LF: Fix the GOP, Don’t Abandon It

Fix the GOP, Don’t Abandon It
A message to Glenn Beck.

Last week, to much fanfare, Glenn Beck declared that he was leaving the Republican party and becoming an independent. During a Tuesday night appearance on the O’Reilly Factor, Beck explained his decision thusly:
They surrendered on the abortion bill, surrendered on executive orders on illegal immigration, common core. They helped push through $3.5 trillion in deficits this last year. They won't fight Obamacare. They voted to confirm Katz Unstein (ph). They thwarted the bill on the NSA data collection. They're still not doing anything on Benghazi. They haven't done anything on the targeting of conservatives with the IRS. They haven't done anything on the VA. They also threw an election against Chris McDaniels to Thad Cochran. They actually went to the Democrats and played the race card. I mean, I can get that from Hillary Clinton's people….

We had to have the house. Then we had to the House. Then we had to have the House and the Senate. Now we have to have the White House. And then when they get the White House, the House, and the Senate then it becomes the Bush administration where it's just as bad on deficits and everything else. They don't have any intention of doing anything.

Beck has a point here. Granted, he’s overstating the case to some degree -- political constraints are such that the GOP can’t do a lot of what he demands. But there are indeed issues where the politics favor the Republicans -- the insurer bailout in Obamacare, farm subsidies, highway spending, and the Export-Import Bank -- where the party is not doing much of anything. Far too often, the GOP seems more inclined to go-along-to-get-along then do the hard work needed to reform government.

As I argued here, and in my new book, the Republican party has been aligned with big business for almost 150 years. In many respects, this is a good thing for conservatism. People who are employed by a business, after all, do not need the government to prosper. And big business employs a lot of people, so conservatives have common cause.

But businesses are profit-maximizing agents, and insofar as they believe the government can assist them, they will go rent seeking. Corporate and professional interests have many friends in the Republican party, who, always in the guise of promoting “economic growth,” pay off their patrons with corporate welfare, favorable regulations, conciliatory tax policy, and the like. Republicans have been doing this for big business since the 1870s, and they continue to do so to this day.

So Beck is right: a lot of what the Republicans do is not conservatism. It’s more akin to interest-group liberalism.

However, leaving the GOP is a bad idea, for two reasons.

First, the Republican party is not going to let conservatives go anywhere else. There has never been a viable third party in the country, at least not one that has persisted over the long run. This has to do with the nature of our elections. Political theorist Maurice Duverger demonstrated fifty years ago that winner-take-all contests centered around discrete geographical areas typically produce a two-party system. There are exceptions, but they’re rare.

Moreover, third parties that do thrive temporarily are co-opted by one of the two major parties -- usually to the detriment of the ideological movement that spawned the third party in the first place. For instance, the Populist party was captured by the Democrats in 1896, and did not see traction on any of its issues for nearly 20 more years. The Progressive party ended up getting split between the two major parties after 1916. Similarly, the Perot movement ended up fueling the “Republican Revolution” of 1994, but the deficit-cutting zeal of the GOP in the mid-1990s soon gave way to the gross profligacy of Congress during the George W. Bush years.

As if all that isn’t enough, even the seemingly easy task of forming a third party is a challenge. The two parties can be thought of as opponents in most respects, but they can also be understood to operate a cartel that restricts entry by competitors. A third party will thus have to jump through all sorts of hoops to get itself listed on the ballot, and even more to be included in presidential debates. None of this is coincidental. The two parties want us to have a choice … between the two parties!

Second, the Republican party can be reformed. It may be very hard to do so, but the GOP is not a political machine. It is not a closed system, impervious to change. It’s open, and grassroots reformers have recourse -- in the form of party primaries. They may be seriously out-financed in those contests. Still, it is one thing to be an underdog, and another to have no hope of change at all. And there is hope.

In fact, I’d argue that there has been an extraordinary amount of change within the GOP over the last generation. Reformers have made some real gains. In the wake of the 2014 wave, I noted this about the incoming Senate:
This Senate majority will be as large as the one seated in 1995, but much more conservative. That year, the Republican caucus included many nominal, moderate, or otherwise unreliable Republicans, notably John Chafee of Rhode Island, Mark Hatfield of Oregon, Jim Jeffords of Vermont, and Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas. Some such Republicans remain—Frank Murkowski was succeeded by Lisa Murkowski—but their numbers have shrunk. My informal count has them declining from about 15 in 1994 to less than half a dozen today. The group of solid conservatives, meanwhile, has grown. The Senate already had many such members, like Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, and Tim Scott. But now they are set to be joined by Tom Cotton, Ben Sasse, and Joni Ernst. My back of the envelope calculations suggest that the number of solid conservative senators has risen from about a dozen in 1995 to 20 or so today.

The House has shown similar signs of improvement. The “insurgent” class of House reformers is now large enough to make real noise. Did such a group really exist a decade ago? Certainly not with the same numbers. There is no denying that conservative reformers have won some big elections in the last few cycles, and that the reformist right is on the rise within the GOP, if not yet dominant.

Maybe part of the frustration is that there has been change, but no breakthroughs. That’s because breakthroughs are hard in our system of government -- by design. That is one of Madison’s big points in Federalist #10 and #51; he wants our system to be responsive to changes in public mood, but -- fearful of fractious majorities -- he also promotes a system of checks and balances to slow change down. Moreover, the powers that be in the Republican party have been doing things a certain way for a century and a half. They are not going to give up just because conservatives have won a handful of elections.

