The Republican Party’s Last Burp of Hope | Hacker News Reader

The Republican Party’s Last Burp of Hope

jeremiahlee.com

2 pointsjeremiahlee7 comments

I don't think partisan "party X sucks" posts are helpful.

Sean Trende's book "The Lost Majority: Why the Future of Government Is Up for Grabs and Who Will Take It" made the point that there are no permanent majorities in politics, because losing parties adapt.

"This time it's different" comments are always suspect, but there's a reason to think it is different this time -- though in the opposite direction of TFA.

The closest thing to "permanent" in American politics is the Supreme Court, and it belongs to one party for the rest of my lifetime. The Supreme Court's power is indirect, but it's absolute: the Constitution means what they say it means.

And that makes them the final say in who gets elected. They can nearly always find a reading of the Constitution as a fig leaf for the outcome they want.

That includes determining who will choose their successors. They don't usually apply that indiscriminately, but as of now there's no reason not to. There is no appeal.

Eventually the demographics may change who makes up the party. But as a matter of partisanship, the opposition is now irrelevant. Even if they have a short-term win next week, it won't suffice to change the permanent nature of the composition of the Supreme Court. It's different this time because there's no adaptation that can suffice to overcome that thumb on the scale of every future decision.

I presented much data on how Republicans are failing to adapt to Millennials' beliefs and how Millennials will require the Republican party to adapt.

I agree parties have evolved greatly over time. The point I state in the article is that the Republican Party does not seem to be making any accommodation of younger and racially/ethnically diverse electorate that are now the majority of voting age adults for the time in a presidential election.

Why should they change? They won last time, and the demographics haven't changed radically in four years.

They don't need to adapt in policy. They can simply adapt in the mechanics. They've done their best to exclude those demographics from the ability to vote. Should any of those exclusions be questioned, they now have a large majority of justices to affirm that they are legal.

It doesn't matter that they're a majority. The circumstances have been rigged to allow a minority to rule, and having done so, to continue to set the circumstances to entrench that power. That move has finally become complete and it doesn't matter what millennials want.

correction: largest generation of voting age adults, not majority

This makes the common and terrible assumption that humans don't change as they age. The fact that Millennials seem more to the left of Boomers is presumed to mean that the country will move left as the Boomers die. We must remember that the Boomers were those 1960s leftist radicals. Some day, decades from now, the Millennials will be elderly and conservative.

Another bad assumption is that party platforms don't change, and that the current alliances will be forever unchanged.

I cited a study in the article showing Millennials have gotten more liberal over the first (almost) 2 decades of adulthood.

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