Will moderate Republicans try and purge their party of the radical right wing Christian fringe?

[The Craw]

I have met many moderate Republicans who now identify themselves as Independents, because in their words, 'the religious nuts have taken over the (Republican) party.'

McCain made the same mistake that Bush sr did- he tacked to the hard right,and in doing so,alienated not only all Democrats, but Independents, and moderates within his own party-and as a result, lost the election

Has anyone seen any evidence of moderate Republicans who want to purge the Republican party of the Christian zealots?

For a party that claims to want LESS government intrusion in our lives,the Republican Party in recent years certainly wants the government in our bedrooms..

[liberal N proud]

1. There is always room in the Democratic party for the moderates

They could be the right end of the Democratic party which is all inclusive.

[QC]

2. There aren't enough moderates left in the GOP to rob a kid's lemonade stand,

much less pull off a successful purge.

[ProfessorGAC]

3. Don't Agree

They've been marginalized and have had to shut up. Now is the time to lead the charge to take back the party. It's exactly what happened here in Illinois in 2004.
The Professor

[The Craw]

4. I hope President Obama will only deal with moderate Republicans

and ignore,isolate and marginalize the radical right wing Republicans...

[ProfessorGAC]

12. That'd Be Ok WIth Me

And, it's as it should be. His election was at least partly a repudiation of modern hyperconservative republicanism.

For the next couple of years, they either calm down, or they get marginalized. It's up to them.
GAC

[Xenotime]

13. They should move. We don't need their fundie thinking here anymore.

[patrice]

5. I've talked to deep-pockets Republicans around our Moderate governor about this, they say

"It's ALL about power." I.E. they will USE whomever presents themselves for their use.

[patrice]

6. self-delete

[But....]

7. Afraid it will be the other way around...

as moderate Republicans leave(or are pushed out of)the party:evilgrin: If we lucky maybe they will form different parties

[snappyturtle]

8. I agree with you....I think the republican party will gather around the

strongest faction and I believe that is the far right wing. imho

[The Craw]

15. But don't you think McCain's failure will inspire moderate Republicans to take back their party ?

I hope Palin will run in 2012- She's a radical right wing Christain zealot,and will lose.....

Many moderate Republicans must see that too-so one would think after tMcCain's defeat,they'd try and pull their party back from the radical right,towards the center...

[But....]

20. No..

moderate Republicans may have the money and other forms of power, but they don't have the bodies! And what's left of their sheeopel are too stupid to be lead.:evilgrin:

[snappyturtle]

26. I don't know but it's the radical right that put the republicans in play so

would the moderates do that? I don't think they have the strength or the structure that the far right does. imho

[The Craw]

40. A local right wing radio blowhard asserted to win in 2012, the Republicans must purge all moderates

Interesting- A local right wing radio blowhard asserted today that to win in 2012, the Republicans must shift even further to the right, and shun all moderates within their party.
This clown blamed Mccain/Palin's loss on mcCain being 'too liberal'

Good! Then they have ZERO chance of being elected.....

[The Craw]

11. I could see the Republican party fragmenting

Many Republican fiscal conservatives recognize Bush as having been a train wreck- I think some of them have morphed into libertarians-
There is opposition to the Christian fundamentalist positions that have somehow taken over the ideology of the republican party.
In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt broke away from the Republicans to form the Bull Moose Party-Perhaps there will be a similar split in 2012.

[surrealAmerican]

25. That does seem to be the trend.

The failure in this election could push this in either direction.

[Peachhead22]

9. Maybe the other way around

I suspect the Fundies are going to be the ones trying to throw the moderates out. The moderates are the tolerant ones who want "a big tent". It's the Fundies who don't tolerate diversity or dissent.*



*Please note: I'm not saying all devout believers of Christianity or other religions are like that. I know many who aren't. I'm just referring to the bigots who are like that.

[The Craw]

14. Many Republicans originally slammed McCain and his supporters for being 'too liberal'

Before the Republican Party nominated McCain,most right wing radio blowhards blasted mcCain and his supporters for being 'fake'Republicans,being 'too liberal',andnot being 'real'Republicans. They seemed to feel that all republicans must feel the same way,and any deviation from total conformity was not to be tolerated-
Since they opposed diversity within their own party,it stands to reason they would never,ever tolerate diversity outside of the Republican Party way of thinking.....

