Latest news with #Whigs
Yahoo
7 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Ex-Democratic leader warns party is 'dying' as key issues leave voters wanting 'new way forward'
Former California Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero warned Tuesday that the party she once called home is "on its last stand," accusing its members of abandoning common sense and core American values in favor of identity politics. "It is a dying party. It will go the way of the Whigs in a century past," she said while appearing on "Fox & Friends First." "The new way forward is an America-first party, the Republican Party under Donald Trump… This is really a new party, and it's one that recognizes that borders matter, citizenship matters, safety for all [matters]. We care about the content of one's character much more than we care about the color of our skin, and across the board… we are there together to say, 'Stop the nonsense. Speak common sense.'" Former Democrat Hill Staffers Challenge The Aging Establishment In Congress: Report Romero said many former Democrats – Tulsi Gabbard, Leo Terrell, RFK, Jr. and herself included – tried to be voices for reform within the party, but saw the writing on the wall and ultimately resigned themselves to leaving altogether. Her comments lambasting Democrats came after Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. John Fetterman bucked his party over the border and antisemitism during a Fox Nation-hosted debate with his Republican colleague Sen. Dave McCormick on Monday. Read On The Fox News App "Antisemitism [is] out of control… Building tent cities on a campus and terrorizing and intimidating Jewish students – that's not free speech, and now we've lost the argument in parts of my party," he conceded. Biden Cover-up Scandal Could Usher In New Era Of Republican Dominance "Our party did not handle the border appropriately. Look at the numbers: 267,000, 300,000 people showing up at our border. Now that's unacceptable and that's a national security issue and that is chaos." Romero applauded the Keystone State lawmakers for showcasing a commitment to working across the aisle in a way she wishes more politicians would consider. "Sadly, Democrats are still caught in that web, the ideology of identity politics, and it [working across the aisle] has not yet taken root," she Here To Join Fox Nation "They still stand up and scream that everybody's a Nazi, everybody's racist. Or still defend open borders, deny the rampant antisemitism, and refuse to stand up for America first. But hopefully, with the Fetterman-McCormick discussion debate, I hope it really sends a message across the country that this is what the American people want – for our elected officials to grow up, to listen to each other, and work with each other for Americans."Original article source: Ex-Democratic leader warns party is 'dying' as key issues leave voters wanting 'new way forward'
Boston Globe
21-05-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
What the Whigs can teach us
Today the Whigs are regarded as a fusty barnacle on American history, a long-ago movement banished to historical oblivion. But the historian Allen Guelzo has The party took its name from the British Whigs, themselves formed to provide a legislative counterpoint to powerful executive rule, in their case the monarchy. For nearly two centuries, the Whigs — the term is derived from the Scottish Gaelic name for a horse thief — sought a series of substantial transformations in the political culture of Britain. They sought to empower the middle class, abolish slavery, and reform the country's political system, then an untidy and undemocratic amalgam of legislative districts known as 'rotten boroughs' that were the power centers of land owners and other aristocrats. Advertisement The American Whigs were motivated by the muscular presidency of Andrew Jackson, so lionized by President Donald Trump that he placed a portrait of the seventh president in the Oval Office in both his terms. The Whigs' gloom over Jackson's overreach — they regarded his 1829-1837 White House tenure as years of executive tyranny — prompted them to seek a new path to restore an old balance. Advertisement Why the need for a new Whig party? Though only four months old, Trump's second administration is marked by unprecedented attempts to exert executive power and a flurry of executive orders that bypass Capitol Hill. Only a handful of measures have been approved by Congress, which has ceded not only the initiative in American politics but also many of its roles. Though Congress has Constitutional responsibilities in trade — and two once-powerful subcommittees specifically devoted to the issue — Trump has unilaterally imposed tariffs on friends, trading partners, and military and commercial foes alike. Though independent agencies created by Congress are historically, and legally, regarded as impervious to presidential interference, Trump has attacked them, removed their directors, and curtailed their remits. And earlier this month, the head of the executive branch summarily removed the leader of an institution called the Library of Congress . President Donald Trump arrived to deliver an address to a joint session of Congress on March 4. KENNY HOLSTON/NYT This has occurred while Congress slept. The Democrats might have mounted an aggressive opposition to Trump had they not been in the minority in both chambers and struggling to reshape their tactics and their message. Advertisement 'The American system has shared powers as much as a separation of powers,' Andrew Ballard, a Florida State University political scientist, said in an interview. 