after 1994). Paul Tsongas (spelling?) perhaps?
We might get a mirror image. A liberal Democratic president in '92 (that is, someone other than the two named fellows!), and if you still have the economic boom of the mid- to late-'90s. Let's say some of the liberal economic program of job creation, rebuilding infrastructure, (?) trade which is much more nearly win-win, better schools, more affordable college, etc, actually add to the boom.

The Democratics might split or near-split between true-blue, purist liberals, and more pragmatic middle-of-the-roaders. Especially as the economy comes back to earth.

Whereas the Republicans might remain more centrist and united.

Interesting! :)
 
Democrtats could compete with Republicans on jobs. For example:

1) entrepreneurship, including leveling with people and giving the honest, realistic advice that 80% of new businesses fail.
Very well! Why do new businesses fail? You can look at peripheral causes like tick-tacky local regulations, and there is much truth in this.

But the fundamental reason 80 percent of new businesses fail, all across the nation, in every bailiwick regardless of regulatory or tax environment, is that capitalism is about capital! When one already has loads and loads of capital one has margins and reserves to handle mistakes and reverses. One one is operating on a shoestring, one mistake, one fluctuation out of control, triggers bankruptcy.

How widely realized and understood, on a conscious level is it, that the ever-popular board game Monopoly models this aspect of capitalism quite accurately? The goal of the game is of course to become the monopolist, to own all the properties on the board and wipe out all of one's competition. The rules of the game are fair; anyone can wind up being the winner; there is no bias built in. What is built in though, not by any particular rule but by the normal rules of basic market transactions, is that by sheer luck as the determining factor, some one will pull ahead. Someone will wind up with somewhat more properties, of somewhat higher value, and from that point on the end of the game is in sight. The reason the winner will win is not that they have any special advantages--they can't use their money to generate extra Get Out of Jail Free cards or exempt themselves from any rule. In fact some aspects of the game mechanics do penalize the lead player with heavy fines proportional to their wealth, so that the leading player suffers a higher penalty than the trailing ones. Nevertheless, on the whole their greater wealth quite automatically enables them to better survive setbacks and to more rapidly and thoroughly capitalize on windfalls. A player with half a brain and an aggressive spirit--indeed, a simple robot player as the computer versions of the game quick demonstrated--can win against a genius. Because once fortune in the early game and common sense in the middle of the game build up a sufficient buffer of wealth and property, one is almost immune to misfortunes that wipe out a less lucky player, and one ruthlessly builds up revenue catchments that penalize all other players and suck the wealth they have "earned" into one's own coffers there to build one's buffer of immunity even thicker and stronger.

Am I guilty of the "condescension" that my hard-left suggestions have drawn? I don't know. Since forming these convictions I have not worked as some party hack (not paid; I've volunteered for many a campaign though) nor held a nice safe and comfortable academic position. I've been a care provider for a disabled individual most of the time and worked in a warehouse environment on the shop floor since, with a security guard stint to also keep my resume nice and lowly looking. I'm hardly in a position to look down. Yet nothing in my experience suggests to me that I was in error to support leftists, and if necessary to compromise with supporting "moderates" who basically always seem to empower mainly the right and the rich, for the little crumbs of modestly helpful policy they condescendingly do shower down on us poor folks.

And unlike your stereotypical Bernie Bros or Ivory Tower Pinheads or Effete Intellectuals, I don't judge my fellow poor people. I judge the hacks such as Limbaugh et al who hand them a toxic message but I honestly don't know what to make of the numbers of those who I think would be better off to ignore and hate him, who appear to listen instead. In fact I am unsure whether the impression one is given by these people that they are everywhere and they rule is a true one--if it were true, how did Bill Clinton get re-elected, how did Barack Obama ever get elected at all--and how did Al Gore win the majority of popular votes in 2000?

