What is, or should be, the proper role of the RNC?

...if the party fails to restructure itself in order to take advantage of the communicative power of the Internet to, in a sense, re-empower the precinct leaders, the ward and county parties, the hammer-blow to which you speak will become a death knell for political parties themselves, leaving only the Internet empowered candidates to lead the way.

As I have mentioned before, this needn't be the case. Political parties have an advantage over political candidates, they are entities of continuous existence -- they are around longer than political candidates. Political parties, if properly executed, can build up a far larger and stronger membership base than any political candidate over a longer period of time. Without this Internet empowered base acting as a counterbalance, the electorate will fall prey to the Piped Piper affect the Internet will have on our political system rather than allowing it to reap the benefits of the wisdom of the crowds through its proper use within political parties.

As proof to what I am saying one needs only look at  the Democratic Party and its relevance to the Obama win. Please, I implor you, take a good look and ask yourself is that where you want the Republican Party to end up?

ex animo

davidfarrar

To be honest, our grassroots organizations never have recovered from this hammerblow. Which is one of the major reasons we have become so dependent on top down leadership.  Media wins elections, money buys media and the DC operatives can raise more money with one direct mail piece than most local parties raise all year.

But it doesn't have to be that way, not now, not with the Internet. With the Internet, we can re-empower our grassroot organizations and grow more, building up larger and larger networks over time that will produce votes directly without the need for media funds, as the Obama campaign has clearly demonstrated. Using the Internet to re-empower the party's grassroot base, we can finally free the party from the domination of its corporate class that has acted to weaken the party's principle message of less government, less taxes and more liberty for so long.

The real question before us is do we want to continue with the old corporate funding structure or do we want to change it to the New Right by using the Internet and the party's grassroots?

ex animo

davidfarrar

I'm far from an expert on this stuff, but I have to say that your analysis makes a lot of sense to me.

a statement like that could get you yelled at on some blogs :P

That said, i completely agree with you. there is nothing wrong with conservative ideals, but the GOP refuses to adapt its message to today's world. The party is now known for supression of dissent ("with us or against us") and sticking to ideas and slogans from the 70s.

is when they start to moralize about things that are utterly irrelevant and weren't true from the getgo. They seem to act like ideals are reality, or should be forced to be reality by any means necessary.

Take "no sex before marriage" -- which presumably the right is going on about when they rant against contraceptives and want there to be consequences for unmarried sex.

That term and rule was coined when the average age of marriage was 13, and it was common to see ten year olds married.

So it sort of made sense not to have sex before then, as a girl pregnant before then was in serious physical danger to her life.

Not that this stopped kids from having plenty of non-marital sex. Adultery, in other words, though a good deal of it might be more accurately called rape. Teenage hijinks, at any rate.

But, I can hear you now, saying "But in 1935 we didn't have so much teenage sex!" Umm... sure. Aside from "kissing cousins", the historical evidence strongly suggests just as much premarital sex (if you account for earlier age of marriage, at any rate).

You'll find that the places with the least amount of teenage sexual activity are the cities -- where people have more to do than drink, have sex, and do drugs. Rural areas now are less remote than they used to be, so we can extrapolate the amount of sexual activity there to be quite considerable -- even if it was hushed up.

But it isn't very interesting to lecture on how unwed pregnancies should be hushed up, is it?

Nor is it very easy to go on about how we don't need a strong military... (when did the republicans become the bully party, exactly?)

But I'm glad I'm not the only one who's noticed this...

Despite my love of policy and ideological questions, I really think the job of the RNC chair has very little to do with that, and ought have little to do with that, mostly because I distrust  the idea that consistent policy plans can flow from any group whose survival is dependent upon elections. Public opinion is fickle, and if the RNC chair had to be a policy wonk, I fear he/she would end up with a set of positions so random that they would only make sense if one took acid and read them backwards. Properly speaking, neither Republicans nor Democrats are officially ideological vehicles, and that's a good thing, in my opinion. If you make the RNC Chair a conservative policymaker, then you increase the indentured servitude of conservative intellectuals to the GOP, and I frankly think that when intellectuals of any stripe get connected to solely political organizations, it tends to make for lousier ideas about what to do with power because originality becomes so constrained. In short, I want the RNC chair to be an election-winner because that will keep the conservative movement still independent of one party.