'But Congress has done just about nothing. Congress has to have incentive to share power or wrestle back some of its policy-making role from the executive. Right now they don't and seem happy with the outcomes. They haven't yet seen that the administration has crossed some line they cannot countenance.' Indeed, the eclipse of Congress has been one of the distinctive qualities of the era. 'The lack of major legislation is not because Mr. Trump failed but because he has not even bothered to try,' the conservative Wall Street Journal noted in a recent editorial. 'Even though his own Republican Party controls both houses of Congress, the president has all but disregarded Capitol Hill so far.…Executive orders feed his appetite for instant action, while enacting legislation can involve arduous and time-consuming negotiations.' The 19th-century Whigs present an appealing prototype for moderate Democrats seeking a way out of their paralysis and for Republicans impatient with, or horrified by, the Trump ascendancy. They grew out of a debate that, Michael F. Holt wrote in his 1999 'Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party,' was 'about the proper character of a republican society, that is, about what social and economic arrangements would best sustain citizens' virtue, their commitment to the public good or commonweal.' These are precisely the questions in the air today. Americans sharing those concerns gathered under the Whig banner 'focused on its everlasting basic principle: opposition to executive usurpation in general' — another analog to today. Advertisement Sean Wilentz's characterization of the Whigs in his 2016 'The Politicians and the Egalitarians' demonstrates the breadth of the 19th-century party and leads us to wonder if a 21st-century version, shorn of some of the original party's constituencies, might be appropriate for our own time. The Whigs, he wrote, were 'a national coalition dominated by pro-business conservatives, humanitarian reformers, Christian evangelicals, supporters of federally backed economic developments and moderate Southern planters.' No historical comparison works completely, or even neatly. Susan Hanssen of the University of Dallas has noted that Trump has some Whig characteristics, particularly his embrace of tariffs. The Whigs didn't endure as a powerful entity. Weakened by sectional divisions growing out of fevered debate over slavery, they collapsed soon after their 1852 presidential nominee, Winfield Scott, was soundly defeated by Franklin Pierce. In their death were the political nutrients that helped nourish the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln. Debates about the limits of presidential power have been a hardy American perennial. The Whig philosophy was perhaps best expressed by William Henry Harrison, the party's first president, who, in a reference to Jackson and President Martin Van Buren, said that considering one person 'the source from which all the measures of government should emanate is degrading to the republic.' The new Whigs could steal that quote as the founding statement of their own party. This column first appeared in , Globe Opinion's free weekly newsletter about local and national politics. If you'd like to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up . Advertisement David Shribman is a nationally syndicated columnist. He can be reached at
Glasgow Times
05-05-2025
- Politics
- Glasgow Times
Dailly: 'Out with the useless, in with the hopeless'
