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baseballcrank's profile
Dan McLaughlin
Dan McLaughlin
Dan McLaughlin
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@baseballcrank

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Dan McLaughlinVerified account

@baseballcrank

Senior Writer @NRO. Reaganite, Catholic, Mets fan, ex-lawyer. Opinions 100% my own, but you can share them. Not the Cardinals broadcaster.

New York
nationalreview.com/author/dan-mcl…
Joined May 2009

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    Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

    Dan McLaughlin Retweeted Nate Bell

    Also, the Whigs couldn't apply their founding principles to new circumstances because the Whigs didn't have any founding principles. There were principled Whigs and a Whig agenda, but there was no agreed set of Whig principles. eg, the party's embarrassed incoherence on slavery.https://twitter.com/NateBell4AR/status/1152217017405100033 …

    Dan McLaughlin added,

    Nate BellVerified account @NateBell4AR
    Replying to @baseballcrank
    The Republican Party rose from the ashes of the Whig Party, which refused to adapt to changing circumstances. It died for the same reason.
    7:05 AM - 19 Jul 2019
    • 28 Retweets
    • 114 Likes
    • Paul Barton David Limbaugh Joan Scanlan The Boudica Police Protect White Supremacy ✊🏾 cc Literally Sean Bannon kc2fargo 🇩🇴X Factor🇩🇴 0-2
    11 replies 28 retweets 114 likes
      1. New conversation
      2. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

        Republicans are different. Unlike the Whigs, unlike the Federalists, unlike the Democrats, Republicans were explicitly founded around a set of ideas rather than just an agenda or a collection of interest groups. Those ideas have both defined & disciplined the party for 160 years.

        14 replies 10 retweets 56 likes
        Show this thread
      3. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

        Nobody who knows the history of the Republican Party would claim that it has always been 100% faithful to its founding principles, or that it has been immune to catering to its constituent groups or pandering to baser voter sentiment. But the gravitational force of ideas matters.

        2 replies 5 retweets 56 likes
        Show this thread
      4. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

        The Democratic Party has veered all over the place in terms of ideology & which voters' resentments & rent-seeking it is catering to at any given time or place. But its history as a collection of interest groups nakedly pursuing their own narrow agendas is the real continuity.

        2 replies 12 retweets 69 likes
        Show this thread
      5. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

        Republican history is, by contrast, far more consistent over time back to the 1850s - in outlook, culture, and temperament as well as ideas - than is typically acknowledged. What is portrayed as Republican change is often simply the contrast presented by Democratic shifts.

        88 replies 23 retweets 103 likes
        Show this thread
      6. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

        The challenge in the Trump era is preserving the things that kept the Republican Party constrained by, even inspired by, its founding principles for a century and a half. Elements like Trump were there from the start, but the party's never been led by them.

        7 replies 10 retweets 55 likes
        Show this thread
      7. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

        Anybody who tells you that Lincoln's party would not have tolerated Know-Nothing nativists in its ranks is historically illiterate. The party forged a majority by doing literally that. Lincoln despised the Know-Nothings, but kept his mouth shut, had an ex-Know-Nothing as his AG.

        5 replies 11 retweets 64 likes
        Show this thread
      8. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

        The early Republicans believed in the Lockean right to keep the fruits of one's own labors, & that the Founding principles applied to all Americans. They were also American nationalists, Christian moralists, & riven by ferocious internal quarrels over immigration & nativism.

        5 replies 13 retweets 65 likes
        Show this thread
      9. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

        Lincoln was partly concern-trolling in claiming the label of "conservative," which in his era was more associated with European throne-and-altar reactionaries. But he was sincere in arguing that Burkean fealty to the tried & familiar was in the Republican bloodstream from Day 1.

        4 replies 7 retweets 43 likes
        Show this thread
      10. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

        And Lincoln was an originalist. His critique of Dred Scott was not that Taney shouldn't have looked to original meaning in deciding who could be a citizen, but that Taney had his history wrong: black men had fought in the Revolution, voted to ratify the Constitution.

        5 replies 6 retweets 53 likes
        Show this thread
      11. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

        But the same Republicans who were all but unanimous in wanting the 14th Amendment to overrule Dred Scott & secure citizenship to black Americans, were also divided over whether to extend that citizenship to, say, Chinese immigrants, & mostly opposed it for the Plains Indians.

        4 replies 9 retweets 48 likes
        Show this thread
      12. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

        Grant's record on moral & religious issues reflected the Midwestern Protestant moralism of his party's culture, the tensions it created with the party's universal principles, & how that moralism sometimes dovetailed with nativism.pic.twitter.com/pZyyGBZdYr

        1 reply 5 retweets 34 likes
        Show this thread
      13. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

        The small-businessman/self-employed-farmer/tradesman as icon, central to Lincoln's concept of a 'right to rise' in the world, runs as a straight line through the Homestead Act, McKinley, Coolidge, Reagan, even the 2012 Romney campaign's reaction to "you didn't build that."

        2 replies 6 retweets 45 likes
        Show this thread
      14. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

        Progressivism ran its course within the GOP under TR & Taft, even re-emerged as a kind of managerial ethos (Hoover, Ike, Romney). But it never attained the kind of radicalism as in the Democratic Party of Woodrow Wilson & his heirs. TR went radical only when he left in 1912.

        4 replies 6 retweets 43 likes
        Show this thread
      15. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

        The progressive Republicanism of the TR/Taft era, which John McCain much admired, was ultimately a small-businessman rebellion against big-business gigantism. A truly anti-business posture could not gain traction in the Republican Party of any era.