[wileedog]

32. There were quite a few better VP candidates that had to be dismissed immediately

simply because of their abortion stance.

When that becomes a litmus test to even be on the ticket, you've already lost as a party.

I've seen and know quite a few Financial Conservatives who are sick of it, and the Fundies will be happy to see them go.

[NOW tense]

10. They think they were not Republican enough

They will be more conservative for at least one more election cycle. Then they might figure out that their tent has become a 2 person dome tent. A third party will strengthen, drawing away from the Republicans and will have moderate success.

[dmallind]

16. That would be tricky

I think it's more likely the opposite. Honestly how many moderate Republicans are left? I don;t keep encyclopedic tabs on every single congressperson but only two moderate Senators and maybe half a dozen moderate Reps spring to mind in the GOP ranks - it would be much more likely that the purists kick THEM out.

NOw obviously we have no idea how many moderate GOP VOTERS there are - statistics implies that there must be quite a few since 46% of the country voted that way and by definition 46% cannot all be radicals, but the trouble is that 46% seems content to help elect radicals nominated by their party (the machinery of which certainly IS controlled by the extreme since, again by definition, the extremes care more than the center) as long as they have the magic (R) after their name. Until that changes the extremists who control the party apparatus and who are nominated and elected will have the upper hand.

[FKA MNChimpH8R]

29. There are virtually no moderates left

It's mostly wingnuts with a smattering of discredited economic royalists and neocons. The purge the Christianist fascists conduct is going to be incredibly bloody. It will also render the Repuke party irrelevant for at least ten years and maybe forever. The country is getting younger, browner and more tolerant. Let them commit demographic suicide. It's what they really want to do, so I encourage the fundies to go for the gold.

Palin did us a huge favor: she let the kooks out of the attic. Now they are in the living room shrieking their kookery at the top of their lungs in the middle of the dinner party, like monkeys throwing shit at zoo patrons. The kooks are firmly in control of the Repig party and this has spooked the establishment conservatives big time. Which is why the Reagan coalition is already in its coffin, just waiting for burial. No common interests unite these people.

The full-mooner, foaming at the mouth fundy Repuke base is deeply and irredeemably racist. Given the sorry state of race relations in this nation, white trash's only claim to being better than brown people of all kinds is their whiteness. The educated economic/political elites that identify as Repug couldn't give a hamster turd whether a candidate is blue, purple, black or Vulcan. To them, vulgar racism is declasse. That is why the conservative "intelligentsia" threw McCain under the train. Whether they admit it to themselves or not, the Powells, Brookses, Wills, Buckleys, et al., have finally gotten an uncensored look at the underbelly of sheer hatred, seething paranoia and unvarnished sociopathy in their party's base and they have been scared to death by seeing it up close.

[TransitJohn]

17. Moderate Repubs and DLCers

could form a party of their own. It's a possibility, and 3 parties would be a start...forcing coalition building in Congress to get the people's business done.

[LatteLibertine]

18. Maybe the "radicals" will have a change of heart

when they get a taste of what it's like to feel disenfranchised and marginalized for a while.

[Cresent City Kid]

19. The base of the GOP isn't going anywhere

I have to agree with several posts here, the base will be the base if the moderates stay, or the whole party if they leave. Their union was always forced, and will be if it continues. You can't use reason and statistics to make half the country believe that helping the rich helps everyone. They created this group that buys whatever Rush sells, and it has calcified to a point where moderate Republicans can't move them to win elections.

[patrice]

22. Calcified in the churches, which is the BIG reason they're not going anywhere.

Their spiritual leaders make their livings off of who and what these blasphemers are.

Tax the f-ing churches!

[gratuitous]

21. They're welcome to try

But whether the Republicans try to "get back to their roots" or try to "redefine themselves to respond to the challenges of a dangerous world," they're going to need people to do things for them. No political party gets very far without people to staff the phones, stuff the envelopes, open the mail, and so forth. While the religious extremists might be a bother, they turn out in droves to do all the scut work that's gotta be done for any campaign. The Republicans have a very tricky path to tread wherein they tell the fundies to forget their social engineering, but still work for free.