For the last 100 years or so, the two-party state at Westminster has been a tussle between the Tories and Labour; before then it was between the Tories and the Liberals – with the Liberals having grown out the Whigs in the 1850s. The term "hegemony" comes from Ancient Greece. It means to lead and represents the ascendancy of one group or elite within a society over everyone else. It's arguable that until the 1920s, the UK's hegemony operated principally for the royalists, aristocracy, landed gentry, and wealthy. The rise of the Labour Party marked a sea change shift with a political party representing the working class and trade unions. However, last week's local council elections in England witnessed working class voters reject both Labour and the Conservatives. One might suggest that Labour in 2025 has more in common with 1920's conservatism than Ramsay MacDonald's Labour Party. Nigel Farage's Reform UK gained 677 councillors and control of 10 councils. The Tories lost 674 councillors; while Labour lost 187. The Lib Dems gained 163. Some commentators have tried to play down the complete wipe-out of Tory and Labour councillors, pointing to the fact there are 317 councils in England – comprising county, district, unitary, and metropolitan councils among others. But English local government elections operate in yearly cycles. What was up for grabs last week was mostly county and a few unitary and metro councils, with six directly elected mayors. Many of these elections were in traditional Labour heartlands and Reform took 41.5 per cent of the 1,631 council seats available, along with 2 mayoral contests and a MP in the Runcorn and Helsby by-election. If that wasn't seismic, I'm not sure what would be. Here's the thing. We will have another cycle of council elections in England next year – including all 32 London borough councils – and another cycle in 2027 too. Never has a governing party that won a landslide victory at Westminster – just 10 months ago – lost support so quickly amongst the electorate. The message from the voters is simple. We've had enough of the two mainstream parties. The Tories literally ran a clown show for the last few years. Labour come into office with grand promises of improving people's lives and the first thing they do is cut the winter fuel payment and hike up employer's national insurance contributions. No taxes for the uber rich but plenty of money for weapons of war. To balance the books, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have proposed a raid on welfare spending with £5bn of cuts to disability and sickness benefits. There's a Westminster Hall debate on the planned cuts this Wednesday afternoon. Perhaps the saddest aspect of all of this is that Reform UK offer little. No hope. Just more division. For sure, they are good at calling out Labour's duplicity and uselessness. Just like Labour did with the Conservative Party – and how did that end? And yet people are voting for Reform UK in England in their droves to express their frustration and disdain for the two traditional parties. How will Reform play out in Scotland? We have the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election for Holyrood on 5 June. And then the Holyrood elections in May – so we shall soon find out.
Spectator
04-05-2025
- Politics
- Spectator
How great political parties die
Though local polls and by-elections are notoriously unreliable guides to general elections, and a week is indeed a long time in politics, what happened at last week's local elections could portend one of the greatest changes in our political system in over a century: the permanent presence of Reform UK, and consequently the demise of our oldest political party, the Tories. The Tories have been around in various forms since the reign of King Charles II, when party politics emerged as a rivalry between the Tories and the Whigs over the issue of whether to exclude James II from the throne on the basis of his Catholic faith. The two parties alternated in government throughout the 18th and 19th centuries and well into the 20th. The Liberals, as the Whigs became under William Ewart Gladstone, stood for free trade, nonconformity in religion, a sceptical anti-imperialism, capitalist industrialisation, social progress and an end to the domination of an unelected landed aristocracy.
Yahoo
11-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
When the GOP Seemed on the Verge of Extinction
Democrats are in a truly awful state today, with a recent approval rating of just 37 percent. California Gov. Gavin Newsom last month labeled the Democratic brand 'toxic,' and his fellow Democrat, Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, has warned, 'if we don't get our sh-t together, then we are going to be in a permanent minority.' If the party's fortunes sound hopeless, it's worth remembering the far more dire straits that Republicans found themselves in nearly a half-century ago. In the runup to the 1976 presidential election, the fallout from the Watergate scandal and Ronald Reagan's primary challenge to President Gerald Ford so roiled Republicans that some high-profile party members and media figures were openly predicting the GOP would go the way of the Whigs. 