{"id":109375,"date":"2023-02-27T00:43:07","date_gmt":"2023-02-27T00:43:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/?p=109375"},"modified":"2023-02-27T00:43:09","modified_gmt":"2023-02-27T00:43:09","slug":"sarah-huckabee-sanders-has-a-funny-idea-of-what-the-republican-party-should-be","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/?p=109375","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Sarah Huckabee Sanders Has a Funny Idea of What the Republican Party Should Be&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2023\/02\/14\/opinion\/sanders-republican-party.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">NY Times<\/a>: &#8220;Here, I should say that this critique of Sanders\u2019s response rests on the supposition that Republican politicians want to build a national political majority. And why wouldn\u2019t they? Political parties are supposed to want to win the largest possible majority. \u201cUnless there\u2019s a countervailing force,\u201d the historian Timothy Shenk notes in \u201c<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/books\/edition\/Realigners\/zZFVEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&amp;gbpv=0\" target=\"_blank\">Realigners<\/a>: Partisan Hacks, Political Visionaries and the Struggle to Rule American Democracy,\u201d \u201cparties bend toward majorities like sunflowers to the light.\u201d A large majority, after all, means a mandate for your agenda. With it, you can set or reset the political landscape on your terms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But what if there is a countervailing force? What if the structure of the political system makes it possible to win the power of a popular majority without ever actually assembling a popular majority? What if, using that power, you burrow your party and its ideology into the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2022\/10\/21\/opinion\/minority-rule-majoritarian-democracy.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">countermajoritarian institutions<\/a>&nbsp;of&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2022\/05\/27\/opinion\/uvalde-senate-gun-control.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">that system<\/a>&nbsp;so that, heads or tails, you always win?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In that scenario, a political party might drop the quest for a majority as a fool\u2019s errand. There\u2019s no need to build a broad coalition of voters if \u2014 because of the malapportionment of the national legislature, the gerrymandering of many state legislatures, the Electoral College and the strategic position of your voters in the nation\u2019s geography \u2014 you don\u2019t need one to win. And if your political party also has a tight hold on the highest court of constitutional interpretation, you don\u2019t even need to win elections to clear the path for your preferred outcomes and ideology.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NY Times: &#8220;Here, I should say that this critique of Sanders\u2019s response rests on the supposition that Republican politicians want to build a national political majority. And why wouldn\u2019t they? Political parties are supposed to want to win the largest possible majority. \u201cUnless there\u2019s a countervailing force,\u201d the historian Timothy Shenk notes in \u201cRealigners: Partisan&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-109375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-newsstory"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=109375"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109375\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":109376,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109375\/revisions\/109376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=109375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=109375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=109375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}