It’s almost 2014. Almost time for another mid-term election that’s going to pit the MNGOP – the party of plucky volunteers, creative fundraisers and circular firing squads – against the Minnesota DFL, the policy body on whose narrative’s behalf the Unions, the non-profits, the trial bar, the media, the Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota and a whooole lot of plutocrats with deep pockets and deeper white liberal guilt spend millions and millions and millions of dollars and hours of paid labor.
The Minnesota GOP has always been a party of uneasy factions – although it really became an issue after about 1994, when the Reagan Revolution finally poked its nose out into the Minnesota cold.
The GOP has quite a few factions these days:
- The “Liberty” Movement. The “Ron Paul” clique took the party by storm in 2012 with a very effective organization – and, arguably, waned badly by the end of the year, as people realized that some parts of the organization -some (by no means all) of their delegates to the 2012 RNC in Tampa, the leadership in CD5 and CD4 – were more interested in sticking it to the GOP than going after the DFL. Maybe they waned as their activists walked away. Maybe they’re keeping their powder dry. Maybe the dumb ones went away and the smart ones – like most of the “Liberty” activists in CD2, or my own SD65, among others – focused their energies on actually winning elections. Either way, they’re a faction. As, for that matter, is the more-mainstream but equally liberty-conscious “Liberty Caucus”…
- The Tea Party – The wave of activists that came out, in many cases for the first time, in the wake of Obamacare. They’ve had a disproportionate impact on the GOP; many of the most effective conservatives in the Legislature came from the Tea Party class of 2010 and 2012; go ahead, count the number of Tea Party candidates on the Taxpayers League’s Best Friends of the Taxpayers list. The Tea Party class of 2010 drove the GOP to the right – which was a very good thing.
- The Social Conservatives – They’re out there. They don’t get much press these days – the media has moved on to calling fiscalcons “extremists” these days – but there are enough pro-lifers, traditional marriage supporters and anti-stem-cell people to sway endorsements in a good chunk of Minnesota. They aren’t the power bloc they used to be, but they are still important – and not just at endorsement time.
- “Moderates”: We know they exist – the media keeps telling us so. And someone voted for Tom Horner. Seriously? I may have met two Republicans in the past decade who still pine for the days of Arne Carlson. But the GOP still has the likes of Jim Abeler, in whose district the conventional wisdom says he’s the most conservative candidate who can win (as it once said about Steve Smith and Connie Doepke and Geoff Michel; the conventional wisdom was right once…), and places like Minneapolis and Saint Paul where that same conventional wisdom says that the likes of Norm Coleman and Cam Winton are the most conservative candidates who have a shot at actually winning elections. And the record shows they have a point.
- The Establishment: Who are “the Establishment?” Good question. “The Establishment”, as cited by the Liberty clique in 2012, sometimes seems a bit like Keyser Soze; everyone’s heard of it, but nobody’s seen it. Who is “the establishment?” I’ve been called “the establishment”, as recently as last winter at my “Liberty”-dominated Senate District. Near as I can tell, “The Establishment” is the network of big-money donors that have been the party’s fiscal major muscles. Pragmatic, not especially invested in any ideology, infuriating to the people in all the factions above for whom principle reigns and pragmatism comes in a distant second if it shows up at all.
The Liberty movement likes to claim that the GOP can not win without it. There’s a germ of truth to that. The GOP needs the Liberty crowd’s numbers – and Liberty movement will never win anything on its own, either.
Beyond that? None of the GOP’s factions is worth anything on its own; all of them are minorities within a large minority in this state.
And as long as the factions are bickering with each other, there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell the Party is going to be of any use helping candidates reach out to enough undecideds, “independents” and newcomers to activism to help them get to the majority.
And the shame of it is, the factions do agree on almost everything!
The Party – as in, the office full of functionaries down at 225 Park Avenue, kitty corner from the Capitol – needs to hold a “meeting of the five families”. They need – in my humble opinion – to get the leadership of the various factions together to agree to put aside the things they disagree on (in public, anyway), and focus on the things that do, in fact, tie us together as a party. Which involves negotiating – something most of the factions eschew – but negotiating with an aim toward changing the state’s (and the party’s) political climate so that all of the factions have a shot at making the difference they want to make.
This might mean carving up some “turf”, ideologically. It might also mean all of the factions realizing that even if you’re a liberty Republican or a pro-lifer, having a Tea Partier or a business-first conservative in office is going to be a better proposition for your cause than, say, two chambers full of Paul Thissens.
Idealistic? Sure. I’m a conservative in Saint Paul. Idealism keeps me alive.
Pollyannaish? About as Pollyannaish as Don Corleone’s “meeting of the five families”; the MNGOP’s fratricidal bloodletting is a waste of everyone’s time and effort.
Making the GOP effective means finding a way to get the major factions to work together against the real enemy.
That’d be the DFL, for the benefit of some people I’ve met lately.
And – just a quick poll here – how has two years of circular firing squad done us any favors?
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