Ideology | Praxis

GOP Missed Opportunity to Adopt Trump’s More Centrist Social Positions

People form their opinions about a party based on what its platform includes. Political scientists Elizabeth Simas at the University of Houston and Kevin Evans at Florida International University have found that in years that parties adopt particularly conservative platforms, voters tend to see the nominee as more conservative too. “Voters are in fact picking up on the parties’ objective policy positions,” they wrote in a 2011 paper. That means that a platform like this one could have lasting impacts on how the Republican Party…

The GOP’s Strategic Sclerosis Is Becoming Fatal

Somewhere in recent years, the GOP’s engagement with modern America and how to best project those values into a nation of 320 million people became dysfunctional. As the country has diversified, the party has remained monochromatic, has grayed, and rather than allowing some birch-like give on shifting cultural norms, has become an unbending oak of ideological purity. The GOP now finds itself lacking an intimate’s ability to criticize productively, given its demographic and cultural divergence from the majority of the country. […] According to the…

The Republican Industrial Complex Has Turned Missteps Into Millions

Steve Jobs, the late co-founder of Apple, was famously criticized for his ability to convince others to believe anything he said through a combination of hyperbole and bravado. One Apple employee called the effect a “reality distortion field” in 1981 and the term persisted ever since. It’s quite clear by now that conservative philanthropists and grassroots donors have been living in a reality distortion field as well, the creation of a cadre of political consultants who have failed repeatedly at their jobs and yet manage…

Presidents Who Get What They Want Use the Other Party’s Base to Do So

Regardless of whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton wins November’s election, the next president faces what looks to be a nearly impossible task when it comes to governing: Persuading the other side to compromise. With the House likely to remain in Republican hands and neither party likely to hold a filibuster-proof Senate majority, successful dealmaking with Congress by the next president would have to overcome massive partisan divisions. Holding your breath doesn’t seem advisable. But one route to legislative success may lie with the public….

Donald Trump Is the Candidate Conservative Intellectuals Conditioned Their Base to Want

It’s been said that societies elect the governments they deserve. That’s certainly the case with the American Right and Donald Trump. In spite of this, many Republicans have been beside themselves about the man for the past 12 months. According to his critics, the former reality-TV star is a gross departure from the conservative tradition. They couldn’t be more wrong. One group of Trump disparagers were so discontented with their future nominee that they vowed to found their own rump organization, the Renegade Party, in…

The Left Machine: Foundations and Elizabeth Warren

Part 1: Massive Foundations put billions into left wing activist campaigns, but nobody seems to notice. In part 1, I explained that left wing Foundations fund an enormous amount of research, activism and media — creating, promoting and covering their own political campaigns. In part 2, I will give you an example of how this works. Specifically, how Elizabeth Warren built her career on the kind of “sponsored” research that she criticizes today. Last September, Elizabeth Warren attacked Brooking’s scholar, Robert Litan over alleged “financial conflicts of interest” related to…

The Trump Victory Proves the GOP Is Fundamentally Broken

If 2012 was the presidential election in which data-driven journalism really came into its own, the 2016 Republican nomination contest has been the one in which the conventional wisdom has continually been shattered. Besides driving Republican officials to distraction, Donald Trump has been the bane of journalists from data geeks like Nate Silver and the New York Times’s Nate Cohn to more old school analysts like Ron Brownstein of National Journal. The former television star’s unorthodox background and brash demeanor has upended the conventional wisdom…

The Left Machine: Foundations and Government

Part 1: Left wing Foundations put billions into left wing activist campaigns, but nobody seems to notice. Part 2: How Foundations buy manufactured “research” from activist-academics like Elizabeth Warren. In part 1 of this series on the Foundations behind the Left, I mentioned that left wing Foundations sometimes collaborate with government agencies. Let’s look at one particular collaboration. The Open Technology Fund (OTF), was started under Secretary of State Clinton, and is funded by “yearly U.S. Congressional appropriations for State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs”, which are routed to…

The Left Machine: Foundations and Media

I’ve already described how deep-pocketed, left-wing foundations funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to liberal groups and news outlets, largely without much media scrutiny, which is at least partly “due to the fact that the left wing Foundations fund many media organizations…” and the media seems to be hesitant to bite one of the increasingly few hands that feed it. The result is a perfect circle jerk of Foundation-funded research pushed by Foundation-funded activists covered by Foundation-funded media. One recent example illustrates how this model works. Last year, InsideClimate News and…

The Rise of Irreligion is the GOP’s Real Demographic Crisis

In the past several years, many trees have been felled and pixels electrocuted in the service of discussion about the impact of Hispanics on the American electorate. No one knows for sure which way they’ll vote in the future but everyone is interested in discussing it. Curiously, though, an even larger political shift is taking place yet receiving almost no attention whatsoever from political reporters—the emergence of post-Christian America. Judging solely from the rhetoric and actions of the Republican presidential candidates this cycle, you would be…

Understanding the present is the key to the future