Since I started following US politics in the 1990s, 1 simple heuristic has been the most reliable guide: the GOP, at every juncture or decision point, will do/say/be the worst possible thing. The bulk of analytical errors in punditry trace to ignoring or doubting that heuristic.https://twitter.com/ATVSPoseur/status/1223317762061340674 …
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Despite this heuristic being 100% reliable for decades now, it still hasn't sunk in -- certainly not in the center-left or in mainstream media or punditry. "Will the GOP do the worst possible thing?" is still treated as an open, even controversial question. But ... they will!
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So if you want to impress your pundit friends, just think, "given the current situation, what is the worst, most venal, most short-sighted, most cruel thing Republicans could do?" And then predict they'll do that. Voi la: you're a prophet!
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One final thing on this: it's worth noting that no one has been more consistently surprised by the devolution of the GOP than center-right and "moderate" Rs. Their proximity to the party did not help them see it more clearly. If anything, the opposite is true.
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I still think about the head of the WA GOP, who left the party after Trump won and, in his own words, expected a parade of good-faith Republicans to follow him. But he turned around and...there was no one. He was blindsided by the nature of the party *he helped run*.
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Last, last thing: if you want to see the ultimate example of how liberals have deceived themselves about the nature of the GOP...watch West Wing. Arnold Vinick is the Republican of the center-left imagination, a fantasy they mistook for reality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Vinick …
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Last, last, last thing: worth remembering that people who DO accurately diagnose the GOP have consistently been marginalized as "partisan extremists." Being correct over & over & over again has done approximately nothing to diminish this dynamic; it is still operative.
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One episode that illustrates my point: the GOP's famous post-2012-election "autopsy." It lamented an increasingly old, white party & recommended reaching out to minorities, women, & young people -- and, specifically, softening on immigration.https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/03/what-you-need-to-read-in-the-rnc-election-autopsy-report/274112/ …
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Those of us with an appropriately dismal view of the GOP looked at those recommendations & immediately concluded they were fanciful nonsense, that there was too much gathered momentum toward white identity politics for elites to be able to engineer a course correction.
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But it was *exactly* what VSPs & mainstream pundits wanted to hear, exactly the GOP they'd been imagining for so long, so they heralded it as a turning point. We know how that turned out: the dirty hippies were correct, the VSPs biffed it again, & no one learned anything.
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