Own Goal.
So we often hear people desribe mistakes made as 'own goals' but i think it's appropriate here to discuss the subject at length before getting into the topic. So we'll look at two sports: soccer and basketball.
So imagine you're a soccer player and you've got the ball and your runnning the ball towards the goal.You're feeling like a G.O.D because none of the opposing teams are getting anywhere near you. As you close in on the goal, the goalee is waving his arms at you and eventually tries to charge you. You expect this from a goalie because that's their job. But you are running like a G.O.D and one goalie isn't going to stop you. After all, you outran the entire opposing team.
Finally you shake the goalie and boom, ball into the net. GOAAAAAAAAAAALLL.
Victory!
Yet there is a lot of booing going on. Why? Members of your team catch up to you and they are mad as hell. It then dawns on you. You put the ball into your own teams goal and scored a point for the opposing team. It never occured to you that the reason that you were running like a G.O.D is because the opposing team was happy to let you score a point for them. You were so blinded by your G.O.D status that you failed to notice that the goalie was your OWN TEAMMATE who was trying to get you to stop.
No, you were too hung up on yourself to realize that you were playing the wrong side.
This is the institutional GOP. They are the player thinking that they are running like a G.O.D because they are running the ball into their own goal. The base of the GOP is the lone goalie trying to warn the party that they are going in the totally wrong direction.
Another thing to note is that in soccer game scores are very low. Single digit low. an own goal may be the ONLY goal of the game. Even if a gam manages to get to 3, an own goal could be anywhere from 30 to 100% of scores made. Own goaling is a devastating thing in soccer.
Imagine a similar scenario in basketball. In basketball scores often reach 100+. A single "own goal" would be 2-3% of the the total score. One would think that in such a small percent, relative to soccer wouldn't impact the game. Yet how many basketball games are determined by a single shot before the buzzer? So indeed even though an "own goal" in basketball would appear to be inconsequential and one could argue that the rest of the game has far more of an impact on actual wins, in the end, when the game is close that own goal could very well be the difference between winning and losing.
This is also a reflection on the establishment GOP. They have been own goaling in the basketball sense so often that they thought it was inconsequential to the final outcome. They own goaled on business, immigration policy, education policy, right to bear arms policy, homosexual marriage, etc.
The current GOP is essentially what the Democratic party was maybe 15 years ago and maybe more like 20. For all their talk about Reagan, the GOP of the Reagan era wouldn't recognize 2021 GOP.
Which brings us to the topic. I don't usually watch MSM. When I do watch it, it is because it's on somewhere. In this case I saw Christine Todd Whitman being interviewed by a "Journalist" where she made a bold lie of a statement that went unchallenged because she was own goaling and they were happy to allow her to do so. She said:
I think the country does better with two strong parties, two major parties, a center left and a center right. And the Republicans have clearly been captured by Donald Trump. I mean those who still identify as Republican. If you look at the trends in the voter registration, indepenents are what's growing, then come Democrats and Republicans come after that. And a lot of those independents are Republicans who feel lost. The party has gone away from them.
So the first myth is that you have a "center-right" and a "center left" party system. We do not. A Pew paper shows how much has changed:
"Center" may have been descriptive of 1994 politics but it most certainly doesn't describe 2017 and I'll guess that that the polarization is far greater now. But it's important to look at these graphs in terms of what Whitman thinks is the issue. Indeed if you limit your view to 2004 and 2017 you'll see a huge jumo in partisanship on both sides.
In the above I overlay the 2004 and 2017 charts. the lines show the medians for each party. Indeed both Democrats and Republicans "went to their corners" between 2004 and 2017 even though it's clear that "liberal" democrats outnumber conservative Republicans. So Whitman cannot be correct in thinking that this growth in independents is only due to the Republican party being taken over by Trump. But lets look at the comparison between 1994 and 2017:
You should note here that the Republican median has barely moved relative to the Democrat median. So while there has been a shift to the right there has a been a FAR FAR FAR greater shift in the Democratic party. A generous conclusion to draw from this comparison is that we have a center-right party and a FAR left party. If that is the case then Whitman and her ilk are woefully ignorant as to what the Democratic party actually is. If they think the Democratic party is "center-left" then the Republican party will simply drift left out of ignorance rather than calling out the Democratic party for what it appears to be: Far, FAR left.
More importantly, look at how many Republicans fall at the 1994 Democratic median. It's about 30%. In contrast, if 10% of Democrats fall at the 1994 OR 2017 Republican median that's a "large" number. This shows that it is indeed the case that for a large portion of the Republican party, they are the Democrats of yesteryear.
So for someone like me who could be described as a "1994" Democrat in the vein of Barbara Jordan, I do not recognize or support the current Democratic party and hence find myself more often supporting a Republican because the "moderate" Republican is most like the old Democrat.
This is what Whitman is clueless about. It's not Trump. A GOP that continually own-goals and capitulates to a party that is clearly far left is of no use to it's supporters. Trump was a warning shot to the establishment GOP that the own-goaling needs to stop. Whitman simply wants to keep own-goaling and Democrats will give her all their platforms to do so.