Still, given the heartening results of the last few elections, rather than giving up on the GOP, conservative reformers should take careful note of their successes and failures, and refine their strategies. For instance, in 2014, there was a lot of emphasis on defeating incumbent Republican senators. This was largely unsuccessful. Meanwhile, Dave Brat came out of nowhere to defeat Eric Cantor. Therefore, perhaps the point of attack in the next cycle should be the many go-along-to-get-along Republican House members, who may be more vulnerable.

The point is that the Republican party is no doubt in need of reform, but still -- it can be reformed. That won’t come easy. Reform never does because the powers that be always prefer the status quo to change, but it can be done. Glenn Beck should stay in the party and lend a hand.

Jay Cost is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard. His new book, A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption, is now available.

George Bush is the one that gave us Bubba Clinton. A third party had nothing to do with it, asshole.

Anyone remember this gem from the '92 debates? That's when I knew that Xlinton had won it.

That would be like a gang of thugs attacking your house, shooting you, your wife, kids, & pets, then pouring gasoline on and striking a match to burn it down,and someone suggesting you chill out, call the police, and wait for them to arrive on scene & take care of it, but for you to NOT TAKE THE LAW INTO YOUR OWN HANDS, and correct it in a civilized manner.

I will admit my example is exaggerated, but it was to illustrate the imperative of the time factor. But then, you already knew that.

I think Beck's most cogent statement was that if we the Dims, the slide goes faster. If we pick the Pubs the slide slows just a bit.

However, what he did not consider is regardless of party, once they all gather in the hell hole of Wash DC, birds of feather...

"For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ." (John 1:17)

"Turn and burn" mentality has its immediate 'Id' fulfillment. However what happens after everything is burned down?

I agree somewhat with the article. The portion that shows we are getting more Tea Party conservatives going to DC is important. It does not satisfy the immediate 'Id' in us who want to knock it all down and start again.

Then we have to consider...things happen which reverse a lot of wrong. We can never predict it; it just happens.

It is my hope and prayer one of these historical 'things happen' comes along very soon. It can happen.

But, Stoner, I share your anger and frustration. I have kids too and they are growing up in a sewer of a nation. Sure there are still some oasis places, but for how long. Texas is pretty good where I am. Even so I still have concerns given I am raising two white males who will encounter discrimination based on how our woman-minority centric society is today.

Don't burn it down just yet. You never know when the "Riders of Rohan" will arrive to save the city:

"For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ." (John 1:17)

I have long lost faith in that happening! We are surrounded by way too much evil, and too much within !

heard that before , Conservatives had a temper tantrum because of Bush breaking the no-new tax pledge. So Perot syphoned off 19% of the vote by running a single issue campaign .Most of those votes would have gone to Bush.

Maybe ;or we can hope that the Tea Party and conservative insurgencies transforms the party like the Reagan Revolution did . We tend to forget that it took Reagan 3 campaigns to become President .

I am always amused that those that attacked him so strongly, later claimed to be "Reagan Conservatives ". Liars all!

Democrats are babykillers. No further scorn is needed. By that fact, they've consigned themselves to hell.

And no Democrats post here. People who still call themselves Republicans do. They need to get out of that party. Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.

The problem with a new party is that the Rs and Ds have passed impossible new candidacy laws. The R Party did not have to abide by that when it rose from the ashes.

A third can't possibly make it because it has no real financial backing, no getting on the ballot on every state, and no chance to be included in the debates.

Breitbart was right. The only chance is to take it from within. Take out the Dems first and then go after the RINOs. Unity is the key.

"For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ." (John 1:17)

You are living in political fantasy land with nothing to back up your hallucinations.

I know at least 10 people that voted for Perot. Without exception every one of them would have voted for Bush. Myself included.

"For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ." (John 1:17)

To back up your point. Perot came close to siphoning off enough votes to give Bubba Texas.

"For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ." (John 1:17)

The exit polls on voter who supported Perot showed that the majority of them would have voted for Clinton if Ross were not in the race. Clinton was better than Bush as a President. I voted for Perot and would have left the spot blank if not for him.

Just a little ditty about a man's obsession with trains. He loves the compost world of recycling and green technology.

"For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ." (John 1:17)

Perseus? Are you actually thinking about the one who embezzled the treasury at Delos?

That is how his son became President. Because people thought they made a mistake with Clinton. They came back "home".

1. Perot spent the year attacking Bush ;not Clinton. Clinton was too busy taking down his Dem challengers . Perot framed the debate about Bush's stewardship of the economy .

2. Perot's single issue campaign was designed to take down Bush .He was almost obsessed with Bush in what is generally believed to be a personal hatred . Note that he attacked Bush relentlessly until the Democrat convention ;and then conveniently dropped out of the race to leave the stage to Clinton. He got back in the race claiming he only left because of dirty tricks by the Republicans.He even claimed they tried to sabotage his daughter's wedding .

Perot put the national debt on the map.Clinton would've never run with that on his own. He was more into the progressive talking points . Are you now telling me that Clinton; (who's reckless policies would've led to an economic train wreck had the Republicans under Gingrich not reigned him in),cared a lick about national debt ? The Dems don't care about it now ,and they didn't in 1992 either . But with Perot putting the debt in the spotlight ,Clinton got the opening to make the claim that taxes had to be raised to reduce the debt . btw ;Perot also favored tax increases to close the debt .Of course Clinton lied as he had no intention to reduce the debt . Gingrich sorta forced him to moderate . But I have to ask you ,did you support Perot's and Clinton's position that taxes had to be raised to reduce the debt ?

