Proportionate to the Size of the Grain of Salt

The sentiment that anything achievable is small, trimming around the edges and unworthy of Democrats — a view unfortunately propounded by Warren — effectively writes off most of the electorate and casts Obama as an inconsequential president. https://t.co/8AzvZEPB9N

— Jennifer Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) August 1, 2019

I read Rick Wilson's twitter feed because it entertains me.  But most of the arguments, like this, promoted there, are made by GOP conservatives who don't like what Donald Trump has revealed about conservatism and their party, but, c'mon:

President Donald Trump’s increasingly racist rhetoric has stunned political observers, yet he’s simply playing to a constituency that was cultivated over decades by people like Nixon and Reagan. They may have operated on a more subtle level, saving the worst of their bigotry for private conversations instead of declaring it in tweets. Yet the core principle remains the same: racism.

While some political observers wish to cast Trump as an anomaly of history, the truth is that he’s a logical heir to the bigoted lineage of his predecessors. In 1964, the Republican Party began using the “southern strategy,” a ploy to win over white voters in the south by stoking racial anxiety. In 1969, President Nixon launched the drug war as a way to lock up black people, according to one of his top aides.

The GOP benefited from the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.  It's the primary reason we think of the South as GOP territory.  It wasn't when I was growing up.  It certainly wasn't when LBJ won election to the Presidency.*

Even LBJ knew what doing the right thing was going to cost.

The GOP that has been "lost" to Trump is not coming back, anymore than the solidly Democratic South is coming back, and for pretty much the same reasons.  Was Obama a "consequential president"?  History will tell, not the electorate.  Obama isn't on the ballot; he's not even in the primaries.  No one is on the ballot, in fact.  Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders are presumably the ones "effectively [writing] off most of the electorate," but they aren't on the ballot yet, either.  This is August 2019, not August 2020.  Besides, the most memorable part of the 2015 primary season was the ferocity of the "Bernie Bros." who, convinced they got a raw deal in the primaries, took their ball and went home.  The last nail in Hillary's coffin came from James Comey and, in between, she just wasn't a very good campaigner.  No one expected that which was why Trump had a GOP Congress; the electorate expected the White House to be held by a Democrat, they didn't think the entirety of D.C. should be in the hands of the GOP.  Besides, compared to his Democratic Congress, Obama was a liberal progressive, and what did that get him?  Obamacare?  Barely half the loaf it was ever advertised to be, and much of that almost didn't survive contact with the Roberts Court (whether the rest will remains to be seen).

The Democratic party is not going to become the GOP party Wilson and Rubin think once existed and seem to believe was taken over by an invasive species.  The parties are set on a path of being as distinct from each other as possible, and considering the days of Tweedledum and Tweedledumber when the distinctions were so fine Talmudic scholars couldn't find them, that's not a bad thing.  Besides, I've seen the GOP, and I don't want the Democratic party looking anything like it.  If that puts a lot of voters in the wilderness again, there will still be enough votes to carry the Democratic candidate into the Oval Office.

That, or we just have a national death wish, and the republic is done for at the hands of the people most responsible for its continued existence.  But I'm not quite read to concede that, yet.

*And yes, to be brutal about it, Rubin's argument is essentially the argument of "Wait!" that Dr. King decried in his letter from jail.  There was a backlash to the civil rights laws of '64 and '65; we are still living through it, 55 years later.  That doesn't mean it wasn't the right thing to do then, or that "Wait!" was the right political advice to LBJ.  In fact, most of what he did we take for granted, so much so we don't realize how much of it dates to his Presidency.  You can bring the country along, if you try.