        1 reply 11 retweets 47 likes
        Show this thread
      16. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

        Dan McLaughlin Retweeted Josiah Neeley  🤔

        I would not go that far, but the combination of pro-business & nationalist elements in the GOP have been pro-tariff at least as often as they've been pro-free-trade. The Reagan-Bush-Bush era was the high watermark of free trade in the GOP.https://twitter.com/jneeley78/status/1152226718649868289 …

        Dan McLaughlin added,

        Josiah Neeley  🤔 @jneeley78
        Replying to @baseballcrank
        Sure. For example, support for a protective tariff has been a core principle of the Republican Party throughout most of its history, albeit with occasional lapses.
        2 replies 5 retweets 37 likes
        Show this thread
      17. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

        Another area where the GOP has had internal tensions from the outset: Lincoln was a law-and-order guy, horrified by mobs & John Brown-style vigilantes. He was like John Adams - not Sam Adams. But the libertarian, my-land-my-gun ethos was vibrant in Bleeding Kansas.

        2 replies 6 retweets 40 likes
        Show this thread
      18. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

        Republicans were never really averse, even in Lincoln & Grant's day, to pandering to a variety of deplorable sentiments. But their inability to compete with Democrats on naked identity politics & urban machinery has likewise been a constant for generations.

        6 replies 9 retweets 38 likes
        Show this thread
      19. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

        The continuity between the Republicans' inability to crack the D unity of white Southerners between 1850s-1920s & their inabillity to crack the D unity of African-Americans in recent decades is likewise wired into the two parties' styles of addressing identity-politics issues.

        3 replies 7 retweets 30 likes
        Show this thread
      20. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

        "The parties flipped" is a misleading shorthand: the Democrats gradually stopped pandering to a group that was leaving the party, & started pandering to a group that was entering, while the GOP in both cases was playing catch-up. Dems didn't change tactics, just targets.

        5 replies 16 retweets 53 likes
        Show this thread
      21. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

        Has the influx of ex-Democrats, or more typically the children of Democrats, in the South changed the Republican Party? Sure. But the sources of continuity remain. And even Trump has more in common with the Know-Nothings, John Bell, or Andrew Johnson than he does w/1850s Dems.

        3 replies 5 retweets 31 likes
        Show this thread
      22. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

        Republican growth in the South didn't flip on a dime. It started rumbling in 1928 (Al Smith) & 1938 (Court-packing, 2d New Deal), grew organically outward from ancestral Republican sectors of VA, TN, TX, wasn't really completed until this decade. 1st GOP POTUS to crack it? Ike.

        4 replies 6 retweets 38 likes
        Show this thread
      23. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

        Some Republicans have been more welcoming to immigration than others, some did better in the Northeast. Some immigrant groups were GOP. But broadly speaking, since the mid-19th century the Democrats & not the Rs have been the party of the big cities & recent arrivals.

        1 reply 6 retweets 28 likes
        Show this thread
      24. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

        The fact that Democrats were simultaneously the party of big, urban machines full of immigrants *and* the party of slave plantations only makes sense once you accept the transactional rather than principled nature of the D party. The same dynamic explains Joe Biden in the 1970s.

        4 replies 19 retweets 54 likes
        Show this thread
      25. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

        Fernando Wood, the Tammany Hall Democrat Mayor of New York, wanted NYC to secede from the Union with the slave states, & opposed the 13th Amendment. Upstate New York was full of abolitionist Republicans like William Seward; the City remained Democratic.

        1 reply 8 retweets 35 likes
        Show this thread
      26. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

        Given the longstanding nature of each of the 2 parties, the answer today for frustrated Republicans is not to join the Democrats, who will never be the party that stands for the general interest or the classical liberal, Lockean principles of the American Founding.

        4 replies 11 retweets 50 likes
        Show this thread
      27. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

        The answer, instead, is to stay and fight for the long, proud legacy of those principle in the Republican Party. Every great Republican leader had to accept compromises of those principles & adapt them to new times, but we can always return to them. They haven't left, even now.

        11 replies 12 retweets 53 likes
        Show this thread
      28. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

        I have a second set of thoughts to maybe append here later, but I'll leave off here for now. Keep the faith, and never let anybody tell you it's not a faith worth keeping.

        7 replies 4 retweets 35 likes
        Show this thread
      29. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

        Dan McLaughlin Retweeted Heather Cox Richardson (TDPR)

        So far, an hour later, this is only one Tweet, but it seems likely from the framing of the initial Tweet that it's going to completely ignore everything I actually wrote, from the broad themes to the specific examples to the numerous caveats.https://twitter.com/HC_Richardson/status/1152241043573825538 …

        Dan McLaughlin added,

        Heather Cox Richardson (TDPR)Verified account @HC_Richardson
        Cherry-picked versions of GOP history argue that the party has been unchanging in its support for black rights and ordinary Americans, but that's just not right. The long history of the GOP has been both glorious- as they argue- and sordid. Let's have a look, shall we? /1 https://twitter.com/baseballcrank/status/1152220958041812992 …
        Show this thread
        14 replies 4 retweets 26 likes
        Show this thread
      30. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

        Nearly all of the focus of "the parties switched" narrative is on the South, & there are reasons for that, but it impoverishes history to just ignore the whole rest of the country. Moreover, even the South is not a monolith. Let's look at the presidential vote in the South.

        3 replies 5 retweets 18 likes
        Show this thread
      31. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

        I'll use R vote share rather than 2-party vote share for these purposes; both have their uses, but the challenge for Republicans for years was to get a hearing with white Southerners, even when they started abandoning Ds.

        1 reply 3 retweets 12 likes
        Show this thread
      32. Show replies

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