{"id":1821,"date":"2014-11-25T08:12:50","date_gmt":"2014-11-25T15:12:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/?p=1821"},"modified":"2016-08-03T13:45:06","modified_gmt":"2016-08-03T20:45:06","slug":"the-gop-establishment-the-tea-party-and-2016-hugh-hewitt-11-10-14","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/2014\/11\/25\/the-gop-establishment-the-tea-party-and-2016-hugh-hewitt-11-10-14\/","title":{"rendered":"The GOP Establishment, the Tea Party and 2016| Hugh Hewitt |11.10.14"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sunday\u2019s\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0ran this top of the fold, front-page headline (left column, meaning the number two story of the day), \u201cBefore Battling Democrats, GOP is Fighting Itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

To some extent\u00a0The Times<\/em>\u00a0was trying to stoke the flames of Republican division. Even so, the Tea Party v. the Establishment is all the buzz in Washington just now.\u00a0 Will the Republicans rip themselves apart before Mitch McConnell even takes up the reins of the Senate majority leader?\u00a0 Inquiring minds want to know.<\/p>\n

To be sure, GOP division is only one of a number of capital-city cocktail-party and Starbuck\u2019s conversation obsessions in the aftermath of last Tuesday\u2019s blow out.\u00a0 On the Left in particular (and this town is mainly Left) there is talk of the president\u2019s failures as a communicator and a leader, of his disengagement even from allies in his own party and, beyond the transience of personalities, of the shortcomings of the U.S. Constitution.<\/p>\n

Of course, the American Left has been fighting an underground war against the Constitution for several decades.\u00a0 But the Democrats’ left wing is more out in the open about their opposition to our constitutional system now than ever before.\u00a0 They were fine with the Senate until they lost it.\u00a0 Now we hear hints of abolishing it.\u00a0 The House with its gerrymandering is not much better, they say. They have been for doing away with the Electoral College at least since Bush v. Gore, despite the chaos that national direct elections would inevitably produce (for more on that question, please go here:\u00a0http:\/\/bit.ly\/1GHk0wK<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Still, this weekend, such Left-generated issues were on the back burner.\u00a0 The big story was the supposedly impending GOP civil war.\u00a0 But is it civil war, or is it reverting a mean?<\/p>\n

With the exception of recent times, the history of the GOP has been of ongoing tension between reformers and establishments.<\/p>\n

The party began as an alliance of Northern Whigs (establishment) and Abolitionists (reformers), not groups that easily got along but that in alliance proved enormously consequential.\u00a0 They won the Civil War, ended slavery and set the stage for the nation\u2019s emergence as the world\u2019s preeminent industrial power.\u00a0 Consider what the global history of the 20th\u00a0Century would have been like had they not united and prevailed in 1860 and numerous elections after that.<\/p>\n

By the 1880s, the reformers of an earlier time had become mainstream and joined the establishment of the era.\u00a0 New anti-corruption reform elements led by a young Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge among others began contending for party position.\u00a0 Their ultimate legacy became an executive branch that was \u2013 thanks to reforms like establishing a merit-based civil service \u2014 far more honest and capable of commanding public confidence than what had preceded it.<\/p>\n

By 1900, anti-corruption had extended beyond issues like replacing the spoils systems to Progressivism\u2019s emphasis on regulating large corporations.\u00a0 The McKinley-TR ticket of that year represented an establishment-reform rapprochement. Roosevelt\u2019s emphasis as president on anti-trust and the passage of the Food and Drug Act in 1906 were fruits of that era\u2019s reform movement.<\/p>\n

The Coolidge-Hoover division of the late 1920s might have been the initial sign of a fresh reformer-establishment split, but, if so, the successive crises of the Depression, followed by World War II, followed by the Cold War changed national and Republican politics for nearly two generations.\u00a0 Not until William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan came forward in the late 1950s and early 1960s did a new reform movement emerge in the party, this time seeing the machinery of excessive government rather than the major corporations of the Progressive Era as the new corruption.<\/p>\n

And not until Ronald Reagan\u2019s election did the party\u2019s reformers and establishment unite, producing the most fruitful GOP alliance since Lincoln\u2019s.\u00a0 The economy roared into the strongest and most sustained peacetime growth in American history.\u00a0 Constitutionalism was at least partially restored to the courts.\u00a0 The Cold War was won.<\/p>\n

Today, as so often in the past, the establishment includes many who were reformers during GOP reform\u2019s last wave \u2013 the new Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, for example. And as often in the past, pace is the real issue, not direction.\u00a0 All Republicans are reformers now.<\/p>\n

Looking to 2016, here is the lesson I take from all this history.\u00a0 It is not just that we have been this way before.\u00a0 It is that the most successful GOP presidents, while coming from the reform wing of the party, have consistently been figures who could make peace with the establishment, bringing it into the reform fold.\u00a0 Lincoln did that.\u00a0 So did TR \u2013 and Reagan.<\/p>\n

Creating a reform-establishment alliance and preparing it to win the White House \u2013 this is the great political task of the next two years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sunday\u2019s\u00a0New York Times\u00a0ran this top of the fold, front-page headline (left column, meaning the number two story of the day), \u201cBefore Battling Democrats, GOP is Fighting Itself.\u201d To some extent\u00a0The Times\u00a0was trying to stoke the flames of Republican division. Even so, the Tea Party v. the Establishment is all the buzz in Washington just now.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[12],"class_list":["post-1821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political-commentary-general","tag-hugh-hewitt"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1821"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1821\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1915,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1821\/revisions\/1915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}