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I'll start with a simple model of society with aspects of the right left divide, informed by recent Western history mostly.
Human society is composed of two basic groups: a minority elite and a majority populace. The elite is generally superior to the populace because they are a self-selecting subgroup of the population with above-average cognition. The populace are everyone else who cannot compete with the elites, and cannot enter the elite because they are not seen as elite marriage material.
Enter democracy, which turns traditional society on its head because the majority populace now has power, in theory. How on earth can a minority rule in a democracy?
In the US up until very recently, the elite has been on the right. Its main tool was the elite's oldest and most formidable tool: religion, which is basically a psy-op that convinces the populace that elite minority rule is natural and just. However due to the drop in information storage and transmission costs, religion is dying everywhere, which explains the long-term decline of the right starting in earnest with the French Revolution.
It is true that Christian fundamentalism remained potent in the US for about one generation longer than it did everywhere else, but that is now ebbing. At the same time, right-wing power in thr US increased as Christianity declined. So I don't see the decline of religion as a death knell for the American right, as many leftists hope. It just hasn't worked out that way.
Rather, I see the strength of the American right as an expression of the weakness of the American left. And the American left is weak because it is riven by ethnic and sectarian divisions. This gives the right an opening for divide and conquer. The left is far stronger in nation states such as those of Europe, than it is in a civic state like the US, because the left in a nation state is comparatively united by history and culture. This explains the unique persistence of the American right, in my opinion.
This is the real reason that the "GOP establishment" likes immigration. It gives life to the divide and conquer strategy. Who is being divided? The working class, split between natives and immigrants.
The left is close to achieving a governing majority without the need for the native working class. (That near majority requires dissident native elites, however, an alliance forged at the cost of abandoning wealth redistribution policies, but that is a topic for another thread.)
So will the American right, understood as the elite (significantly thinned by the above-mentioned dissidents, who I predict will be fair-weather friends to the left) be able to reinvent themselves once the universal tool of the right, religion, and the particular American tool of the right, immigration, both lose effectiveness?
I have a simpler answer for you. It's called the electoral college, which is baked in gerrymandering from the Constitution. Republicans cannot win the popular vote anymore in Presidential elections and only the electoral college is keeping them in contention. If we were under a parliamentary system where seats in Congress were awarded based on percentage of votes, the Republicans would be out of power already.
And before someone comes in to say how the Constitution is the like the gospel and cannot be wrong, please explain why the choice of where I live should have an impact on the weight of my vote.
Michael Moore - yes, I know his name makes some here roll their eyes - commented that if you take a good look, America is overall very liberal in its preferences. But ideally, the right, even if I think it's gone crazy at the moment, has some perfectly valid basic ideas - preferring to be a little insular, maybe more selfish, worrying about security and stability. It makes sense that some of the basic ideas would be durable.
I have a simpler answer for you. It's called the electoral college, which is baked in gerrymandering from the Constitution. Republicans cannot win the popular vote anymore in Presidential elections and only the electoral college is keeping them in contention. If we were under a parliamentary system where seats in Congress were awarded based on percentage of votes, the Republicans would be out of power already.
And before someone comes in to say how the Constitution is the like the gospel and cannot be wrong, please explain why the choice of where I live should have an impact on the weight of my vote.
It is possible to win an election in a Parliamentary system without the majority of the "popular vote".
There is one thing that truly "unites the right" and keeps it in the game.
MONEY.
It will always reinvent itself because the evil billionaires (not all billionaires are evil, but those who fund the right wing are!) will always be throwing Dark Money at media and creating astroturf and other "movements" to gather the ignorant.
The last 100 years have been fairly clear about this. The "respectable republican" ended, in one sense, with Ted Roosevelt having to leave the party due to the Capitalists not liking his want for a balance...a "square deal" for the regular working Americans.
Since that time they have just floundered around - not being part of making this country great (Dems won WWII, did SS, Medicare and many other progressive modern policies)....
But just being business orientated isn't really evil...in the same sense of the "new radical right" which was born out of the Oil Money in Texas and the John Birch Society and the many other billionaire financed propaganda groups. Under the guise of "anti-Communist", what they really wanted was to pump as much oil as possible, mine as much coal, cut as much timber and NOT PAY TAXES or deal with pesky regulations. That is at the heart of the matter.
It's really become "for the people" against "for some selected billionaires not paying taxes".
Much of the present right wing was funded...and some still is, by the Mercers, Scaifes, Hunts, Kochs and similar fortunes. For them it is just a hobby of sorts....after all, one cannot imagine that they really care about whether they have 50 billion or 60 billion (Waltons, for example).
On an individual basis, these people may be idiots when it comes to politics or social policy. But they feel that their money entitles them to "one dollar = one vote" and the "conservative" SCOTUS has agreed.