The fundies also have to ask themselves why, when the Republicans had complete hegemony over the political landscape, they were unable to enact any or all of their pet projects. Were the fundies duped? Did their political leaders just lose their nerve? Is the political arena really where they should invest their energy?

If the Republicans can't work out some very delicate problems, they're going to be stuck for several years to come. But they've put themselves in this fix, making a disastrous coalition between the social conservatives and the economic conservatives.

[Juche]

23. The radical right wing is too important to the GOP

They are the ones who control the GOP media apparatchik like talk radio or Fox News. They are the volunteers who came out of the woodwork when Palin was picked. They are the ones who started working for the GOP via the churches after Roe V Wade. I don't think the GOP can risk alienating them.

Supposedly this civil war was slightly started when Huckabee started leading in the primaries rather than someone like Romney. The leaders of the GOP want the radical right wing to act as foot soldiers but doesn't want them leading on the issues (the GOP is a party of RW economic policy while the RW base is motivated by cultural issues which are largely ignored once an election is won). So my impression is that the 'base' is made up of fundies and extremists who are motivated by cultural issues who get used by the leaders of the GOP to get elected, but once elected pursue an economic policy rather than the cultural policy of the base.

Fundamentally I really don't know. I think the RW base has become so big and polarized that the GOP is going to have a hard time keeping them as foot soldiers who can be controlled. Honestly, I could see it going either way. Maybe the RW base will take over with Palin as the pick in 2012 and run on an agenda that scares the hell out of the other 75% of the public.

However I think that by 2014 or so the GOP will have figured it out. Krugman is usually good at his predictions and he predicted in 2007 or so that the 2006 midterms was just the start and that after 'a few more thrumpings at the polls the GOP would be reborn as an Eisenhower party'. I think that'll happen but by then the damage will be done.

Not to mention that by 2015 the millenial generation (who grew up seeing the GOP as a party of dangerous, radical, uninformed extremists and carry that bias with them in the voting booth) will make up 1/3 of the electorate. Combine that with the passing of the elderly (who vote GOP) and I don't see how the GOP recovers. In 2004 the millenials preferred te democratic party by 10 points. By 2006 it was 20 points. In 2008 it was 35 points. I don't know if/how the GOP can gain them back because all they will be doing is making the RW base shut up, they will still be a force in the party. What I mean is that even if the GOP puts up people like Schwarzenegger or Crist as its leaders, I am still going to know that Palin and DeLay are major players in the party. So I still wouldn't vote for them.

Even if the GOP is reborn as an eisenhower party by 2014 or so, by then an entire generation that is scared of them will make up 1/3 of the electorate and many of the elderly (who support them) will have passed away. Combine that with a growing minority (cultural, racial, religious) nation who the GOP has trampled on and it'll be hard to make a real comeback. And fundamentally the radical RW base will still be in the party, they will just be suppressed.

[FKA MNChimpH8R]

30. Excellent analysis

The Pukes signed their demographic death warrant over the last eight years. The country is getting consistently younger, browner and more tolerant. The Reichwing Christianist fascists are doomed by numbers.

[old mark]

24. I thought that would happen, but it seems like the "religious" right

is kicking the Moderates out, and that the Republican Party will move even further hard right. I believe they are in the process of destroying any real chance they had to re-gain power in the near future, which is OK with me.
I am sure some of the moderates will become Democrats, some independents, maybe a few small parties will form around the moderate to moderate right ex-GOP. If the extreme right takes full control of the GOP, this may be the end of that party completely.

mark

[leftofthedial]

27. and vice versa

[Vidar]

28. Personally, I know fifteen moderate Republicans who voted

for Obama, because McCain/Palin was unacceptable.

[GreenPartyVoter]

31. I'm not sure they can, now. Unless the evangelicals run for the

constitution party and hide out there, which they won't want to do because we all know the power is in the two big parties.