3. Some exit polls showed that Perot voters were equally divided in between Clinton and Bush, but other numbers showed that Perot got a large percentage of his votes from Reagan/Bush Republicans. This meant that these voters were less likely to vote for Democrat Clinton if Perot had not been in the race. What Perot succeeded in doing was to split the Reagan coalition . You cannot deny that .The combined Perot /Bush numbers almost equalled the vote for Reagan/Bush in the previous 3 election cycles. Further ,according to the Washington Post exit polling : the "vast majority " of Perot supporters were ....

https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1955&dat=19920603&id=- NMxAAAAIBAJ&sjid=DuIFAAAAIBAJ&pg=1524,455440&hl=en

I'll give you that Bush did his share to damage the coalition too. But ,without Perot in the race ,they would've either sat it out ,or voted for Bush . He had a similar effect on the 1992 election that Teddy Roosevelt had in 1912. He peeled off enough Republican votes to give the Presidency to the Democrat.

Well yes, but that would have been obvious:) Plus saying it that way was not as 'poetic':)

"For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ." (John 1:17)

The Oligarchs know how the politics of the mob is a pendulum that swings from right to left and left to right, and that's why they spend equally on both sides of the aisle.

Today, as the morbidly obese bobs are wobbling out on the left end of their programmed trajectory, most of them have no clue that the Secretary of Commerce's Chicago family- owned Security Bank failed as a result of its innovations in sub-prime ACORN farming back circa 2001.

As long as the Bread, Circuses, and Viagra flow.... BOHICA.

Some years ago I gave on online course in political psychology for payment. It was attended by fifty to one hundred thousand people in a dozen or more countries. Forty or more percent of readers were M.D.s, Ph. D.s and various educators. I would receive up to 60 Emails in the morning as well as posted comments. What follows is extracted from that course:

Politics in America Part 15: Parties, Subcultures, and Structures Within the American Political System by Robert L. Kocher

This is not a dissertation on American Republicans and Democrats, although it begins with them. It is an examination of political reality and needed direction for reform and survival. It's worth a doctoral degree in political science that is guaranteed to get you barred from entering, or expelled from, any university department on earth.

A study was done in 1998 as a joint project of Harvard University, the Henry J. Kaiser Foundation, and the Washington Post. It was published in the October 4, 1998 Washington Post. It showed the following well-defined subgroups within the major political parties and how those voted in the 1996 presidential election. The study found four Republican subcultures and five Democrat subcultures. The Democratic and Republican subcultures, and their voting patterns, are those identified by statistical analysis in the study. The analysis here will incorporate, but is not limited to, information found in that study. My descriptions of these subcultures incorporate and parallel the defining features found and described in the study, but are my own words, observations, and analysis.

These are 30 percent of democrats. Sixty-three percent are women. Eighty-six percent voted for the Clintons. Four percent voted for Dole. Four percent voted for Perot. The remainder voted for splinter party candidates.

This subculture believes entitlement to everything is a personal right. Government is to guarantee jobs, medical care, economic equality. Concurrently, most of these people believe government is inefficient and intrudes into people's lives. That means they want unconditional government support and funding without accountability. Accountability is relabeled intrusion. Basically, they want a blank check given to them with no questions asked and no demands for responsibility. They want a government that is a wealthy permissive parent surrogate.

They support same-sex marriage, unrestricted abortions, out-of-wedlock childbearing, unlimited welfare or social service benefits. They believe in confiscation of other people's earnings and redistributing it so they can coast through life with their primary concerns being their sex lives and personal problems.

They are 22 percent of Democrats. Sixty-seven percent are women; 84 percent voted for the Clintons. Six percent voted for Dole. Seven percent voted for Perot.

These are people who have bought into liberal sociology and selectively combined it with the most socialistic aspects of religion. They are essentially religious socialists. They inhabit a form of soft religion that emphasizes forgiveness, but is deficient on demanding responsibility from both themselves and others. They are Jimmy Carters.

My personal observation over the years is that there is a class of Christians who live in a bland separation from emotional reality. They have attained a type of pathological dissociated state through religion and are willing to browbeat anyone who doesn't share it. A type of unrealistic all-forgiving all-understanding emotional euphoric stupor is, in their eyes, attainment of sainthood. They are dangerous to themselves and dangerous to others in their emotional unreality and in their judgments made within that unreality. The type of government and social environment they advocate requires someone as emotionally neutered, repressed, or sublimated as they are to live in it. Many in this political subculture are of that condition.

The idea of sainthood is to be in such a state such as to look up at The Lord in oblivious forgiveness when people stick pins in you. The problem is, when you have attained that mental condition, the world has a serious number of sadists who will stick pins in you, and more, for amusement if they can get away with it. Those of us who are less emotionally detached from reality regard this sadism as a danger signal impelling us to make war rather than prayers.

This subculture is a difficult group of people to explain. They have classical religious moral values. Fifty percent strongly disapprove of abortion. Eighty percent strongly reject homosexuality. Eight in 10 strongly agree that America should return to traditional family values. But socialism is more important to them than traditional morality, which is why they are Democrats. Most believe welfare benefits should continue indefinitely. They believe America should become some sort of compulsively imposed religious economic commune, and that would end all problems.

Their religious values terminate at, or emphasize, selected socialistically oriented words of Jesus at the expense of weighting necessity for responsibility and self-discipline.

These are 19 percent of Democrats. Fifty-seven percent are women. Sixty-nine percent voted for the Clintons. Thirteen percent voted for Dole. Twelve percent voted for Perot.

These tend to be poor white American southerners who decline government money and government programs as a matter of moral conviction. They vote Democratic from the Southern tradition of supporting the Democratic Party and because nobody but Reagan has ever appealed to them. They are probably many of the Democrats who voted for Reagan because he could talk to them.

