Today’s ZMan post was very thought provoking. He links to two other articles that take a pro and con stance on whether ineffective “conservative” parties like the Republicans in America and the Tories in England should be totally abandoned or reformed.
The abandonment thesis is that if the British Tories were completely abandoned by their supporters this would have the twin benefits of destroying the spineless Tory part, thus paving the way for a replacement and delegitimizing the whole Uni-party arrangement that the Labor and Tory parties have practiced for generations.
The reform opinion holds that destroying the brake on the power of the progressives that the half-hearted but at least existing opposition party provides will make things much worse with all the worst policies now happening unchecked.
It’s a very difficult argument to pick a side on. It’s hard to imagine a worse situation than the one we find ourselves in presently with Joe Biden ruling by executive order. That is until you imagine what would happen if he had even a two thirds majority in the Congress. They’d impeach and remove Supreme Court justices and anyone else standing in their way.
So, the ZMan is staunchly on the abandonment side of the argument. He’d let the Republicans go down to complete defeat and depend on an accelerationist scenario to drive the present government into disrepute and depend on a reset to produce a new system that suits him better.
I guess I’m currently in the reform camp. But I will say, if the Democrats hold onto the presidency this year I may change my mind. At a certain point you just give up on “working within the system.”
It’s a pretty good read.