'There have been warnings from Republican leaders that the party might not survive its present wrangling,' Walter Cronkite solemnly announced in a newscast that year. Maryland Republican Sen. Charles Mathias questioned whether the party had a future and warned, 'The fate of the two-party system may hang in the balance.' Of course, just four years later, Reagan would win a landslide victory over President Jimmy Carter, ushering in a conservative revival. Today, despite the Democrats' anemic poll numbers, lack of a standard-bearer, and ideological conflicts, there's still hope for the party—especially with President Donald Trump's massive tariffs leading to a Wall Street meltdown and prompting fears of a recession. We are already starting to hear rumblings from some Republicans about the negative electoral consequences that Trump is inviting for the party by pursuing an economic agenda that could inflict higher prices on inflation-stressed voters. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul warned that tariffs historically have 'led to political decimation,' pointing out, among other examples, that Republicans lost half their seats in the 1890 House elections after Congress passed then-Rep. William McKinley's Tariff Act. The defeated House Republicans included McKinley himself, although he would rebound to win the presidency in 1896. When the party in power overreaches, as Republicans are arguably doing now, that often leads to a backlash. And even before Trump announced his tariffs, the liberal candidate's resounding victory in a high-profile Wisconsin Supreme Court race was already providing evidence of the physics of American politics, which have long shown how quickly a party's political prospects can reverse. That was especially true in the volatile 1970s, which started with President Richard Nixon pulverizing Democrat George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election. But just 15 months later, the spreading Watergate scandal already was prompting questions about the GOP's viability. At an awards dinner in Washington in January 1974, then-Vice President Ford presented Reagan with the 'Mr. Sam' Award, named for the late House Speaker Sam Rayburn and awarded to a 'governmental figure' making a special contribution to sports. Amid speculation that the California governor would battle Ford for the '76 nomination (awkward!), a reporter asked Ford if the GOP nomination was even worth winning. 'You're darn right it is,' he snapped. But even some party leaders acknowledged the sense of doom. 'Unless you and I get together and work for this party, we may have no party at all,' Republican National Committee Chairman Mary Louise Smith warned in a 1975 speech. On May 31, 1976, as Reagan continued his insurgent run for the GOP nomination against a sitting president, the New York Times ran a photo of him at the top of the front page, waving astride a horse. But the headline below it belied the smiling image: 'Some Republicans Fearful Party Is on Its Last Legs.' 'Is the Republican Party over?' reporter James Naughton asked in the story. 'Divided by a contest for its Presidential nomination and debilitated by the events since the last national election, the party may face a new disaster in November and perhaps beyond.' At the time, there was still a distinct liberal wing of the Republican Party, represented by politicians such as Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. Reagan's candidacy was an attempt to move the party firmly to the right. As Naughton wrote, 'Young progressives spoke dejectedly of the 1976 campaign as their 'last hurrah' as Republican activists. Conservative purists described specific contingency plans aimed at 'destroying the Republican Party' as a means to create a new major party. And campaign professionals beholden to neither ideological wing said they feared the party might do no more than 'stagger along as a cripple' for another decade.' Hard-right conservatives like Richard A. Viguerie, the pioneer of direct-mail political action campaigns, said the party wasn't a viable vehicle for people like him. He compared the GOP to a disabled tank on a bridge during wartime: 'You've got to take that tank and throw it in the river.' Meanwhile, moderate GOP consultant John Deardourff warned that nominating Reagan would hasten the death of the party, which he said was already reeling from terrible branding. The national party brand was so toxic after Watergate that Minnesota Republicans changed their name to the 'Minnesota Independent Republican Party.' (They dropped the 'Independent' label in 1995.) Deardourff said that old voters associated Republicans with Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression, while for younger voters, the GOP carried the stench of Nixon and Watergate. In that same New York Times story, even Sen. Bob Dole, a former national party chairman, acknowledged that Republicans were on the ropes. 'You'd think the only way to go is up, but not necessarily,' he said, a couple of months before Ford chose him as his running mate to replace the more moderate Rockefeller. 'I'm not a doomsayer—yet.' Pessimists thought of the GOP as a ball of yarn—with conservatives pulling one thread by threatening to form a new, 'ideologically pure party' if Ford won the nomination, and moderates ready to pull another thread by withholding their support from Reagan if he was the party's nominee, as they did in '64 with Barry Goldwater. 