One lesson that my lowly place in the economic food chain has tried to teach me that I have refused to learn is "kiss ass to rise to the top!" My supervisor at my security job site was a fan of the website Storm Front and demonstrated to me in training that I should interrogate and investigate mixed couples on our site, because they had no business there. (And by golly, there were darn few African-Americans employed by the client on our site--to be sure the site was in a gradual process of shut down which is how I lost that job, so maybe the employer, a producer of globally famous reputation, had its fair share of African-American techs and office workers on the viable campuses). I most certainly did understand the basic concept of "don't argue with your boss!" but ventured to make some very polite and soft critiques of the web site anyway, and never encountered any particular problem with African origin people in the years I worked there since. As usual my main problems came from white people.

But who knows what doors to advancement might have been opened for me had I kissed up and pretended to be a white supremacist too? And who knows just how much more abject and hopeless my employment situation would be had I had the courage to escalate my revulsion at a supervisor being that kind of committed and open bigot to company management? I lacked that courage in large part because I doubted upper management would hold it against my supervisor, whereas I would be a troublemaker. It would go beyond this employer as I would be forced to list them as my prior employer--they'd give me a bad reference. If I tried to take it to court, I'd get nowhere whereas my troublemaker status would be plain in the public record.

So when I say people are channeled by society, I am not attributing anything worse to them than I am guilty of myself.

And I don't know if it is obvious to everyone who plays Monopoly that the fundamental dynamic of centralization and consolidation of all wealth as capital has in effect a gravitational attraction to make millions of separate small concentrations into one big gigantic black hole of a lump is plain as day to most working class Americans who play it and it is only I who was so slow to notice it I had to read Capital first. But if they don't realize it consciously I believe everyone does realize it unconsciously! This is part of the appeal of the game--the vicarious chance to be the one that this mindless, automatic process of profiting in every transaction because there is plenty more money where what was "risked" came from to redeem any missteps benefits instead of sucks the life out of.

So--small business failures. By definition small businesses are founded by people with very little capital. Furthermore, the pickings are slim because the fields that are most profitable are preempted by big capital. Once a business model is demonstrated to be a sure thing the capitalists, whose academic shills claim derive their profits from risk, move in to monopolize it and can brush small competition aside with their deep pockets. Only on the fringes and peripheries where risk is inherent can small investors find territory left open for them to try their luck in--the territory is open because it is judged to be worthless by people whose business it is to identify and exploit opportunities.

I'd think only one in five surviving 2 years is just the beginning of the attrition too. Of that 20 percent, how many are still in business 8 years later? The basic business cycle of boom and bust goes like clockwork over approximately a decade--look back on the past century and you can clearly see that every decade contains one "boom" period, for widely varying values of boom, and one bust, again varying much in depth and breadth. But the basic heartbeat remains regular. I'd say that a business founded on a shoestring can only be judged a real success if it survives one of those crashes, and it ought to demonstrate surviving two to claim to be here to stay. How many last 20 years, or the lifetime of its founders, or even long enough, with enough net profit, to secure the living of the founders until their deaths? Far far less than 20 percent, I would bet.

And is there any conscious, serious consideration of that heart-beat like boom-bust pattern? If our American economic system is geared to the welfare of honest hard working people of the common classes, employees and entrepreneurs, or just one or the other of these, should we not have institutions that acknowledge this and are generous with welfare help during known, universally acknowledged crashes, and tax the richest who benefit the most from booms to pay for the survival of the poorer majority, on the grounds that the business cycle is part of how our system works and the dire straits of the less well off during the crashes are not a fault of theirs but a feature of the system?

But we do not have such a consciousness, any more than we generally seem to realize the end game of the game of Monopoly is dictated by the nature of market capitalism. Every crash that comes more or less on schedule is held up to be a big surprise, the unforeseen failure of a system that during the recent boom just before it was held up to have finally, once and for all, licked any particular mistakes or liabilities that caused previous ones. I remember Newt Gingrich and others proclaiming that the Internet had cured all diseases of capitalism and the DotCom boom was going to be forever, just as his spiritual predecessors in the 1920s predicted endless advance of American business. It is a lesson the academic economists never ever seem to learn, despite it happening several times in their careers!

