By DEXTER DUGGAN
Item One
“The Republican Party is dying,” says the executive director of the Democratic National Committee. “The old theory that parties go up and down in cycles doesn’t apply now. The Republican Party can’t bounce back any more. It has the brain wave of a dead person.”
The executive director of the Republican National Committee replies that he can’t say the Democrat is wrong. The Republicans, he says, “were beaten, and beaten so badly. We actually lost seats, and none of us expected that. The thing is, we did the very best we could. By and large, we were so pleased with our candidates. We spent enough money.
“But we lost. We cannot survive another decade like this,” the Republican official continues. “Now we are faced with a terrible problem: redistricting after the . . . census. If we keep going the way we are now — and I see nothing changing — we will be destroyed as a national political party. . . .”
The reporter who quoted these political officials goes on himself to comment that no doubt “there is always talk about the death of one or the other of our great political parties after major defeat. . . . But until now the party pros never believed that kind of talk,” confident that there always would be “another election and another chance.”
But things have changed, the reporter continues. The Democrats have a powerful new strategy. “Of course,” he writes, “there is more to the Republican problem than the ability of the Democrats and their liberal allies to recruit and support attractive candidates.”
He resumes the thread of comment by the Democratic Party’s executive director, who says: “The important point is that the Republican Party has shrunk to where only 18 percent of the voters relate to it. And I just don’t know where they go.”
Tens of millions of Americans aren’t registered to vote, the Democratic official adds, but they’re people who wouldn’t be expected to favor the GOP anyway, so no point in trying to add new voters from among them. “That’s dead territory for the Republicans.”
The Democrat continues: “They’ve been unable to adapt to environmental change. They are rigid and unbending, and they have become more and more ideological. Since 1965, on the other hand, the Democrats have been able to change and adapt.”
The reporter chimes in: “Bad as things are, they may get worse for the Republicans.”
An editorial cartoon accompanying this article shows two Republican elephants’ hides nailed to the cabin wall of a donkey relaxing on his front porch.
The headline on the copy of the article I have says, “GOP’s next convention might be held in a telephone booth.”
Item Two
In a separate article, a different political observer expresses a similarly pessimistic view:
“Traditional proscriptions, precepts, and beliefs were systematically extirpated from law, public life, and public institutions, to make ours a secular society where law is rooted in moral relativism and majority rule. When traditionalists turned again to the GOP, they found an articulate ally in the Oval Office, but a party hierarchy indifferent to their grievances.
“The GOP failed to become America’s majority party, then,” this observer adds, “because its leadership class recoils from moral and religious issues that engage the passion of the people; and because it harbors a sense of guilt about race and, hence, is easily intimidated.”
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With America’s annual obeisance to sacrificed turkeys on big plates looming as this hardcopy issue of The Wanderer went to press on November 16, a reader might guess that item one and item two both are from current news in dominant media picking over the bones of stories about what a dead duck the Republican Party is under Donald Trump and conservatives, after the GOP’s feathers were clipped in recent Virginia and New Jersey elections.
No, that’s a bird-brained guess.
Item one on the inevitability of Democratic power was published in November 1976. That was exactly 41 years ago. It was written by James M. Perry, a reporter for the now-defunct National Observer weekly. He was no conservative, although that newspaper’s Dow Jones ownership was considered so. Perry lived until nearly age 90, in 2016, so he had time to see, if he would, how wrong he’d been.
In November 1976, previously little-known Georgia Democrat Jimmy Carter had just beaten Watergate-stained incumbent Republican Gerald Ford for president by about two percentage points. Carter won Texas, and Ford won California.
The political calculus changed somewhat in the 41 years it has taken to reach 2017. These days Texas would be considerably likelier to go for the Republican, and California virtually guaranteed to pick the Democrat.
Still, the 2016 national elections resulted in Republican control of both houses of Congress and the White House — far different from the political wizards’ predictions in November 1976.
After those wizards foresaw the evaporating GOP meeting in a phone booth just four years later, Republican presidential nominee Ronald Reagan roared into the White House in two consecutive national landslides, in 1980 and 1984.
Meanwhile, the GOP kept chipping away at long-established Democrat power and, in 1994, took control of both chambers of Congress, ending 40 years of donkey rule of the U.S. House.
Dominant media haughtily attack the GOP as fervently now as then for being “rigid and unbending,” even while 21st century Democrats impose purity tests to advance impure agendas by their own troops. Hurry up! Endorse unlimited permissive abortion, sexual disorientation, and racial-grievance fixation.
In considerable measure the Republican Party has benefited from clueless Democratic elitists’ ideological love affair with immorality that drives so many of their members to the GOP.
Rather than correct their faulty course, Democrat theorists decided the answer is to slip in as many pending new voters as can toddle over the U.S. border whose own political experience is in homelands where people are kept small and the government is big. 1) Dependent and 2) deferential, those are two d’s the Dem Party demands among its humble tools.
