Republicans - The Party of Ideas

In early July (2014) the New York Times Sunday Magazine had a long feature article about all the new think tanks full of Republicans developing new substantive ideas.  The Republican's have evidently woken up to the fact just saying no to Democratic ideas isn't enough for voters, outside the reddest of red states.

After reviewing the ideas discussed in the article it is apparant the Republican notion of new ideas is to take problems the Democrats have been harping about for years and find "Republican" solutions.

Conservative Republicans have the same deeply flawed approach to addressing policy problem that left wing Democrats have.  Both ends of the political spectrum start with an narrow view of reality then build their policy ideas based on the their false notion that their view of the world reflects the totality of reality.  For Republicans its "business good, government bad."  For the left wing its "business bad, government good."

The left wing of the Democratic party has had a hard time being taken seriously the last few decades but the right wing of the Republican party is still a force in American politics.

However Republicans have a lot of history to overcome before I will spend my time seriously considering their new ideas.  

Back around the end of World War I Republican's used support for Prohibition, coupled with "fresh" ideas about cutting taxes and regulations and enacting business friendly laws to sell voters on trusting them and grab and control Congress, which they held from 1919 to 1933.  We went through a business boom where the stock market went wild, the housing market went wild, the rich got richer and the rest got poorer, then the 1929 Stock market crash ushered in the Great Depression.  But the time the Republicans lost control of government in 1933 the country was on its knees.

Voters remembered that, so Republican's were a minority party for the next 40 years, but as those voters died off the Republican parties influence began to rise again.  By the 1980's the conventional wisdom (still unquestioned today) was that the Republican party was again "the party of ideas". In the mid-1990's they used their glossy list of nice sounding new ideas to gain control of Congress and over the next decade or so enacted many of the same ideas they sold the country on back in 1919 (dragging along Democratic politicians who knew which way the wind was blowing).  Again we had a steady diet of tax cuts, business friendly laws, and cuts in government's ability to regulate economic activity.  Securities markets took off, the price of housing took off.  A quote from a 1980's movie that "greed is good" went from ironic in the movie to a hallowed truth in Congress. 

As voters finally ushered the Republican Congressional majority out the door in 2007 we were sliding into the biggest financial collapse since the the Great Depression, the greatest concentration of wealth in the hands of a few since the Great Depression, the housing market had become a casino for speculation, and unemployment had risen to levels not seen for decades.

History suggests Republican's are much better at marketing ideas than actually coming up with workable ones.

I just don't want to waste time on ideas from either end of the poltical spectrum that grow out of simplistic views of the world rooted in an emotional commitment to a particular ideology.