In a sense, the Right engorges itself.....when you think about it. Making things terrible - like the wars, recession and chaos of today....what does that do to the populace as a whole? Well, it makes them suffer. Suffering people tend to turn back to religion and fundamentalism and authoritarianism. The worse off they make things, the better position they will be in.
I'm not counting votes - but rather noting that the modern right and the GOP have absolutely nothing to offer the country. However, as an example of self-sustaining, if Trump leaves the county in a situation like GWB did, we will have another decade or more of going nowhere (or worse) which will make for more unhappy people....which will make for more people who then blame whoever is in power (even if Trump is gone and Dems are in).
Americans have very short memories...or they are the biggest liars on the planet. I suppose some of each is true when they, for example, blame the debt on Obama. That debt was all fixed and unavoidable due to the wars, recession, tax cuts (which were law) and failure of the former admin to address health care and many other important issues.
Dollars to donuts if you quizzed Americans about such they would spout something different...but these things are real number, not opinions. People must learn to separate the two.
In the end I accept the Trump era because we deserve exactly what we get. Same with the GWB era...we deserved the wars and the recession and the 10K per person health care because we don't do anything about it.
I can wish and hope..that future voters are more educated and better informed. Not much else I can do.
I have a simpler answer for you. It's called the electoral college, which is baked in gerrymandering from the Constitution. Republicans cannot win the popular vote anymore in Presidential elections and only the electoral college is keeping them in contention. If we were under a parliamentary system where seats in Congress were awarded based on percentage of votes, the Republicans would be out of power already.
And before someone comes in to say how the Constitution is the like the gospel and cannot be wrong, please explain why the choice of where I live should have an impact on the weight of my vote.
I don't buy this because the American right dominated presidential contests from 1968-1988 with huge popular vote majorities while the democratic House was Democrat the entire time. Nixon in 72 and Reagan in 84 blew the Democrats out of the water, because the left was incompetent.
Meanwhile in Europe the left was able to push capitalism to the brink until the Winter of Discontent and Mitterand's u-turn ended in tears.
Your explanation only works post 2000 and does not explain the American right's strength pre-2000.
Michael Moore - yes, I know his name makes some here roll their eyes - commented that if you take a good look, America is overall very liberal in its preferences. But ideally, the right, even if I think it's gone crazy at the moment, has some perfectly valid basic ideas - preferring to be a little insular, maybe more selfish, worrying about security and stability. It makes sense that some of the basic ideas would be durable.
Most everyone is liberal in their preferences. Very few people are "evil billionaires". The problem with liberal preferences is that they almost always result in funneling money and power to people who are less competent, in the name of equality. This can result in social breakdown if taken too far. Which explains the durability of the right, in its attenuated form, in Europe, but does not explain the greater power of the right in the US, despite an economy with more "redistributive slack" due to wealth and income disparities.
I have a simpler answer for you. It's called the electoral college, which is baked in gerrymandering from the Constitution. Republicans cannot win the popular vote anymore in Presidential elections and only the electoral college is keeping them in contention. If we were under a parliamentary system where seats in Congress were awarded based on percentage of votes, the Republicans would be out of power already.
And before someone comes in to say how the Constitution is the like the gospel and cannot be wrong, please explain why the choice of where I live should have an impact on the weight of my vote.
I have explained that a dozen times on this forum. Our government is chosen by both the popular and federal principle, because, if it weren't, then small states would have no reason to remain part of the union. It is built into the constitution because there would be no United States if it weren't.
Congress has the House, which gives strength to the more populous states, and the Senate, which treats all states as the same.
There can only be one president, so both mechanisms are built into the choosing process. There is a popular vote aspect, but then the states determine how those votes are allocated. All of this was outlined in Federalist 39. I know this because I have a copy of the Federalist papers on my shelf. You don't know it because the schools are dumbing the population down. You should be angry that you were not taught this in school.
AS for OP, you are drinking a lot of your own bathwater. The right is strong because it represents traditional values, and America has been the second most successful republic in history. It would be idiotic for those values to change too fast.
As for Europe, they are falling apart, if you are not aware. They have gotten along with their lefty ponzi schemes for this long because America has paid for their rebuilding and continued defense, but Trump is about to change that. Look for a very hard shift away from the social welfare state in our lifetime. It is completely inevitable.
Middle America abhors the left, and that is where every census shows the growth is.
The leftwing East Coast is losing electoral college votes every decade.
The rights 30 states were w/o many from the coasts in 2016.
The Red Wall has held firm since 1988. The Blue Wall cracked in 2016.
The red wall cracked in 92 because Perot uncovered simmering discontent with nascent globalism on the grass roots right.
It was a template for Trump to realign Republican policy with base preferences. The Republicans were flailing badly until Trump dragged them kicking and screaming across the finish line.
I think higher conservative growth rates have been swamped by immigration, hence the loss of places like Colorado.
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