However you look at it, the Republican Party has remained more than politically competitive over the decades, even while jealous Democrats and their dominant-media allies try to rewrite reality.
If there’s something the Republican grassroots can be grateful for on this Thanksgiving, it’s that they’ve not only survived but thrived — even when national leadership in their own party seems as determined as the Democrats to reduce the GOP to a whimpering shell.
The Mitch McConnells, John McCains, and their cohorts often are more eager to band with conservatives’ foes than expand and build up conservative numbers for united action with the White House.
Which brings us to the author of item two in the reflections above, who saw traditionalists turning to the GOP and finding an ally in the Oval Office, but being rebuffed by a party hierarchy indifferent to their cares.
How timely this article must be. Surely it refers to President Trump often standing up for conservatives and pro-lifers? But the GOP’s aloof elitists constantly try to minimize their influence and keep the party fractured.
Actually, the article was written by conservative pundit Pat Buchanan for the September 16, 1988, issue of National Review magazine, 29 years ago, as Reagan’s two-term presidency was winding down. The ally in the Oval Office had been former Democrat Reagan, the depth of whose conversion to conservatism has been matched since then in the White House only by former Democrat Trump.
Buchanan and a few other conservative big names like Jack Kemp and William Bennett contributed their thoughts to National Review on the theme of “The Future of the GOP.” Buchanan’s own pessimistic contribution was titled, “How history passed us by.” Buchanan recalled:
“From 1969 to 1973, and, again, from 1981 to 1985, the GOP commanded the heights and led a majority coalition that could have been welded together permanently,” as Franklin Roosevelt had done earlier for the Democrats.
But, alas, “Methinks we blew it,” Buchanan continued. “Absent celestial intervention, the opportunity will not come again — not until leadership of the party passes to those disposed to engage the Left on the social and cultural fronts, and not just on the economic or the budget sector.”
Arguably, that celestial intervention prevailed on Election Day in 2016, when the nightmare of eight years of Barack Obama miraculously wasn’t followed by presidential rule by the Democrats’ queen of the boiling cauldron of special-interest animosities and resentments.
But no sooner did Trump move into the White House last January than his elite bipartisan foes frantically started signaling the moving van to come right back and move him out. Never Trumpers opposed him morning and night. Trump scored victories on judicial-nomination and regulatory fronts, but Capitol Hill resistance kept his legislative accomplishments thin.
Just when his 12-day Asian trip in November seemed likely to let Trump show off some ratings-boosting presidential skills, a perfectly timed overriding scandal burst forth courtesy of his hysterical media foe The Washington Post, which claimed that popular conservative Alabama Republican senatorial candidate Roy Moore actually was an overbearing serial sexual harasser.
The left-wing Post obviously was doing a political hit job. Just a month before a December 12 special election that Moore was likely to win, the paper started parading accusers with astounding stories dating back 40 years. It’s a hit job, but might it also be true?
Elite establishment Republicans like John McCain, immediately calling on Moore to end his campaign, unbelievably proclaimed themselves too morally offended to contemplate having him seated beside them. And Senate Majority Leader McConnell, whose forces reportedly spent $30 million unsuccessfully to prevent Moore from getting the GOP nomination, saw another chance to exclude the Alabaman.
Grassroots Republicans, though, remembered the convenient allegations of sexual harassment against presidential hopeful Herman Cain in 2011, and Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991. Then there was the time the left-wing Post relentlessly hammered U.S. Sen. George Allen (R., Va.) in his 2006 re-election bid with the contrived accusation he was a racial bigot, leading to his narrow defeat.
Arizona GOP conservative activist Rob Haney, a longtime foe of McCain, told The Wanderer on November 15:
“If Judge Moore’s establishment-backed opponent, Luther Strange, had won the Republican primary, a Washington Post reporter would not have been in Alabama digging up dirt. The hyped exposé about Moore, whether true or not, has all the earmarks of another political hit piece hurled against a conservative candidate in the waning days of a campaign.
“I remember the political lynching. . . . Judge Clarence Thomas endured during his Senate hearings because he was a conservative black. And I remember how Sen. Ted Kennedy and President Bill Clinton were protected by their liberal cronies and a biased press for their proven crimes,” Haney said. He added:
“The scandals in which these lefties were entangled were concurrent with their terms in office. Judge Moore is accused of 40-year-old charges which are difficult to prove. And the crimes that Kennedy and Clinton committed were far more serious than the accusations of crimes against Moore.
“The careers of both Kennedy and Clinton got a boost despite their crimes because of the ‘circle the wagons’ protection afforded them by liberal political operatives and the mainstream media. The Republican establishment forces would rather have a liberal Democrat elected than a conservative Republican,” he said.
Meanwhile, conservative pundits including Laura Ingraham and Michelle Malkin noted accusations that sitting Democratic U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez, of New Jersey, had sexual relations with underage prostitutes.
But why should dominant media care much about this when they had a conservative Republican to roast for Thanksgiving? For which Dems give hearty thanks.
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