{"id":22571,"date":"2013-10-18T07:18:50","date_gmt":"2013-10-18T12:18:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=22571"},"modified":"2013-10-18T07:21:52","modified_gmt":"2013-10-18T12:21:52","slug":"republicans-and-conservatives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/10\/18\/republicans-and-conservatives\/","title":{"rendered":"Republicans and conservatives"},"content":{"rendered":"

In The Atlantic<\/em>, Molly Ball<\/a> looks at the split between the GOP establishment and the increasingly angry conservative base:<\/p>\n

On his radio show recently, Glenn Beck urged his listeners to \u201cdefund the GOP.\u201d Sarah Palin has threatened to leave the Republican Party; Rush Limbaugh calls it \u201cirrelevant.\u201d The Senate Conservatives Fund has targeted mainly incumbent Republican senators for defeat. Erick Erickson, one of the right\u2019s most prominent commentators, wonders if what’s coming is \u201ca real third party movement that will fully divide the Republican Party.\u201d <\/p>\n

Conservatives have declared war on the GOP.<\/p>\n

Tired of feeling taken for granted by a party that alternately panders to them and sells them down the river, in their view, Tea Partiers and others on the right are in revolt. The Republican Party itself is increasingly the focus of their anger, particularly after Wednesday’s deal to reopen the government, which many on the right opposed. Now, many are threatening to take their business elsewhere.<\/p>\n

\u201cConservatives are either going to split [from the GOP] or stay home,\u201d Erickson, the influential editor of RedState.com and a Fox News contributor, told me. \u201cThey\u2019ll first expend energy in primaries, but if unsuccessful, they\u2019ll bolt.\u201d<\/p>\n

Erickson, a former Republican elected official in Georgia, stressed that he wasn\u2019t advocating such a split, only foreseeing it. \u201cI think the GOP is already splitting,\u201d he said, with grassroots activists feeling \u201cplayed\u201d by elected officials\u2019 unfulfilled promises to defeat Obamacare.<\/p>\n

The calls for a split mark a new, more acrimonious chapter in the long-simmering conflict between the Tea Party and the Republican establishment. Steve Deace, an Iowa-based talk-radio host, said his audience has never been angrier. \u201cThey\u2019re tired of electing a bunch of Republicans who care more about what the media thinks about them than what the people who elected them think,\u201d he told me. \u201cWhy do I care whether John Boehner or Nancy Pelosi is the speaker of the House? Why do I care whether Harry Reid or \u2018Ditch\u2019 McConnell is the Senate majority leader? What changes? Nothing changes.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, most of this is froth and fuming — they won’t split the party or form a new one. Why is that? It’s because the GOP and the Democrats have got the system rigged so that only those two parties ever have a real chance at getting candidates elected to state or federal office. In some states, third parties have to petition for ballot access<\/a> every election for every individual candidate. This doesn’t sound too unreasonable, except the threshold for gathering signatures is incredibly high in many cases (or time-limited, or rigged in other ways), so that without an active, fully staffed party organization only the top few positions can be realistically contested. Only GOP and Democratic candidates are included in polls, debates, and other electoral events covered by the media, so as little “oxygen” as possible is given to outsiders, independents, and third party candidates. Stories like this<\/a> recent one in Reason<\/em> happen just about every year in most states.<\/p>\n

Having done their part to make the existing duopoly the only game in town, the conservative faction of the Republican party may gripe all they want, but they’re not seriously going anywhere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In The Atlantic, Molly Ball looks at the split between the GOP establishment and the increasingly angry conservative base: On his radio show recently, Glenn Beck urged his listeners to \u201cdefund the GOP.\u201d Sarah Palin has threatened to leave the Republican Party; Rush Limbaugh calls it \u201cirrelevant.\u201d The Senate Conservatives Fund has targeted mainly incumbent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,13],"tags":[431,622,517,327],"class_list":["post-22571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-usa","tag-conservatism","tag-ideology","tag-republican","tag-teaparty"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5S3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22571"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22571\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22575,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22571\/revisions\/22575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}