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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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    1. 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.
      11 replies 28 retweets 114 likes
      Show this thread
    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 52 likes
      Show this thread
      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.

      7:33 AM - 19 Jul 2019
      • 9 Retweets
      • 48 Likes
      • Paul Barton Rebecca Wilova Sneedy K. James Goeglein Mary H-D Mark Woodlief (he/him/y'all) Jon Voos Justin Kennedy ✝️ Havilah Vaskeritchin
      4 replies 9 retweets 48 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. 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
        3. 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
        4. 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
        5. 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
        6. 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
        7. 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
        8. 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
        9. 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
        10. 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
        11. 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
        12. 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
        13. 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
        14. 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
        15. 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
        16. 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
        17. 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
        18. 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
        19. 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
        20. 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
        21. 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
        22. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

          "Deep South"=FL/GA/AL/MS/LA "Border South"=TX/TN/VA/AR "Border States"=MD/DE/MO/KY/WV. The two latter had mostly caught up to the nation in R vote share by Ike's time. The Border South states shifted sharply R between 1940-52.pic.twitter.com/ZAf1KS8whz

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

          The Deep South was also trending more R by the mid-1940s, but its wild swings from 1964-80 are (unlike the Border South states) more directly attributable to the Dixiecrat 3d party vote & the Southern swing back to Carter. In 1980, the Deep South was still less R than the USA.

          1 reply 4 retweets 14 likes
          Show this thread
        24. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

          This, too, is an incomplete picture, however; you have to drill into downticket races like the House & state legislatures to see the long trajectory of Republicans breaking through with white Southerners, much of which was generational & tracked the region's economic progress.

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

          I've written at more length some years ago about the seductive oversimplicity of the "Southern Strategy" mythos, which simply assumes that there are no such thing as national security issues, economic issues, or non-racial social issues. http://baseballcrank.com/archives2/2012/07/politicshistory_6.php …

          6 replies 7 retweets 25 likes
          Show this thread
        26. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

          The behavior of the various Dixiecrat politicians after 1965-68 illustrates my view of the continuities of the two parties' patterns of behavior. Dixiecrats were, as a group, pandering populists. You'd expect their behavior to track what they believed would win them votes.

          2 replies 3 retweets 13 likes
          Show this thread
        27. Dan McLaughlin‏Verified account @baseballcrank 19 Jul 2019

          Some of the Dixiecrats who stayed in the D party - the guys Biden was buddy-up with in the 70s - stayed mostly unrepentant, yet won plenty of black votes. Why? Because Democrats are a coalition party. Go back & read some of the NAACP statements in that era.

          10 replies 6 retweets 16 likes
          Show this thread
        28. End of conversation

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