They tend to be of more serious religious moral conviction and have the same attitudes toward homosexuality and abortion as the Helping Hand Democrats.

These are 15 percent of Democrats. Forty-three percent are women. Ninety-two percent voted for the Clintons. One percent voted for Dole. Two percent voted for Perot.

These are economically well off, eternal party kids—although many of them are in their 30s, 40s, and even 50s who are still trying to pretend they are kids and avoiding adulthood. They live exclusively for instantaneous personal amusement regardless of costs to themselves or others. One third of them are in their 20s. The remainder are older, but think and act as if they were fifteen. Most of them are single. They like sex of all varieties, drugs, abortions, and anything else either immediately amusing or servicing the consequences of that amusement. They care about nothing but the night's party. They reject all forms of morality and religion. They want a bigger government with more guaranteed services to relieve them from responsibility or having to absorb any consequences for their actions or for employing any thought in their lives.

They are essentially free-spirited freeloaders. They are emotional freeloaders in their unreasonable demands upon other people. They are economic freeloaders in their demands upon others to enable their life styles. Many of them have fallen into good positions in an economic condition where the living is easy.

They are apparently differentiated from other people on the economic and lifestyle political left by absence of ideology. You won't hear elaborate Marxist or para-Marxist philosophy. They just want what they want at the moment and believe life should be a continuation of that pattern forever with government help and assurances. The merry-go-round should go on forever with no responsibility and others paying the bills, although they are not serious enough in thought to even consider that others need to sacrifice to pay the costs.

These are nine percent of the Democratic Party. Forty-nine percent are women. Eighty-five percent voted for the Clintons. One percent voted for Dole. Ten percent voted for Perot.

These people are practitioners of eternal angry selfish empty rebellion. There is a difference between a degree of enlightened selfishness in which a person demands respect for themselves as opposed to a selfishness that believes the entire world revolves around themselves at the expense of others and the future. These are proponents of the latter.

Their interpersonal relationships tend to be horrible or nonexistent. They are angry fortresses inhabited by empty emotional refrigerators. They can't tolerate each other any more than their group can tolerate other groups. More than 40 percent of the entire group are divorced. That's 40 percent of the entire group including a large proportion of people in the entirety who have not, and do not, engage in close interpersonal relationships, including marriage, of any kind. They want to be a subject of some kind of sterile awe and worship in their personal lives. They are would-be stern demanding Germanic gods expecting to be worshipped.

They hate government but are Democrats because they believe the Democratic party is atheistic and they hate religion more than they hate government. They tend to be people who have destroyed their personal lives and in too many cases religion reminds them of it. They are also vehemently polarized from the authoritarian simplistic faith-based reasoning found at many churches. They are of the belief that acceptance of any type of moral code would make them similar to the rote bible-thumping faith-based systems that they hate. They have exchanged rote blind bible-thumping for rote blind atheism-thumping.

They believe they are sophisticated. In their belief in their own sophistication, they don't believe in any rules except the ones they make up themselves for their own life. But, they don't seem to be smart enough to come up with a working set of rules for life. Consequently, they tend to mess up their lives, and are angry about it. They mistakenly believe all rules for life and reality come only from religion.

In their complacent belief in their own sophistication, beneath which is really a shallowness, many of them are the most tedious and boring people imaginable. They are narrow, obsessive, and boring.

If there is truth in the old adage that a man all wrapped up in himself makes a small package, these are people who have achieved a state of miniaturization to be envied by the semiconductor industry.

There is another infused or parallel sub-subcultural branch of the libertarian subculture that is mentioned in other studies and crosses over into the Republicans and into portions of the Libertarian party. This part of the subculture is primarily oriented toward one issue. The people subscribing to it want recreational drugs to the point of obsession. They are unreliable for anything else. They are stunted mentalities fixated at immature levels, lacking a broader or comprehensive view of life. Regardless of what they say, if Ivan the Terrible were to guarantee them access to drugs, they would accept him with open arms or vote for him. They are temporarily aligned with the movement toward a weaker smaller government as a type of manipulation because they believe such a government would have less power to interdict their drug supply.

Once they have access to enough drugs to stay stoned, any other commitment or concern decays into doubtfulness or non-existence.

There is nothing wrong with America that using drugs is going to fix. Not once in 40 years have I seen drug use add to anyone's quality of life. On the other hand, there is much that using drugs has made worse, individually and socially. The legacy of drug use has been to inflict on America legions of soft immature personalities who show a remarkable capacity for continuing to function at the level of logic they have become accustomed to under the reality-anesthesia of drug use. It's a quality of functioning well-adaptable to the soft unreality of socialism.

These make up 19 percent of the Republican party. Fifty-eight percent of them are women. Thirty-four percent of them (you read that correctly) voted for the Clintons, 48 percent for Dole, and 12 percent for Perot.

They seem to be Republicans rather than being Democrats because of the snob appeal of the Republican party. They believe they bathe more frequently, wear fancier clothes, have fancier educations, have better table manners, discourse with more subtle wit, and are more suitable for management positions than the rather crude laboring people or non-perfumed coarse radicals stereotyping the traditional Democratic party.

In terms of political activism, they work to see that the most liberal candidate becomes the nominee of the Republican party. After working for that, they then vote for the even more liberal Democrats on election day.

These are often people living life in the personal fast lane. The women tend to screw around a lot in what they believe is a higher class manner than the vulgar Democrats, and they want abortions afterward. The men they are screwing around with want them to get those abortions afterwards because they don't really want to be stuck with either the women or their babies. Abortion is a major thrust in the liberal Republican agenda.

