I happen to be a Democrat, but I enjoy reading commentary from both sides of the aisle. Today I was reading this particularly ridiculous piece written by a Republican commentator. Mr. Feehery feels that the splintered nature of the Democratic party is an opportunity for Republicans. His argument goes something like: our party’s values are small government, social conservatism, rigid enforcement of immigration law. The Democrats are large governement, socially liberal, loose on immigration. Therefore, since the Southern Democrats, Hispanics and African Americans aren’t as socially liberal as those
liberal nutjobs in Washington, they could be part of our party. We could win them over!
Of course, for each of the reasons the Republicans might win them over, it’s their current platform that also drives them away. The Hispanic population isn’t generally a fan of tough immigration laws, African Americans have been ignored by Republicans, and while socially conservative, the Southern Democrats presumably still believe in a strong central government.
Even were I totally off on why each demographic will and won’t shift between parties, if the Republicans managed to attract these demographics, they’d be in the same position that Mr. Feehery claims the Democrats are now in. They’d suddenly have people in their party who didn’t match the current party platform: socially conservative, fiscally conservative, pro-gun, anti-abortion, anti-immigration. Mr. Feehrey is a victim of survivorship bias. He looks at his party and says “hey, we’re all aligned” but that’s because largely the people left in his party are those that shared the very narrow party platform. Everyone else, the “non-survivors”, have been driven out.
So, sure, Democrats have a splintered party and they must sometimes compromise to maintain their voting bloc. This somehow makes the alternative that the Republicans (who he superbly understates as “having their fair share of problems”) are offering workable? Hey, these people didn’t vote for you for some reason… presumably because the things that the party ideals were against outweighed the elements of the party that people were for.
Which is the case with me, I’d probably be a Republican (I LOVE fiscal conservatism) except that Republicans are a disaster (in my opinion) on personal liberties. I have chosen larger government, and more taxes, as an acceptable evil in exchange for a party that is willing to provide more social freedoms. Anyway, I digress…
If you’ve got a situation which you deride someone else for failing at (or setting themselves up for failure at), and think that it’d work for you… take another looksie. If it is failing, it is failing for a reason. Just cause you could be running the show instead of them doesn’t get rid of the underlying problem. This commentator’s entire argument appears to be “the pendulum will swing back” and from that one can reasonably conclude that it’d swing back yet again after that, and again, and again, and again, because nobody is actually solving the problem of why the splintered party doesn’t work.
Maybe it’d be better to be a minority, but at least a unified minority. Maybe it’d be better to serve some customers really well than to serve many customers marginally…