A society serious about the prospects and good fortunes of small entrepreneurs should be socialist. It should look to the concentrations of great wealth and demand they accept a social contract whereby their being constantly bled of their automatic and essentially risk-free profits that accrue to them simply by virtue of their owning most of the wealth, in order to generously fund the reserves to tide small enterprisers over the inevitable risks and setbacks, and to relieve them of such overhead costs as paying for healthcare benefits by providing these universally to all citizens, funded out of taxes on the rich. Compliance with environmental and labor laws is no hardship if heavy capital costs are funded publicly and all rules and regulations are complied with by all players at all levels.

That this is not the reality should be evident to anyone who watched the recent Presidential debates.

To make such a society socialist, from our present starting point, is an open declaration of war on those who currently run and essentially own the system.

It should be no surprise then that one finds all sorts of topics where mainstream discussion is not at all realistic. The poor cannot afford to piss off their betters openly, so they do not listen to stuff they have good reasons to believe is true. And the serviceable middle classes and of course the very rich have even less reason to be frank, although the latter sometimes are, at least insofar as it suits them. Trump denouncing Hillary Clinton for not changing the rules while she was in power in the Senate to make people like himself pay fair shares and comply with labor laws is a classic example for the ages!

And of course it is no surprise a guy like me, who once aspired to academic position, should take all the "ivory tower" positions I do and favor a fellow like Bernie Sanders this past year. But Bernie Sanders was not a Presidential candidate because of people like me! We've been around since forever; I knew Bernie as a hero of the working classes for longer than I'd ever known the names of Bill or Hillary Clinton! No, it wasn't intellectuals like me who made him a contender this past year--it was small business owners and military veterans who were the people I met at Sanders events.

And it was very few of the Democrats I knew from the 2010 cycle either. I went to my first Sanders event looking for these old friends and found, after seeing hundreds of people, just one. Later at the county Democratic convention I found two or three more. The rest of them were new to me.

As for Bernie Bros being condescending--well gosh, I went to my caucus for my precinct, and in the hour before the formal process began, spoke up for him almost alone, except for one other person, against six or seven other "white" people, all of whom were for Hillary, essentially on the grounds that she had a proven track record of getting results within the system whereas we were dangerously radical, aspiring for too much. And also too many Bernie supporters were young and inexperienced and didn't know right from wrong or something. As the room filled with these younger people (who to my eyes were not callow kids but young couples in their twenties or thirties--and not all white either!) I glanced around, wondering would they really go on attacking the young generation of the party right in front of them? (I am in my fifties myself nowadays). So since we who spoke up for Bernie were so few and Hillary's people so many I expected my precinct caucus to go to them. But the divide was IIRC 9/13--on Bernie's side! We both got two delegates to the convention, me being one of them.

Condescension? The worst I would say about the alleged heavy minority support for Hillary is that these people darn well knew we Democrats are a weak reed to rest on, but the only friends they do have, and therefore backed the most connected, mainstream of us in the hope of getting something solid. And I do not blame them for that!

But your white small business types, your military veterans--they were Bernie's. They took a chance, perhaps in their white entitlement, to go for what I judge to be the real "Brass Ring," the stronger assertion of middle class and working class values--and rights!

What alienates me from Hillary--not to the extent I won't vote for her of course--honestly I find her demeanor and promises in the debates against Trump quite inspiring--is not so much her own condescension, as that of her grass roots supporters I met at that caucus. How small-minded, how mean-spirited, they seemed! And condescending and mob-like as all hell too.
And rebutting Republicsns on this "gov. regulation" claim. For smaller businesses, not so much federal regulations, it's the ticky-tack state and local regulations.
And the tacky-tack of state and local taxes too. It is not income taxes that break our backs, not even when they are double-dipped on us with state income taxes on top of local. At my low wage rates, my income tax liabilities to the State of California were in the range of hundreds of dollars a year, never over a thousand in my best years. 600 800 dollars, that was the range. When I moved to Nevada with its vaunted freedom from income taxes, the increase in my auto insurance rate alone accounted for more money that that every year! With no state income tax everything is paid for by sales tax and despite lower rents I paid more out of a meagre paycheck for basic necessities than I did in allegedly expensive California.