These make up 22 percent of Republicans. Forty percent of them are women. Twenty percent of them ( yup ) voted for the Clintons. Fifty-eight percent voted for Dole. Fourteen percent of them voted for Perot.

These are people whose dominant or only interest is money money money. They are either relatively unconcerned about morality, or their disapproval of classical immorality is passive and distanced. Few of them are religious. Contrary to the stereotype of people in big business, many of them believe they can make more money under quasi-socialism.

These make up 23 percent of Republicans. Fifty-five percent are women. Eighteen percent of them voted for the Clintons. Fifty-eight percent of them voted for Dole. Sixteen percent of them voted for Perot.

They are moderately religious. They are the least prosperous of all Republicans. Sixty percent of them never went beyond high school. Forty-five percent live in the South.

Sixty percent of them believe the government "Should do everything possible to improve the standard of living of all Americans." That is translated into a wish for greatly enlarged government, government support, and programs —which is why so many voted for the Clintons.

(Note: At this point a pattern is evident. A major and critical amount of the Clintons' political strength, and the strength of people like them has been in the Republican party—and particularly among Republican women. )

These are 29 percent of Republicans. Thirty-nine percent are women. Nine percent of them voted for the Clintons. Eighty percent of them voted for Dole. Five percent of them voted for Perot.

Many years ago there was a movie adapted from an old script in which Burt Lancaster played a western sheriff in the 1800s. As a sheriff entering an unknown town, the first thing he would do was examine the churches to determine the character and temperament of the people. As he came into one town he remarked some other towns had churches where people knelt down in submission and prayer. But in this particular town the people stood upright when they addressed their god. He knew that if the stood upright when facing their God, they would stand upright with him.

Most Republican religious conservatives are of a nature who stand upright before their god and all else. Submission and compliance are alien and immoral. They say what they believe is the truth regardless of whether people want to hear it. They allow no slack in their own lives, or in the lives of those around them. They are repelled by extramarital sex, homosexual marriages, or casual abortion,

No emotional blandness here. They will crack heads in an eye-for-an-eye fashion rather than turn the other cheek. When something goes wrong, they want to know exactly why, and what somebody did to cause it. Prayer will come only after honest brutally frank accounting. Like the cold-blooded libertarians, 68 percent of them believe in a five-year limitation on welfare benefits. According to their god, for those who don't use a helping hand to discipline and improve themselves, the free ride stops.

Their preference for rigorous cold logic and personal accountability regardless of anyone's personal discomfort makes them hated by those people who are chronic screw-ups looking to concoct a story to sell somebody. This subculture doesn't accept stories.

Their integrity and self discipline serve them well. They are apparently the most highly educated and prosperous of the political subcultures. One in seven have gone to graduate or professional school. More than half were making over $50,000 per year in 1998 and one quarter were making over $75,000 per year. They are the most serious advocates of, and participants in, free enterprise and entrepreneurialship of any of the political subcultures. They are basically what remains of the backbone of America.

They vote strongly Republican in desperate defense against what they conceive of as the total degeneracy and madness of the liberal Democratic Party.

They are looked upon as an inconvenience and annoyance within the Republican party, but the party needs their votes and therefore tolerates them with discomfort.

Third, and other, parties were not mentioned in the study, but most certainly exist.

The third party is the dominant party, but runs no candidates itself. It strongly affects the candidacy and issues in the Republican and Democratic parties. The Third Party is essentially the media and entertainment industry further supported by the educational establishment. Somewhere about 89 percent of the Washington press corps voted for George McGovern in 1972, which is more conclusive evidentiary demonstration of clear aggressive insanity than could be derived from administering Rorschachs or Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventories. About the same percentage voted for the Clintons, suggesting the condition is both permanent and passed to, or is a requirement of, successive professional entrants. The relationship between the political values of the media versus the ordinary public has ranged from sharply divergent to crusadingly adversarial during the last 55 years. The gap is closing as the machinations of the monolithic media have taken effect.

People in the media and entertainment professions live a life much like the European fops of several hundred years ago who sat about dressed in wigs and gaudy clothes impressing and entertaining each other through demonstration of affected effete childishness and with their distance from reality and the vulgar world of physical productivity. The media and entertainment elite, and university educators belong in a closely parallel class, inhabit that artificial world where they can remain entranced by their self-conferred superiority. It's a subculture of fops, fools, and court jesters who have contempt for all others other than themselves and their world.

But the American public's knowledge and image of history and events is channelized into, and filtered or distorted through, the media, particularly TV. There, political-social ideas or candidates can be subjected to subtle ridicule, there can be selective presentation and distortion of candidate image, there can be cultivation or development of recognition and appearance of leadership or importance of selected people in a virtual reality, while just as importantly fop-disapproved ideas and candidates are sentenced to oblivion in terms of public knowledge or awareness through deleted presentation. This is the most highly developed monolithic propaganda and information control system in history. It is voluntarily and almost religiously adhered to and operated. With power such as this, a political party doesn't need its own candidates. It creates and determines issues and political candidates and injects them into other political organization and in the nation's cultural institutions.

This political party tends to believe in liberated sex, casual abortion, same sex marriage, government welfare programs, one-world economics and socialism, and they advocate what they consider to be this sophisticated view. In fact, living within their social and intellectual inbred separation and isolation that they inhabit, the existence of serious valid opposing views is inconceivable to them or thought to be held only by primitives and eccentrics in distant ignorant regions.

