Subject: Re: An American Creed
In other words: enforced conformity. Force everyone into the same mold. If someone isn't a fit, disappear them.

That's what political parties do - and certainly did a lot more of back in the day. If you bucked leadership or refused to go along with the Whip on major votes, the party leadership would exact a consequence. It's not like Tip O'Neill was running a free-for-all - party discipline gets enforced. There's a reason it's called "the party line," after all.

That's what many organizations do, actually. It's not like union members get to just choose whether or not to honor a strike called by their unions, for example. I mean, they do have that choice - but unions put a ton of pressure on members (and even non-members) to try to enforce conformity to the collective choice.

It's all the same principle: solidarity. If we don't hang together we will hang separately.

Trump's managed to vastly increase the range of right-wing stuff that can get done during the current "trifecta" of GOP control by the simple expedient of being able to require everyone in the GOP coalition to just go along with it. So the Trump Administration has been able to force changes that would be beyond the wildest dreams of his right wing base if anyone in his party was trying to attack him.

Either for his actions or his inactions. One of the most amazing things about the first nine months of the Trump Administration is that even as he broke every tradition and norm to advance his agenda, he didn't do anything of consequence to restrict abortion. Virtually nothing. And there's been almost no criticism of him to amount to anything! Here we have a Republican President who is exercising power to an unprecedented degree, acting like nothing is beyond his power, and he hasn't deigned to do anything of note on his party's most defining issue - and the base has just swallowed their tongue! Hard to imagine the same thing happening on the Democratic side, that's for sure - the Sunrise Movement would have President Bernie Sanders' ass if he tried to do the same scope of stuff on the liberal side if he were President but had decided to put climate change to the side just because it was a political deadweight.

Anyway, the GOP is vastly more effective because Trump has gotten them all to hang together - more the embodiment of Franklin's aphorism than contradicting it.