The Biggest Speed Bump For The GOP In Creating A Post MAGA Party

We get the government we deserve

I just wrote an article about reporting that quite a few traditional GOP power players are already plotting very quietly about the first steps to take to start cleaning up the MAGA mess after a likely Trump blowout loss in November, and taking their party back. And since Traitor Tot and the Hillbilly Imbecile are radio silent again today. I want to look at the mechanics of that a little closer.

James Carville nailed it today when he said that if you want to change the culture of a party, you have to blow them out. If a corrupt or out of touch party keeps losing close elections, then the logic tends to be, We don’t need a full-blown douche, we just need to tweak the message. Nothing starts the soul searching more than an electoral blowout.

As was pointed out today by Chris Hayes on MSNBC, the GOP has won the national vote tally once in the last eight election cycles, and that was a narrow George W Bush victory in 2004. But they weren’t blowouts, so they kept tweaking.

By the Romney loss in 2012, they had lost 5-6 national tallies, and then RNC Chair saw the handwriting on the wall. Priebus authorized the infamous 2012 GOP Autopsy Report, which called for a total revamp of the party and would take two cycles to complete. Loath to lose four cycles in a row, the RNC ditched Priebus and with the same old sh*t with Trump in 2016. When Trump won, the shortsighted RNC was jubilant, since now they could put off the overhaul until 2024.

Let’s stick with 2016 for a moment. Hillary Clinton won the national tally by more than three million votes, but lost the electoral college in a squeaker. None of that sh*t mattered to the base. Any Clinton loss was considered a blowout, mainly because the younger, more progressive base was sick to death of the old guard running the show.

Then former President Obama did the perfect thing. He stepped back, put his hands up palms out, and said, My name is Paul, and this is between y’all. He left them wandering in the wilderness like the Fuqawi Tribe. It wasn’t his job, he was out. Let them figure it out.

They did. The younger, more progressive base, which was now ascendent decided that enough was enough. In 2018 they took to the polls in the primaries en masse, and a whole bunch of senior House leadership got their heads handed to them. The 40-seat blowout in 2018 was so prominent that new Speaker Nancy Pelosi had no choice but to enter into a power sharing agreement with the young Turks, tutoring the more qualified into party leadership roles. And today the transition is complete. The Democrats are ready to lead for the next 20 years at least.

But here’s the McGuffin. The progressive wave wasn’t made by the Blue Tsunami of November. The battle was actually fought, and the war won when the motivated younger progressives stormed the ballot boxes in the primaries and got them on the ballot so that they could vote for them in November, and start the transition. Biden likes to brag that You grow the economy from the bottom up, and the middle out. And the same is true of changing the internal structure of a party, it all starts with the primaries.

Which is where these high mucky-mucks in the mainstream GOP are going to run into trouble when they start trying to clean up the sh*tstorm that Traitor Tot and his MAGAt’s left behind. Because they can hose down the walls and ceilings with Clorox and scrub it all down squeaky clean, but all that does is to put a different shade of lipstick on the same stinky pig.

If they want to restore sanity to the moderate GOP party, then the first thing they have to do is what the progressive Democratic base did all by itself. The most important job they have is to motivate the moderate GOP base!

Because it all starts with the primaries. The new GOP is still going to be rife with MAGA howler monkeys, throwing sh*t balls all over the place. Sea slugs like Machine Gun Marjie, Gym Bag Jordan, MAGA Mike Johnson, Grupenfuhrer Gosar, Pistol Packin’ Lauren and Bratty Matty Gaetz. And most of them are already in safely gerrymandered districts.

The Post Trump moderate GOP base of the party will likely be the majority. But if the new leadership of the moderate GOP can’t motivate their moderate base to show up for the primaries to vote for generational change, then when November rolls around, all that shiny new moderate majority is going to have to vote for is Democrats, or the same old MAGA pond scum.

If it sounds like I’m rooting for the bad guys here, I am. We don’t have a parliamentary system here, we have a two-party system. And it takes two healthy parties in opposition to save us from the tyrannical excesses of Project 2025. Besides, in order to attract the new moderate GOP base, moderate conservative candidates are going to have to come up with policies and positions that are attractive to moderate conservatives. And not only is that sunlight to the MAGA vampire, but it will tend to elevate the all-around political discourse to issues rather than personalities. And that is how a democracy is supposed to work, and we’ve gone far too long without it.

I thank you for the privilege of your time.