The increasing thrust of media lives and the media industry (and educators) is unrestrained sadistic imposition of outrage coupled with feeling of their own narcissistic superiority. From the time you get up in the morning the listening or reading audiences are assaulted with declarations of what is wrong with America —-and what is right about the political and lifestyle left. Outrage procures attention and TV ratings as well as contributing to their sense of self-importance. So does theatrical lunatic politics.

Under the revision and filtration process the public learns Viet Cong atrocities never took place, leftist subversives and revolutionaries are blandly relabeled social activists with new ideas who are persecuted for thinking differently, Eleanor Clift and Gloria Steinem are serious spokespeople worthy of repeated presentation. Gun control is of prime importance —and so on. Other people and views are non people or non existent —or are represented in as distorted a manner as possible.

These are small parties ranging from socialists, to libertarians, to constitutionalists, to environmentalists.

In the world of real politics, candidates or parties need to meet three criteria to become elected.

1) They need to receive media, particularly TV, support, or need some way to get around left-wing media opposition and filtration. Without that, few people will know they exist. Party and candidate credibility is established by certifiers and supporters in the media, particularly by certification on TV.

2) Any party or candidate needs enormous amounts of money to buy glitter, presentations, and TV time. TV is where the contest of politics takes place. Companies spend $300,000 to $600,000 a pop advertising automobiles or concoctions guaranteeing underarm niceness because those commercials work. Those commercials are a necessity to counterbalance commercials from alternative companies and maintain a share of the market. Similarly, to even begin to run, a national presidential candidate requires $50,000,000 to do the same thing companies need to do.

3) Any minor party must have a presentable candidate with what passes for ideas. Major parties don't seem to need ideas at the present time. Major party candidates seem to do little but accuse their opponents of calling them nasty names and waging negative campaigns.

Minor parties and minor party candidates invariably lack items one and two of the above. As a consequence, those of us in realistic politics realize they have no serious chance of winning a presidential election within those conditions. While it is true that Abraham Lincoln could win the presidency in what was then a splinter party, he could do it from horseback without needing to spend $300,000 a shot for minutes of TV time.

Perception of a party's being able to win is important as a determining factor in receiving votes. This is independent of the validity of the party's ideas or quality of candidates. That is, if there are two major political parties, one of which is 95 percent incompetent and terrible, and the second of which is 85 percent terrible, and a third party that is quite good, with good ideas, but relatively unknown with little money and with little visibility and public recognition, most people are of the belief that the third party has no chance of winning. Hence, the voting public is forced to try to salvage what little it can by voting for the party that is only 85 percent lousy on election day. Or they stay home in depressed resignation.

What has evolved is a skillfully constructed system of implicit blackmail in which people are threatened with being afflicted with the worst of two clowns running for president if they withdraw their vote from the second worst clown and caste it for someone in a splinter party with integrity. I'm constantly assaulted with that in political discussions. "A vote for a minor party is the same as a vote for Al Gore," say the Republicans.

As a practical matter, any political system that has splinter parties produces this intrinsic conflict between voting one's conscience versus losing leverage and ending with the worst major party candidate instead of the second worst candidate.

In most cases a so-called third party vote is an angry protest over the existing condition of American politics. The splinter parties are so fragmented in ideology and personalities that none of them have the resources to mount a significant campaign.

The largest single political group in America is composed of people who don't vote. This group has been growing steadily in America for the last 40 years. The percentage of people voting in American presidential elections has declined nearly linearly from 63.1 percent in 1960 to 49.1 percent in 1996, with one major exception which will be examined in a moment.

Let's look at some numbers of people registered to vote, number of people voting, and percentage of eligibly-aged people voting in recent presidential elections in America.

The percentage of registered voters showing up at the polls to vote is as follows:

These figures can be found in any of the almanacs. I'm using the 1998 Time Almanac.

Readers may be puzzled as to how more people voted than were registered in 1960. Although this was always standard procedure in Chicago under the old Daley Cook County Democratic Party machine, it isn't the major reason. Several states did not report their number of registered voters for that year.

With two exceptions, one minor and one major, to be discussed, the percentage of eligible voters who vote has declined almost linearly over the last 40 years. Greater numbers of people register to vote each year, but smaller proportions show up at the polls on election day. Even the popular President Reagan, who was the minor of the two exceptions, failed to generate the proportion of voters showing up at the polls eight years earlier. Why?

These non-voting people are the crux of American politics and need to be explained. We can postulate several theories to account for them. We can postulate the interpretation that recent generations and people in recent years simply have no political interests. We can venture the hypothesis that there is some sort of generational phenomenon in which recent generations will not go to the polls.

If we postulate some sort of generational phenomenon in which recent generations are politically disinterested or will not vote, is there anything that would refute this hypothesis? Yes, and the answer lies in the 1992 election in which there was the only significant increase in voter turnout over the previous four presidential elections in 40 years, to provide the highest percentage turnout in 20 years. If we draw the overall voter participation decay line, we would expect to see a proportion of voters at about 49.7 percent for 1992. Instead, we see a strong surge to over 55 percent. How can this be accounted for? What happened in 1992?

For the moment we'll call the 1992 surge the Perot Phenomenon, which is an oversimplification.

The consistency within the last 30 years is that there is a base of 39,000,000 Republicans who will turn out to vote for a Republican presidential candidate under nearly any conditions or quality of candidate. Anything above that is an expression of an exceptionally frightening and lunatic Democratic candidate or a charismatic Republican candidate.

Indications are that there are now the same or a slightly higher number of solid Democrats with their number increasing each year.

