How California Could Bust Up the Two-Party System NYT edit

[elleng]

'California’s Republican Party is in crisis. Voters are leaving it in droves, its candidates haven’t won a statewide election in more than a decade and its lawmakers are likely to lose several important elections this year. Yet many of the party’s leaders and lawmakers seem unwilling to make the kind of substantive changes that would broaden its appeal. Its candidates for governor, for example, are competing on their fealty to President Trump, when more than two-thirds of Californians who are registered to vote disapprove of him.

The G.O.P.’s problems in the state are a symptom of the toxic political extremism that has forced sensible centrists to the margins of the party throughout the country. But in this problem there is an opportunity, one that California Republicans are in a singular position to seize: a chance to build a sustainable third party.

At least some Republicans in the state, chief among them former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, have been trying to push the G.O.P. to adopt more mainstream ideas and policies. This group includes people like Chad Mayes, who was ousted as the party’s Assembly leader after working with Democrats to reauthorize a landmark cap-and-trade program, and Kevin Faulconer, the mayor of San Diego.

But they are struggling to make headway against a party establishment that refuses to acknowledge that it is on the wrong track, let alone take action to change. Republicanism, even in California, has become inseparable from Trumpism because most of the party’s leaders and lawmakers are more focused on catering to its far-right base and elite donors than on speaking to or for the majority of Americans. . .

(edit) The G.O.P.’s problems in the state are a symptom of the toxic political extremism that has forced sensible centrists to the margins of the party throughout the country. But in this problem there is an opportunity, one that California Republicans are in a singular position to seize: a chance to build a sustainable third party.

At least some Republicans in the state, chief among them former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, have been trying to push the G.O.P. to adopt more mainstream ideas and policies. This group includes people like Chad Mayes, who was ousted as the party’s Assembly leader after working with Democrats to reauthorize a landmark cap-and-trade program, and Kevin Faulconer, the mayor of San Diego.

But they are struggling to make headway against a party establishment that refuses to acknowledge that it is on the wrong track, let alone take action to change. Republicanism, even in California, has become inseparable from Trumpism because most of the party’s leaders and lawmakers are more focused on catering to its far-right base and elite donors than on speaking to or for the majority of Americans.'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/12/opinion/california-third-party-republicans.html?

[still_one]

1. The NY Times has been misreading things for a long time, and they have this wrong too

[elleng]

2. Please explain.

[still_one]

5. Here is just one of their assessments where they blamed Democrats for pushing republicans to

View Climate Change as Fake Science:

"The Republican Party’s fast journey from debating how to combat human-caused climate change to arguing that it does not exist is a story of big political money, Democratic hubris in the Obama years and a partisan chasm that grew over nine years like a crack in the Antarctic shelf, favoring extreme positions and uncompromising rhetoric over cooperation and conciliation."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/03/us/politics/republican-leaders-climate-change.html

and while the NY Times may have some presence on the West Coast, their editorial speculation that California will be the back drop for the republicans in California to give birth to a third party doesn't hold water. There have been enough republican governors in California to counter that view, and the John Anderson and Ross Perot political runs nationally just add the reality that third parties serve only as spoilers

Most California republicans have no desire to branch away to a third party, if they did they would be libertarian

[shraby]

3. In what way?

[still_one]

6. As I indicated in post 5, California republicans have no desire to leave the republican party to

be part of a third party. If they did they would have already moved over to the libertarian party, and that just isn't what is happening

[California_Republic]

7. Independents maybe, plus some R and Ds

As Californians shed their political party labels, independent voters are close to outnumbering Republicans

[still_one]

10. Technically in California it is referred to as NPP, (no party preference)

[stuffmatters]

8. The only thing that keeps Faulkoner "mainstream" :is a Democratic San Diego City Council

He's as ALEC/Koch/Trump a Repug as the rest.

[Hortensis]

9. Should we want to blow up even a flawed system that

nevertheless enabled the most stable, prosperous, and progressive period in our history?

All though that period, America was predominantly centrist politically, the radical and extremist factions that gained traction in other nations unable to grow due to insufficient anxiety and resentment. America's people were more satisfied than otherwise with two main parties pulling mainly moderate left and moderate right. It worked too well to feed insurgent dissension.

What is the relationship between:

The broken moderate center that once joined legislators of two parties in functional government,
A two-party electorate unable to unite and vote in common cause to stop our enemies,
The new ultrawealthy classes busily transferring our nation's wealth and power to them,
The increase in anxiety, hyperpartisan behavior, and extremism,
And now an imagined need to split divided-and-fallen electoral power among yet more more groups?

This looks like wishful thinking to me, and of course not from our side. California is doing so well that it has a huge budget surplus that its Democratic-dominated legislature is arguing about how to invest in betterment. Conservatives have managed to stop and even roll back progressive government and civil and worker rights in other states, but not there, at least not lately.

But in any case, America as a whole has to rebuild our center, not split in more pieces, so that we can organize to fight all our enemies. Those very much include the weaponized corruption and allied insurgent fascistic forces that are active not only in our nation but in many others.