[GoneOffShore]

33. From the press reports - it looks like the opposite is going to happen.

Check out the People for The American Way site. http://site.pfaw.org/site/PageServer?pagename=homepagenew
And their Right Wing Watch page.

[last_texas_dem]

34. I'm sure both factions want to purge the party of the other

But know that they're forced to stay together for the Repugs to be able to ever win anything. Their marriage of convenience was definitely looking more and more inconvenient this year, though... No doubt both factions will blame the loss on the other faction. The fundy types no doubt are more responsible for what went wrong, but they also make up a larger part of the party; I doubt a Repug party composed solely of moderates could win anything, even if it would be far more tolerable.

[RB TexLa]

35. If moderate and business type Republicans had told the religious far right that they weren't getting

what they wanted and if they didn't like it they could vote Democratic, they wouldn't have the problem. Perhaps the nuts would have run an third party candidate that would have helped the Republican lose a close election to learn the lesson but their party would be a lot closer to mainstream America for having stood up to them.

[bridgit]

36. Yes. It has already begun, and by the Rad Right as well: 'For example, Miss Noonan charges that Mrs

Palin's: "political decisions seem untethered to a political philosophy. She does not speak seriously but attempts to excite sensation: "palling around with terrorists ... But it's unclear whether she is Bushian or Reaganite ... she has spent her time throwing out tinny lines to crowds she doesn't, really, understand. This is not a leader, this is a follower. She could re-inspire and re-inspirit; she chooses merely to excite. She doesn't seem to understand the implications of her own thoughts." Oh my.

Has Miss Noonan been napping up there on Mount Olympus through the last several generations of American politics? She accuses Mrs. Palin of not engaging America in a Socratic dialogue, of using phrases untethered to a political philosophy. Exactly what philosophy are the slogans "Change" and "Hope" tethered to? American presidential campaigns, with very few exceptions, have been little more than slogans shouted in the hope of exciting a crowd. The much admired Obama campaign has been the greatest exemplar of style over substance. However, it is Miss Noonan's completely unsupported sneer at Mrs. Palin's mental capacities that is most revealing.

I think that Miss Noonan may have unconsciously touched on what is really going on here when she accuses Mrs. Palin - who is attracting crowds as big if not bigger than any Reagan ever drew - of being a "follower … not a leader." Miss Noonan's unconscious fear may be that it will be precisely Mrs. Palin (and others like her) who will be among the leaders of the about to be re-born conservative movement. I suspect that the conservative movement we start re-building on the ashes of November 4th (even if Mr. McCain wins) will have little use for over-written, over-delicate commentary.

The new movement will be plain spoken and social networked up from the internetted streets, suburbs and small towns of America. It certainly will not listen very attentively to those conservatives who idolatrize Mr. Obama and collaborate in heralding his arrival. They may call their commentary "honesty." I would call it - at the minimum - blindness.

The new conservative movement will be facing a political opponent that will soon reveal itself to be both multiculturalists and Euro-socialist. We will be engaged in a struggle to the political death for the soul of the country. As I did at the beginning of and throughout the Buckley/Goldwater/Reagan/Gingrich conservative movement, I will try to lend my hand. I will certainly do what I can to make it a big-tent conservative movement. But just as in every great cause, one question has to be answered correctly: Whose side are you on, comrade?'

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/oct/22/conservatism-reborn

And so with a sordid little twinkle in their jaundice eye, the unwholesome re-birthing of the conservative movement has already begun prior to Wednesday, October 22, 2008 and likely prior to that, look...

Conservative republicanism seen the handwriting on that wall months ago, which is part of why their robbery of the treasury was seen as accelerating exponentially. Their time to gather someone else's profits and jump into their gated communities - ride it out. But they will be coming back make no mistake. That's when we will be seen as the biggest fools ever if we fail to understand that these people are nothing if not planners of nefarious things far, far down the road.

[FKA MNChimpH8R]

37. Fuck off and die, Blankely, you

fascist asshat.

[SalviaBlue]

38. If they are smart they will. So... NO.

[dembotoz]

39. if there is a purge, it will be the moderates who will removed.

the wingnuts held up their end. It was those damn moderates who failed.