As Neo-Conservative hawks, intellectual conservatives, and smug corporatist types flee the Republican in Party in droves, searching for some redeeming value in the third parties they’ve mocked and snickered at for years, we are witnessing the return of those missing-in-action Blue Dog Democrats who seemed to go extinct overnight after the sinister swindle called ObamaCare destroyed the Democrat majority. Blue Dog Democrats, I’m sorry… Republicans seem to have latched onto the rise of Donald Trump and his merry band of progressive populists.
Why should anyone be surprised. We’ve complained for months that Donald Trump is really a Democrat and despite a massive minority of Republicans who despise Donald Trump, Trump has won state after state on the backs of conservatives and evangelicals. We never stopped to question whether these conservatives and evangelicals were historically Republican in the first place – and it does not appear that they are – rather, what we are witnessing is a hostile take over of the Republican Party from the center.
Donald Trumps positions on immigration, trade, foreign policy, and entitlements, in congress with his populist rhetoric aimed at American Workers is exactly the kind of rhetoric the old Blue Dog Democrats used to spout. It’s not that these people aren’t conservative or Christian, but that they simply hated the Rockefeller Republicans and establishment neo-conservatives. When Ronald Reagan took on the Republican Establishment, these Blue Dog Democrats were called Reagan Democrats, but that’s just about as far as you can take any comparison between Reagan and Trump. Trump actually represents, not the Republican Base, but the disenfranchised Blue Dog Democrat base.
The Democrat Party has traveled further and further left and they have done real damage to American workers and they have lost all affection from average folk in “the south”. So along comes Donald Trump, speaking directly to them, and for the first time millions of Americans had a politician they could connect with. These average, working class folks don’t care about our two party system, or about our high-minded party-ideas. They simply want the government to get out of the way, to stop stomping on their industries, stop antagonizing their companies, stop ridiculing their gun and god clinging lifestyles.
And it’s not that Trump speaks to the religious mindset of southern-evangelicals. He doesn’t. He does speak to the issues that concern them in their own personal lives. He speaks to the very real concerns of modern ‘Muricans. These are God-fearing, reality-tv watching, pro-military, pro-america, anti-immigrant folks who are pissed off that they haven’t gotten a raise in five years, or even if they have, that their standard of living has not improved. Trump speaks their language and he’s telling them that if they vote for him, he (as opposed to any other candidate in either party) will solve those specific problems.
The Blue Dog Republicans are here.
What are we going to do? Their presence isn’t just scaring off the establishment types, but also the libertarians and constitutionalists and the intellectual conservatives. Trump and the Blue Dogs threaten to destroy the Democrat Party’s old base, while utterly reforming the Republican Party into something none of us expected.
We won’t know until November how many of these Blue Dog Republicans actually exist, but if they exist in enough numbers to elect Donald Trump President of these United States, then it really is a whole new ballgame out there and we’ll all have to start making peace with the idea that this new Republican Party, Trumps’ Republican Party, might be here to stay.
What further consequences these changes will have on the Democrat and Republican parties is unclear, just as it is unclear whether or not a new Republican Party of this kind could pave the way for a third party in American Politics.
12 comments
Quite interesting, however…. Think I prefer Gingrich’s explanation of the new Trump Americans..
This analogy is so historically confused, fantasized and just plain wrong its hard to even know where to begin. A brief try. First, the “blue dog” term arose and was applied to a small group of southern regional ELECTED Democrats that had survived the Republican’s massive take over of their traditional southern states political strangle hold, which the Democratic party had held since the post civil war years. This Republican southern effort began in earnest during the Nixon administration. They eventually became a small coalition in Congress and had absolutely nothing to do with the actual voter base in the south or any where else for that matter. A media created term.
Second, this Blue Dog Democratic voter wing you just created out of thin air (which never self identified around this term at any point in time) were most certainly NOT Reagan Democrats, period. If you ever want to start using facts in your scribbling do a simple lookup on the demographic composition of the term and you will find that the bulk of these individuals were working class voters in the manufacturing sector, heavily centered in the northeast and mid-west which had been hit hard by Democratic economic policies and largely pushed aside in the party’s policy strategy. Sound familiar? To call them Blue Dog Democrats is not just a misuse of the term and silly, but basically wrong, as the thrust of Reagan’s Democratic support was not in the south of that era that lacked the heavy industrialized infrastructure to support a mass working class (recall also these Dems were being replaced by a transitioning Republican base).
To build this incredibility incoherent straw argument (wrong by the way in almost every context) to propose some Trump based take over of the Republican Party by Blue Dog Republicans (a meaningless term) is a colossal gaff regarding your ignorance of the parties traditional composition which has been in place for over 50 years. Beginning in the 1970’s a significant movement of middle and working class voters simply abandoned the increasingly urbanized, leftward leaning Democratic party that to this day still does not support their economic interests in policy to move towards the Republican platform which then did at least mouth the words. Post Reagan this mass of voters were shunted aside by the party elites and the Bush family administration’s for the nirvana of globalization and pure self interest. Some of this group became disgruntled and trended toward Republican independents that still generated a reliable Republican voting base but most just trudged on or participated as populists in the Tea Party movement to continue to express their unresolved dissatisfaction.
