共和党党争及影响

Dracula

这文章一般吧。好多细节错误。比如说“共和党本就较民主党松散”，他可能没听说过I am not a member of any organized party — I am a Democrat这句话，共和党在传统上从来都是比民主党更团结。

至于“强大的共和党当权派为什么灭不了特朗普？”现在我也看到过很多检讨。首先就根本没有什么钦定候选人。最早的时候共和党方面的候选人一共有17个，大大分散了偏establishment选民的选票。而Trump一直到primary的很后半段，才开始赢得多数选票，前面大多数时间，他只是取得大约30%的选票，但是在17个人的拥挤的候选人队伍里，30%就足以让他赢得很多州。如果共和党真的能推出什么钦定候选人，一比一对决的话，至少情况会很难说。而且另外那16个候选人一开始对Trump很轻视，比如现在民主党这一波波还没结束的opposition research，也不知道他们都是怎么忽略过去了。他们的火力都是对准相互间，即使是New Hampshire以后Jeb Bush的1亿多美元的竞选资金也主要用来攻击Marco Rubio，等到他们意识到Trump的威胁的时候已经晚了。而最后剩下的能跟Trump单挑的Ted Cruz，他参议院的好多同事对他的厌恶超过对Trump，Establishment一直也没团结到他周围来。如果2020年Trump或者类似他的人还参选的话，Establishment肯定不会犯类似的错误，会提早把他们打压下去并且团结在一个人周围。等到primary结束以后，确实已经晚了。1972年primary制度建立以来，两党的候选人由选民决定已经成为根深蒂固的传统，在convention上搞掉Trump肯定会遭到极大反弹，总统大选输的可能性会很大。但是今天回头看，现在Trump已经是几乎输定了，而且很可能会输的很惨，对参议院众议院的选举也会有不小的负面影响，当时在convention上要是换上Ted Cruz，总统大选可能也还是要输，但总体形势比现在可能还是要好点。（John Kasich应该是没有什么机会被提名，但是假设共和党要是提名他的话，现在对希拉里估计会优势挺大。）

另外关于两党高层脱离群众，要看你对群众怎么定义了。比如少数民族算不算群众，而且中间选民的盘子其实也不小，但是在primary投票的主要是两党的base，立场更激进的会得到更大的呼声。不过到general election还是要回到中间才能赢。尤其是Trump的base好多是被他的White Nationalism所激发，对少数民族天然排斥。随着白人在美国的人口比例逐渐下降，他们的这个coalition或许会主宰共和党的政治，但是在national election里会处于越来越不利的地位。

Dracula

晨枫 发表于 2016-10-17 13:03
呵呵，要是共和党高层也是像你这么想，下一次大选还得重演。

随着白人在美国的人口比例下降，共和党将来要想赢必须要寻求少数民族的支持。Trump这次很可能会输的很惨，将来那条路会更走不通。Demographics are destiny，这是怎么都绕不过去的。当然共和党可能需要吸取Trump的一些主张，比如自由贸易会不再成为共和党的核心信条。

David Frum前几天在Atlantic上有篇文章，讨论共和党在这次大选后的重建问题，挺不错。

How to Rebuild the Republican Party
Incorporate the best of Trump’s insights, while discarding his volatile personality and noxious attitudes.

Bravo for the forward-looking team at Commentary. Unburdened by illusion that Donald Trump can or will “turn this thing around,” they have proceeded straightaway to the next important conversation: What comes next for America’s battered Republican Party? Noah Rothman writes: “Reunification and a recapitulation of something resembling a national governing coalition must be the foremost priority.” That’s clearly true!

How to do it?

Rothman’s answer is to try to reconstitute conservatism as it used to be, refined by the famous “autopsy” of 2013.

Anti-Trump Republicans need to remember the lesson of the “autopsy” as much as do pro-Trump Republicans: electoral politics is a game of addition.

That being said, the coalition cannot be reformed around two competing ideas. Trumpism exists at odds with conservatism, and the party as reconstituted in 2017 must be one built up around conservative ideals of limited government, free trade, an internationalist foreign policy, and an unqualified rejection of identity politics. In short, Republicans of all stripes must be made to acknowledge and accept that Trumpism is an experiment that failed. That’s the price of admission, and it’s a modest one given the great costs associated with sacrificing a winnable race for the White House.

The problem is that pro-Trump Republicans may not agree that Trumpism failed. They may not be amenable to a reconciliation based on acknowledging that they, uniquely, were wrong—and that their defeated party opponents were in the right all along.

Their guy did win 4 million more votes in the 2016 primaries than Mitt Romney won in 2012—despite the 2016 runner-up winning more than twice as many votes as the 2012 runner-up.

Their guy easily bested every challenger against him: the hugely well-funded Jeb Bush, tough guy Chris Christie, the winsome and bilingual Marco Rubio, the true conservative Ted Cruz, the tough-as-nails Scott Walker, fellow outsider CEO Carly Fiorina … a gamut of styles and talents.

Their guy exposed the weakness of would-be Republican powerbrokers and veto-wielders, from the pro-life movement to the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Unless their guy loses to Hillary Clinton in a 2008 style deluge, Trump backers will be much more likely to blame traitors inside the party for his defeat than their own bad judgment in supporting him. Pro-Trump media outlets and personalities (Sean Hannity; Ann Coulter; Laura Ingraham; and Breitbart.com) have gained audience. Anti-Trump media outlets and personalities lost viewers, listeners, and readers. Trump will almost certainly win more total votes than either George W. Bush in 2000 or John McCain in 2008. He could easily match Mitt Romney’s 61-million-vote, 47-percent-vote-share performance in 2012. If that happens, Trump himself may not go away so quietly, instead continuing to dominate the political stage to insist that he was right and all his critics were wrong, stupid, losers.