In the last 40 years the American people have shown progressive disinclination to show up at the polls to support the products of the Democratic or Republican parties who are really media manipulated/filtered and produced products in a virtual reality. People are tired of childish Democrat, Republican, and media, antics. The splinter parties are an exercise in futility. Consequently, people have withdrawn from political participation in reaction to the virtual reality theater of the absurd being pushed upon them from remote TV studios. An ever-greater proportion of the American people seem to have withdrawn from a political system in which they have no leverage or relationship.

So what happened in 1992? What occurred was the entering into the political presidential campaign of an exasperated Ross Perot who, like many others, was clearly disgusted by the condition of America and the direction it had been going for some time.

Perot had several things going for the Reform Party. Being a multi-billionaire he was well funded and could afford TV time to circumvent the control exercised by the leftist media and thus create both visibility and the perception that the party could win.

Love him or hate him, agree or disagree with him, Perot talked to the listening audience straight as if they were human beings. He conducted his presentations as though they were serious business meetings. There were no brass bands or circus performances. He had his charts and graphs and explanations delivered in his peculiar homespun Texas style. Whether you liked them or disagreed with them, he had his conceptions and ideas in an honest and frank form where they might offend some people, but listeners knew where he stood. For many millions of people it was a breath of fresh air and a blessed relief to listen to someone who wasn't presented as a slickly packaged fashion model programmed to say as little as possible.

The Perot campaign took off like a rocket. At one time the polls showed him with somewhere in the order of 30-35 percent of the vote.

There was a major flaw in the campaign. Perot was much too serious a person to survive a political campaign. He expected much more seriousness, more honesty, more maturity, and less goofing around in choosing a president than the way it actually was. He thought he would be dealing with the caliber of serious people he was accustomed to interacting with. He was in for a shock. Actually, the weakness was not Perot's. Elections to determine the American government should not be conducted like carnival side shows.

His frustration with the silliness and dishonesty in the political process began to build. The end came when he appeared before a Black organization somewhere in Florida. Most of the people there didn't give a damn. Finally, in pained frustration, surprise, and disbelief, Perot exclaimed something to the effect, "Don't you people want to do anything?" —-you people—? Cries of "racism" went up from a chorus of voices from media-attended stages throughout America. Perot shortly withdrew from the presidential race in disgust.

In fact, the ungiven answer to Perot's question before the group he was addressing was, “no.” The people attending were looking for groveling guilt-ridden support for presenting themselves as victims deserving special privileges and an absence of accountability as compensation.

It seems somewhat evident that Perot became frustrated and disgusted beyond his levels of personal toleration and withdrew from the presidential race. The reasons he gave for his withdrawal my have been somewhat evasive and contributed to an erratic public image that was being spun by his adversaries.

After watching Bush and Clinton continue to campaign, Perot became further exasperated and reentered the race in disgusted desperation. But at that point his campaign was permanently scarred and too many people felt wary or betrayed by his earlier withdrawal. At that point Perot was permanently destroyed politically beyond complete remedy by his previous withdrawal.

A number of assertions have been made about Ross Perot. Most of what is said is foolishness and spin. I don't know Ross Perot personally and have never met him. I've known or met people similar to him.

So who was, or is Ross Perot. To understand Perot, I'll begin with a true story. When I was a teenager I was a good chess player. There was a middle-aged local small town lawyer I had acquaintance with who had played chess at various times in his life. I asked him if he wanted to play a game and he agreed with interest. Being an impulsive 15 year old I punctuated my moves with comments about how I had him. His quiet replies were, "Um, hum." Finally he quietly declared, "Forced mate in three." He hit me with a brilliant line of play that came out of nowhere and he won the game. I asked him if he wanted to play another game. He respectfully replied that he didn't have time.

When GE and another large company wanted to effect a merger years ago, they had their choice of all attorneys in the country to represent both parties. They chose this man to negotiate the merger for a percentage of the stock. The reason was, he was one of the best attorneys in the country and they wanted to make certain nothing went wrong. He was one of the best legal minds in the country and could practice any kind of law, at any level, before any court in the county, or probably, the world.

I'd unknowingly tangled with one of the sharpest men in the country who was a quiet unpretentious man. The typical 15 year old kid doesn't understand that beforehand. I quickly grew to understand it. I learned a lot that day—including a strong dose of humility. It's a lesson I have never forgot and though it still embarrasses me, I am thankful for it. It's something many adults have never learned.

Beneath his folksy manner Ross Perot is in the same league as that attorney. You will recognize and understand it out of experience with such people if it's within your capacity and willingness. Ross Perot is a man who works quietly and whose word is accepted unconditionally by top people in the business and economic world. There is little doubt in knowledgeable circles that Perot could probably buy and sell entire continents if he wanted to do so. The typical view of the economically and personally naive is to retort, "If he could do it, then why doesn't he do it and make more billions of dollars?" The answer is, more money is useless to Perot. He’s sane enough to realize it. There comes a point where enough is enough. He has no need or interest in making more of it.

Few people can understand what it is like to be Ross Perot. If Perot wanted another ten or twenty billion dollars, he could probably make it in the snap of a finger. Anyone of any stature and seriousness knows it. It's also a fact that Ross Perot could now spend $300,000 a day for the remainder of his life and never run out of money. But, as a practical matter, if most people tried to spend $300,000 a day on themselves, at the end of a month they'd be in a state of nervous breakdown trying to find something to buy or do next. Perot is in a financial state such that more money is useless to him. There is nothing more he can do with it. It won't buy him any more of anything and he's smart enough to know it. It wouldn't be worth Perot's time or effort to walk across the street to pick up $1,000,000 if someone were to offer it to him for nothing.

