How...do you think that we got where we are?
I don't think we disagree about where we are -- it's how we got here that is the issue. So here are what I'd call the top four answers to "why"
1) A strong, charismatic conservative candidate for President has not arisen in the last 20 years. That's why we haven't elected one.
2) The core conservative constitutency that elected Reagan is a smaller, and shrinking, percentage of voters than it was in 1980 and 1984. Therefore, the chances of electing a conservative have diminished over time, and we are electing fewer of them.
3) Two significant structural problems with our system -- a) the rising dominance of the self-perpetuating administrative state, and b) the rise of an activist judiciary, that are festering, long term boils that are very difficult to lance.
Do you seriously believe that people have not been conditioned/conditioned themselves to simply accept whatever the GOP throws their way every election?
This question contains a fundamental premise with which I disagree -- that it is "the GOP" that throws candidates at us. I believe it is the voters who select these candidates in the primaries that have "thrown" these candidates at us. In other words (in the collective sense at least) we have seen the enemy, and it is us. I think a lot of us self-described conservatives desperately want to believe that we are a near majority, but we're not. The truth is, the voters
themselves generally don't agree with us, which is why they keep nominating and electing representatives we don't like.
Because I personally have been IN several hundred/more like several thousand to be honest, arguments with people saying "I'm gonna vote for the Republican NO MATTER WHAT. IT'S A LESSER EVIL."
When this occurs, the underlying problem is that we have failed to nominate a sufficiently conservative candidate. That error cannot be corrected in the general election. The second problem is that even if we do nominate a candidate that is insufficiently conservative, what does it say when the majority of voters reject him/her in favor of a candidate
who is even more liberal? That was the problem in 2008 and 2012. Whatever sense of alarm we felt in nominating someone who wasn't conservative enough should be dwarfed by the recognition that a majority voted for the other guy even though he was even
less conservative.
They don't even THINK anymore. They DEFAULT. And the GOP is not blind to that mindset. So knowing that the sheepish masses would elect the mixed metaphor 'ham sandwich", they give them progressively more liberal candidates to vote for.
Again, this is the same disconnect. It's not "the GOP" that is feeding us those candidates. We
voters are feeding them to ourselves.
This is the core problem I have with your argument: you argue that
not voting for a Republican candidate in the general election sends a clear message to the GOP (or in my mind, the voters) that they need to nominate someone more conservative four years down the road).
I do not believe that is the message that gets sent by not voting for the nominee. First, I'd ask you where your evidence is of this message actually being sent and received? McCain got
clobbered by Obama in 2008. By your logic, this should have sent the message to...whomever...that we must nominate a real conservative in 2012. But that's not what happened. The message either wasn't sent, or if sent, was not understood/received as predicted.
I think the message fails both on sending and receiving. First, there are multiple potential "messages" that can be sent (or multiple interpretations, if you will) when a candidate loses a general election. That's because
there are multiple possible reasons why that candidate lost. Maybe McCain lost because he was an old guy running against a young guy, so we need to nominate someone younger next time. Maybe he lost because he was too white, and the electorate wants a minority next time. Maybe he lost simply because he was less charismatic than Obama, so we need to focus on charisma. Maybe he lost because he was running for the party that was being blamed for the wars and the recession. Or maybe some think he lost because he was
too conservative. The point isn't which of these explanations is the most accurate
in fact. All that matters in terms of a message is what those voters (or "the GOP")
believed to be the reason he lost, because that's the "message" that gets sent when he fails.
Romney illustrates that point very well. Again, he lost, so the GOP knew that for some reason, he was simply not sufficiently appealing to the electorate. But
why? Your argument is that conservatives not casting a vote for him "sends the message" that they need to nominate a stronger conservative next time. Obviously, that's not what happened. But more directly, other people reached a different conclusion as to why he lost. A lot of them blamed his "47% comment" -- in other words, he was too much of a
heartless conservative. The GOP as an institution (via Priebus) and even Trump at the time, concluded that he lost (at least in part) because his plan for self-deporting illegals was to "mean-spirited" or exclusionary, and if we
really want to win next time, we need to be more accommodating on illegal immigrants.
But I'd also add that on the "receiving" end of this message, the recipient that matters isn't
really the GOP, but the voters. And I'd submit that most of them don't carry around, or hyper-analyze, the results of the last Presidential election 3 years previously when they decide who to nominate the next time around. So
even if a clear message was being sent (which I think is almost inherently impossible), it's not really going to affect who gets nominated in the next election anyway.
So to reiterate my point, I do not see how refusing to support a nominee can have a particularly desired/intended effect on what happens the next time around. The message is inherently murky, the recipients don't care, and everyone will rationalize that the circumstances are simply different this time.
I'm sorry Bill. Your posts are often very insightful although I sometimes disagree with your positions. But to me this argument your presenting is smelling a whole lot like someone who voted for Romney and the rest trying to justify those votes so as to avoid responsibility for their actions.
Well, my rationale is pretty simply. I view most "lesser of two evil" elections as a rear-guard action, to buy time until we are lucky enough to have a sufficiently articulate, charismatic (unfortunately a necessity in the TV age) conservative candidate come along.
I do want to note one point where I think we are in agreement. Nominating
and electing a Republican who is only marginally better than a Democrat can be very destructive for any number of reasons. That's the issue with Trump, in particular. And if you vote for a GOP candidate who is only marginally better than the Democrat, and he performs poorly, then I think you
do bear your share of the responsibility for him. I just don't see any actual negative consequences of voting for a crappy candidate in the general election if he fails to get elected anyway. The candidate lost, so whatever message you think should have been sent by that loss, did get sent by that failure, right?