Meanwhile, anti-Trump conservatives will be thrust back into exactly the position they held from 2013 to 2015: exponents of an ideology that does not command majority assent even within the Republican coalition, never mind the country as a whole. Repeal Obamacare; end the Medicare guarantee for people under age 55; offer big tax cuts to corporations and the richest taxpayers; pass constitutional amendments to stop abortion and same-sex marriage; back immigration reform that increases the flow of low-wage labor into the economy; take no action on climate change or other environmental concerns: that message has been tried and found wanting again and again since 2009, and it’s not going to appeal any more strongly after November. Whatever else Donald Trump did, he confirmed that a majority of Republican voters also want a message that secures health coverage, raises middle-class incomes, and enforces borders and national identity.

I’ve been writing and tweeting about Donald Trump’s many, many deficiencies as a candidate and human being since he took first place in the Republican contest in July 2015. I could write another 18 paragraphs right now, had my editorial colleagues at The Atlantic not already done the job for me. But for all Trump's many faults and flaws, he saw things that were true and important—and that few other leaders in his party have acknowledged in the past two decades.

Trump saw that Republican voters are much less religious in behavior than they profess to pollsters. He saw that the social-insurance state has arrived to stay. He saw that Americans regard healthcare as a right, not a privilege. He saw that Republican voters had lost their optimism about their personal futures—and the future of their country. He saw that millions of ordinary people who do not deserve to be dismissed as bigots were sick of the happy talk and reality-denial that goes by the too generous label of “political correctness.” He saw that the immigration polices that might have worked for the mass-production economy of the 1910s don’t make sense in the 2010s. He saw that rank-and-file Republicans had become nearly as disgusted with the power of money in politics as rank-and-file Democrats long have been. He saw that Republican presidents are elected, when they are elected, by employees as well as entrepreneurs. He saw these things, and he was right to see them.

The wiser response to the impending Republican electoral defeat is to learn from Trump's insights—separate them from Trump’s volatile personality and noxious attitudes—and use them to develop better, more workable, and more broadly acceptable policies for a 21st-century center-right. That doesn’t mean inscribing Trumpism as the party’s new orthodoxy. The GOP needs less orthodoxy, not more! What a wiser response to the defeat does mean is joining what can usefully be extracted from Trumpism to the core beliefs of the Republican Party: individual initiative, a free enterprise economy, limited government, lower taxes, and a proud defense of America’s global role.

Instead of drawing up lists of the people never to be forgiven for their roles in 2016, Republicans should be thinking about how they can work more harmoniously. If nothing else, Donald Trump pulled down the final curtain on the politics of the 1980s. So many Republicans have been yearning for one final hurrah for what worked 35 years ago. But as one of the shrewdest of small-c conservatives warned a century ago: “The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcass of dead policies.” Policies become dead not only because they have failed, but—maybe even more!—because they have succeeded, and thus eliminated the problem they were adopted to address. The way to inoculate the Republican Party against another Trump is to address the new problems that most Republican leaders ignored, and that Trump therefore could cunningly exploit.

The democratic world today is roiled by a tide of nationalist populism. Trump is just the local American variant of a trend that has expressed itself as Brexit in the U.K., the National Front in France, the Alternative for Germany, and so many other movements from Minsk to Madrid. The way to respond to a political tide is not to command it to halt, but to divert and channel it.

The United States in the 1930s—and western Europe after the Second World War—defeated revolutionary communism not only by standing against subversion, but also by building social-insurance states that alleviated the discontents on which communism battened. By mitigating the terrors of unemployment and poverty and the anxieties of sickness and old age, our grandparents transformed proletarians into conservatives. It’s our job now to do the same thing with the dislocations caused by mass migration and the economic rise of China and India. Successful conservatives know when to yield a little in order to preserve more. If Republicans can take just that from the strange career of Donald Trump, we may yet owe him and his supporters some thanks.

http://www.theatlantic.com/polit ... lican-party/503282/

Dracula

tangotango 发表于 2016-10-17 17:36
战略错误是不能总用战术失误来解释（掩盖）的。川普能拿到30%的党内选票就足以证明共和党高层建制 ...

现在的general election，业余的Trump不就是被专业的希拉里打的鼻青脸肿，很可能会输的很惨吗？

Trump这次大选能拿到的选票最多也就是40%，里面相当大一部分共和党选民投他的票是因为更厌恶希拉里，或者是social conservative更重视最高法院，对他本人没有多少好感。他的铁杆支持者最多也就占30%，离人口多数有相当的距离。

现在的美国经济还行。经济已经连续增长了7年，失业率在5%以下，所以Obama的approval rating今年一直是在50%以上，相当不错。这次要是Obama对Trump，肯定是横扫，一丁点悬念也没有。只是希拉里以前的包袱太多，才让选情一度变得挺接近，但就是对希拉里Trump也都从来没有领先过。Trump对低收入白人的吸引力经济上是一个方面，但我觉得更重要的是文化上、种族上的，包括他们喜欢他的政治不正确，可以称之为White Nationalism。跟欧洲好多极右党派有共同点。这也就是他为什么在少数民族中的支持率那么低。但是在未来白人占美国人口的比例会持续下降，Trump这种策略想赢大选会越来越艰难。这次大选之后，共和党内清算的时候，这个结我也不清楚怎么解。