Then in his 60s, and now 70, Perot's primary concerns are simple interests, such as his family. Secondarily, he has interests such as the condition of the country. He was president of his class at the Naval Academy and his personal national commitment and outlook have not changed since that time. Perot's interests are such that he is the only person ever allowed to take an original copy of the Magna Carta out of Great Briton, whereupon he placed it in the American National Archives next to the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. The Perots have contributed more than $100,000,000 to various charities and organizations.

But Perot's personal world and integrity of operation are ill-adapted to politics. He wrongly expected the same level of competency, maturity, and seriousness in political life that he conducts in his own business and personal life. Instead, he faced a circus.

One subject to address here is the Perot election urban myth. The assertion is made by a class of amateurs with political interests that the reason the Clintons either entered or continued in the White House was because of people changing their support from Republicans to Ross Perot. But few of these people have looked at the election statistics. The reason the Clintons either entered or continued in the White House was not because of Ross Perot. The reason the Clintons continued in the White House is because 20 percent of Republicans voted for the Clintons. That is how the Clintons entered the White House. You cannot win an election with 20 percent of your own party voting for the opposition candidate. The differential between Democrats voting for Dole and Republicans voting for the Clintons was over 12 percent. Assuming a initial 50/50 split in Democratic/Republican party affiliation, a net 12 percent shift brings a landslide final vote tally of 62 percent for the Clintons and 38 percent for the Republicans within party lines. For Republican candidates, it was catastrophic. For the Clintons, it was a signal for celebration.

There are various myths and theories saying Perot cost the Republicans the election, or that Perot made some kind of strange private agreement with the Clintons or mysterious political/economic forces and societies to enter the race and elect the Clintons. But the fact is, send the Democratic Perot voters back to the Democratic party and the Republican Perot voters back to the Republican candidate, and the Clintons win. You can not win an election when 20 percent of your own party votes for the opposition. It's a loser. Notice that the average turnout for Democrats voting for the Clintons was about 85 percent. If Republicans voting for Perot had instead voted for Dole in 1996, Dole still doesn't obtain that necessary support percentage. It was Republican votes for Clinton that put the Clintons in office. It was Republicans who reelected the Clintons. The Clintons didn't need Perot.

People who argue Perot cost Bush the election in 1992 often do so while making the doubtful assumption that the people who voted for Perot would even bother to vote if Perot were not running. That's a very doubtful assumption. Note that the percentage of voter turnout for Bush's win in 1988 was a very poor 50.1 percent. If Perot votes by Republicans and Democrats in 1992 are subtracted from the proportion of people voting and the totals for Republicans and Democrats are evaluated exclusive of the Perot vote, what is obtained is a percentage of active voters closing in on the poor 1988 turnout.

What occurred is that Perot did not change the election outcome by taking votes away from Bush, but, rather, he brought additional people into the voting booths who would otherwise not have voted. That accounts for the large increase in percentages of eligible voters voting and registered voters voting in 1992.

You dunces come here, and elsewhere, with your fantasies about the way things are or should have been to mouth off. You don't consult the literature. You don't know anything about anything. You're so incredibly stupid that if sh!t were brains, you couldn't fart. You're too God damned dumb to understand if 20% of your own political party votes for the opposition the opposition will win!

Would you explain the headings and numbers please? Either I misapprehend the presentation, or the given data cannot represent the categories identified in the text quoted above. It appears that the column headings do not reflect the data that appears below them.

# Voting perhaps represents the total population of legal voting age, perhaps reduced by those disqualified (felons). It is not the number who voted. Nor does this appear to be the total number of registered voters.

Ignoring disenfranchised felons would count 5,852,180 ineligibles as eligible as of 2010.

% Eligible appears to represent the total popular vote. It is not a percentage of anything, nor is it the number of persons eligible to vote.

The Largest Subculture: the Other People

Let's look at some numbers of people registered to vote, number of people voting, and percentage of eligibly-aged people voting in recent presidential elections in America.

Year	# Voting	% Eligible	% of Eligible Voting
1960	64,833,096	68,838,204	63.1
1964	73,715,818	70,644,592	61.9
1968	81,658,180	73,211,875	60.8
1972	97,328,541	77,718,554	55.2
1976	105,837,986	81,855,789	53.6
1980	112,043,724	86,515,221	52.6
1984	124,150,614	92,652,680	53.1
1988	126,379,628	91,594,693	50.1
1992	133,821,178	104,405,155	55.1
1996	146,211,960	96,456,345	49.1

The percentage of registered voters showing up at the polls to vote is as follows:

1960 NA
1964 95 %
1968 89 %
1972 80 %
1976 77 %
1980 77 %
1984 74 %
1988 72 %
1992 78 %
1996 66 %

These figures can be found in any of the almanacs. I'm using the 1998 Time Almanac.

It was worth the read to come across gems like this. I wonder which group the guy who posted as infowarior over at LP would have belonged to? He liked to come across as some sort of anarcho-libertarian type, and was against enforcement of laws, including at America's borders. At the same time he was a big proponent of the welfare state, including air conditioning for people on welfare.

The guy would let anyone into America who wanted in, and would hand out lavish welfare benefits to all. He would rail against jack booted thugs, but the very social programs he favored would require an Orwellian police to collect the taxes to pay for it all. The principles he espoused seemed at odds with themselves, I notice that several of the groups on your list seemed to have similar contradictions.

Fix the GOP, Don’t Abandon ItA message to Glenn Beck.

The D&R terrorists hate us because we're free, to vote second party

The Largest Subculture: the Other People

Fix the GOP, Don’t Abandon It
A message to Glenn Beck.