Reasonable Republicans?

[cthulu2016]

The media assumes two sides to a story, and thus there must be some reasonable Republicans. And if we relied on statistical distribution, there would be. There are a lot of Republicans... the odds are that some would be reasonable.

The only way there would be no reasonable Republicans is if being Republican is definitionally unreasonable... if unreasonability is part of the definition of Republican. Which it is. On a set of issues, the Republicans have marked all reasonable views as grounds for expulsion from the Party.

August 15, 2012, 12:12 pm
Reasonable Republicans?
Paul Krugman

Several commenters have asked that I provide examples of Republicans making reasonable economic arguments; some of them seem to be saying that I’m proving my bias if I don’t provide such examples.

But it doesn’t work that way: if all Republicans are saying unreasonable things, then it’s a distortion — indeed, a form of bias — to insist that there must be reasonable Republicans.

Now, what you can quite easily find are examples of people who used to be Republicans, or even still consider themselves Republicans, saying reasonable things — say, Bruce Bartlett or David Frum. But the very fact that they’re reasonable has led to their excommunication from the movement!

It’s kind of the “treason never prospers” argument (“for if it prospers, none dare call it treason”); if someone declares that tax cuts don’t pay for themselves, or that printing money when you’re in a liquidity trap isn’t deeply inflationary, or that fear of Obamacare isn’t holding the economy back, he ceases to be considered a member in good standing of the GOP. There are, therefore, no reasonable Republicans on these issues.

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[rock]

1. The very first thing I thought when I read this post was

for Republicans to be reasonable they'd have to be intelligent. That made me think of a discussion my wife and I were having just the other day about animal intelligence and how that was measured.

I said to her, "There's the classic case of of a fence in a V-shape composed of wire mesh. You set the animal in the inside corner of the V and the food outside the corner and see how long it takes the animal to solve the problem. If you try this test with a chicken, it never solves it."

And quick as a wink she replied, "Like a Republican."

You're right, for they don't have the intelligence to be reasonable.

[sadbear]

2. Surely there were reasonable Klansmen and Nazi's, too.