California's costliness falls mainly on the rich, and they pass it on to the poor via things like high rental costs. To be sure there are sales taxes there too. But as I say I paid more overall when "freed" of state income tax by having to pay more in one single private cost, due I suppose to inferior road engineering causing accident rates to be higher here in Nevada. Here it must be quite a fine thing to be a large property owner, or established small business, versus the State of California. But for the working majority it is six of one, half a dozen of the other.

As far as the bureaucracy and cost of compliance as a barrier to small business enterprise I would not know, but I did hear an acquaintance complain bitterly about the difficulty of starting one in Sonoma County. I don't know the whys and wherefores of the regulations involved, whether they are imposing important constraints or whether they are mindless hoops set up either by the mindless process of petty bureaucracy--or barriers to protect established businesses from unwanted competition.

But it seems obvious the proper approach is to have national standards, to evaluate the situation on the ground in various localities and to adopt the good rules as national ones, abolish the senseless (or more likely, protective of established business) ones by national legislation, and create organizational infrastructure to assist both local administrations and the locals being administered in their endeavors to enforce and to comply. And provide loans and grants for capital costs of essential investments to comply with good rules. Because good rules are needed!

Instead the option offered to aspiring small business people by our political dialog is to see all rules swept away, caveat emptor and let everyone sink or swim "equally," never mind the inherent advantage held by those who are already rich. There is no spirit of "Better Together" offered as an alternative.

It is of course the job of Democrats, or if they default on their claim to be the party of the people, a real populist party, to offer these alternatives in credible form. I believe the Democrats have gone as far as possible without challenging the interests of the established big capitals to attempt to offer this sort of reform--but there is not much to be done that does not tread on Establishment toes! Therefore they deal in vague generalities because the only concrete things they can offer without offending their big money supporters are petty and incremental and a lot less inspiring than a grand revolution to abolish all rules and regulations.
2) Making environment and cleaner energy a job winner. I'm not entirely sold on this. For example, if you test ground water like you should with fracking, you might take away a big chunk of the boom aspect, which is a big part of what creates new jobs. So, not totally convinced, but liberals and progressives could certainly give it more of the good 'ol college try.
Well, I imagine having rules against murder or theft are often inconvenient to some aspiring businessmen too. When we make a rule against some practice that is harmful, or regulate it so that the harm is deemed tolerable and acceptable in balance with the benefits, it should be obvious that of course some people are constrained by it. We forbid dumping toxic wastes (insofar as we actually do) because they are harmful. Fracking, as an example, strikes me as the epitome of a wrong way to go. For short term benefit, on the "Drill Baby Drill!" program Romney ran on in 2012, that Trump is reviving again this year, we dig up and burn up irreplaceable resources today, when they are cheaper than they will be in the future, and do damage that lasts far longer than the benefit, for the profit of a few and only a hypothetical and dubious trickle-down for the many.

Investment in the future is the sounder path, and investment is what capitalists are supposed to be good at. But they are not. They are better at it when they are allowed to form monopolistic cartels; this was the basis of US industrial power rising to first-class levels in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But this makes the aristocratic power of the capitalist oligarchy plain and final, barring revolution, and we Americans have taken the step of being up in arms against visible "monopoly" and so hedge the cartels with regulations that are supposed to prevent their existing, but mainly have the effect of cosmetically hiding them and also interfering with their incentives to invest in a future they own.