'In scientific terms, the Republican party is verging on critical non-mass,' conservative analyst Kevin Phillips wrote in a December 1975 column. 'If it gets much smaller, it cannot hold together.' Despondency set in as the party met for its convention in Kansas City, Missouri, in August 1976. The numbers were staggeringly terrible: A Gallup poll taken before the convention found just 22 percent of Americans identified as Republican, compared to 46 percent who said they were Democrats. An earlier New York Times poll found that 4 out of 10 of people who called themselves 'Reagan Republicans' would vote for Carter over Ford. There were only 13 Republican governors at the time, and Democrats had big majorities in both houses of Congress. However, those polls didn't suggest a liberal shift. The Gallup poll found that 49 percent identified as conservative, just more evidence of the party's mismatch for the right. It also supplied ammunition for those disaffected Republicans agitating for a new party. 'For the first time at a GOP convention, there is serious talk among Republicans that the Grand Old Party may be doomed no matter what happens, that it is steadily withering away much like the Whigs in the 1850s,' the Wall Street Journal reported in an August 19, 1976, story—one of a host of comparisons made to that vintage political party. The Journal noted that polls showed Democratic candidate Jimmy Carter with huge leads over both Ford and Reagan in a general election matchup—a striking and misleading snapshot in time, given Carter's narrow win over Ford later that year and his lopsided loss to Reagan four years later. In a Washington Post column headlined 'The Great Shrivel,' Rod MacLeish used a word to describe the Republicans' sorry state that would become more synonymous with Carter's presidency. 'It will take a few more Republican conventions before we know whether this is a temporary malaise or whether the GOP has that myopic fever that killed the Whigs, thus making possible the birth of the party that now brawls and sickens in Kansas City,' MacLeish wrote. Although the presidential election that fall was close, the Republicans found themselves in tatters across the board on election night. They emerged with just 12 gubernatorial seats and 38 senators in the next Congress. Still, the '76 convention, far from signaling the death of the party, reinvigorated it by putting Reagan conservatives on the ascent, paving the way for his historic victory four years later. In a memorable line at the '76 convention that rallied supporters, Reagan said, 'I believe the Republican Party has a platform that is a banner of bold, unmistakable colors with no pale pastel shades.' But even by 1980, some Republicans were still fretting that the party would screw up the chance to regain the White House against a deeply unpopular incumbent by nominating someone as conservative as Reagan. One of those concerned Republicans was Ford, who was hoping party leaders would urge him to run again. 'Every place I go and everything I hear, there is the growing, growing sentiment that Governor Reagan cannot win the election,' the ex-president told the New York Times in March 1980, adding that people warned him 'that we don't want, we can't afford to have a replay of 1964,' referring to Goldwater's shellacking at the hands of President Lyndon B. Johnson. 'A very conservative Republican can't win a national election.' That didn't stop Ford from toying with becoming Reagan's running mate at the 1980 convention. But Ford sought more power than what a VP normally commands, and the idea fizzled when the Reagan and Ford camps couldn't reach an agreement. Today, while no one is predicting the end of the Democratic Party, some of their allies are channeling the dismal spirit of '76. 'The D next to a candidate's name too often stands for disqualified, demoralized, distrusted and disconnected,' said Jonathan Cowan, president of the center-left think tank Third Way, earlier this year. But one of the most prominent voices on the right, Ben Shapiro, co-founder of The Daily Wire, is warning Republicans not to get too cocky. On his March 28 podcast, Shapiro noted that victorious parties often think they've permanently realigned politics, pointing to Republicans after George W. Bush won reelection in 2004, and Democrats after Barack Obama's decisive reelection eight years later. Now, he said, 'I hear Republicans who seem triumphalist about the idea that Democrats can never win again, that Democrats will never take power again, that all the trends are against them. … However, politics changes quickly, things happen, and there are warning signs on the horizon.' A week later, Trump announced his tariffs, and the major stock market indexes fell as much as 10 percent in two days.