To imply that this middle and working class wing is some new phenomena within the Republican party is ludicrous. It’s nothing more then a long ignored and greatly put upon mass Republican voting base, suppressed by false promises and failed policy commitments for years by the party leadership and associated elites that has coalesced around an individual that is speaking to them again in the language of Ronald Reagan policy wise. What you have written here frankly a disservice to these much put upon Americans and the worst kind of factual misrepresentation. Blue Dog Republicans – baloney!
Absolutely Spot on!
As a life long hard right conservative, I have supported the GOP machine for all of my adult life. Although, after years of being ignored by the GOP leadership, I decided to support The Donald because of the things he said would be done to “make America great again.” If he can accomplish half of what he says he will do, he will have outpaced by far what the GOP leadership has been promising to do for the past 8 years. The Donald, lacking one politically correct bone in his body, is just icing on the cake. Unless the GOP leadership comes to grips with the WHY The Donald took them to school and gets on board the Trump Train, they will be discarded like yesterday’s news. If The Donald can succeed in his stated goals and I truly think he will, the “new” republican party will certainly be here to stay! A party that will actually listen to the grassroots. What a novel concept!
I turned 30 in March. I will admit I was excited to vote Dubya in 2004. Kerry disgraced Vietnam vets like my father, so that helped. But I fear that my generation and the ones after us will never fully realize the American Dream, if we don’t change course. Millions of us have determined that Trump is that captain the USA desperately needs.
The sensible GOP leadership is enthusiastically supporting Trump — you’ll need to do a better job of succeeding the ones who aren’t.
Grassroots is too fluffy a term. I define GOP grassroots as unit committee members and above. It is up to THOSE grassroots to reflect the will of their local blades and sod.
The people doing the real work, knocking on doors, attending political meetings (to include TEA Party), the ones actually doing the grunt work, I consider the grassroots. We have been ignored for far too long.
Still too vague. Knocking on doors (assume means precinct work/voterID); attending political meetings (including tea party group???), “grunt work?’
Volunteers can work for the GOP, Individual candidates, and/or TP groups. In each of these respectively are considered grassroots _of_those_organizations_!!!
Smart candidates pay attention to their grassroots, the party listens to their grassroots, TP, well, who the heck knows?
I’ve always thought that the grassroots were the basic building blocks, the rank and file of the organization. If the party is the grass, then the precinct captain and volunteers the grassroots.
So, in my party, the precinct people and the volunteers, are ignored by the party leadership at their own peril.
However, just as the Sunni and Shi’a, we unite to reject those not of the faith.
The Libertarians are in the Libertarian party, the Constitutionals are in the Constitution party, the intellectual conservatives are bloviating online and compromised with Cruz. These aren’t your rank and file GOP. The GOP is old, hollow, and too open for it’s own good. Our electeds have for the most part sold us out. The TP folks swoop in for nominee selection and swoop out when it’s not their candidate.
This presidential cycle, we had no viable candidates. It is our job to come up with qualified, electable Republicans that are superior to what the democrats gack up — we couldn’t deliver and we were lucky enough for Trump to step in and do the job that Republicans couldn’t do.
In our infinite wisdom, we have institutionally decided to allow the general electorate narrow our options. Some say this is to better match the desires of the electorate, others slightly cynical might suggest that it is merely the best method to retain power and incumbency.
The Republican Party swings between establishment moderate and establishment conservative. Every once in a while, undocumented Republicans infest the party machinery and we get a little kooky — sometimes it matches up with the electorate, sometimes they’d prefer to cruelly punish us and themselves.
If the forces of Trump can take over the GOP, we have lost in the political marketplace of ideas, and we should welcome them with open arms.
Yeah, God-forbid we have a candidate that tries to expand the electorate, and not just focus on the states won in 2004. The beltway insiders tried to stop Reagan, they fought Dave Brat, and the same went for Trump. If the GOP actually delivered on their platform, then Trump would not have been necessary. So we have this hostile takeover, that has been long overdue since 1992. I will devote tremendous amounts of free-time in the run-up to Election Day in getting Trump elected. The alternative is dangerously unacceptable.
Yep, insightful.
Thank you. Been saying this since before Trump swept SWVA. I am, credit to Scott Adams’ blog, rather excited that everything is being blown up even though it probably means I will not continue to support the Republican Party, or any party. I hope to see a phoenix rise from the ashes, but all I can really do is wait and see.
Sometimes I wonder how Trump supporters will feel if they ever figure out they are subjects in Trump’s grand hypnosis/power of persuasion experiment (the only thing he has bothered to carefully study in his life), but it probably bothers me more than them. (shrug) – http://blog.dilbert.com/post/144816352346/battle-of-the-campaign-slogans