Socialism is how to get investment in a future the people own. If instead of taking shortcuts like fracking or intensifying exploitation of Alaskan north slope oil at the cost of heavier environmental damage, we were to invest similar funds in developing new forms of power generation and use that are sustainable, we'd not only avoid irrevocable damage to ecosystems human beings depend on to live, but create new and permanent jobs while conserving rare resources that will only become rarer and more valuable.

The "Jobs versus environment" dilemma is a red herring. Either we invest in the technologies of the future now, and profit more or less together (depending on who does the investing on what terms with what goals) now and in the future, or we play catch-up later when damage has been done and the resources are gone.

Jobs or lack of jobs is not directly related to our energy strategy. It is related to the centralization of capital that with its inherently short term thinking prefers to shift the jobs overseas. Not because they lack environmental regulations there, but because they lack effective regulations across the board. They can get away with robbery, and murder, outsourcing. It is up to the people, as Trump sneered at Clinton, to stop them from doing so because a moral compass has no place in a corporate board room where they are obliged by custom, competition, and in the USA even the law of the land to seek maximum and immediate profits. If we stand up to these people, change the rules on them as Trump challenges us to do, hold them to standards in balance with profit, and take revenue from them so that the public can invest in a progress they are too inherently short-sighted to invest in, then we get the jobs. They are different jobs, but they are also better ones.
3) Infrastructure. Big One. And I think a clear majority is all in favor of it. Democrats could be all in favor of trying to get a B or B+ on the American Society of Civil Engineers report card. Going for an A might be where you start hitting diminishing returns on jobs, as well as a lot of things. B+ might be the sweet range to aim for.

With Democrats not doing this too much, does leave open field for Republicans.

The Democrats, speaking in vague and broad platitudes, do as much of it as the capitalist interests will allow them to do, and since that is damn little look like fools, hypocrites and sell-outs--which in fact they are. The Republicans can then claim to be more visionary and progressive than they, because they stand for straightforward and total rule by wealth, and say so. Business is on their side on the whole. If working people have no more favorable if socially risky option to aspire to, it makes sense for them to go along to get along.

Or as Harry Truman said:

"Give 'em a choice between a Republican and a Republican and they'll vote for the Republican every time."

And if we let it rest there, then the Republicans will start out-Republicaning each other and we get this spiraling down the drain to a Bioshock sort of destination.

The fact that the American people can see where this is all headed and don't want to go there explains I think the re-elections of both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and the likely (if scarily uncertain at this date) election of Hillary Clinton. The only office elected by all the people keeps turning up these Democrats much of the time despite their abject failure to deliver on the full promise, because a broken good promise is less bad than a kept bad one. But they remain weak and vulnerable in their compromises, and the bus continues to lurch down the hill toward certain wreck, just somewhat better steered and with some brakes being applied.

I have mixed feelings about a POD that would have preempted this whole slow-motion wreck, prevented someone like GW Buxh being President with an all-Republican controlled legislature for 6 years--for if we could have done it, we should have! But believing people in general and Americans in particular are better than we have been, I have to hope we could have done it and maybe still can.

But looking to the Republicans for the solution strikes me as very very strange indeed. Moderate, triangulating, wonky Democrats like the Clintons might be as much a part of the problem as Republicans have been, but where is the good in the OTL Republican movement I should have been looking for? I don't look there because their ideology embraces the sources of our problems, or seeks to obscure them; they aren't looking forthrightly at reality.

But neither are the Democrats who win. I say it is because we live in a system that cannot take an honest look at itself and continue to exist in its current form; denial is key.

As Orwell:
"Ignorance is Strength."
 

Towelie

Banned
The issue of illegal immigration is the biggest one in which the GOP base divides on. The entire coalition of the party was built in opposition to Communism and it still exists in that form despite that not being a relevant issue. If you get agreement on immigration throughout the party, and it would have to be on the restrictionist side, a split can be staved off.

Going back further, I think you need to prevent the party split up over Bush Sr. raising taxes. The vehemence of denouncement towards institutions within the party picked up at that.
 
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