And it's not just the R elites - it's the D elites too. American liberals have been just as neglectful of poor whites (and poor blacks by the way) and supportive of both free trade (e.g., NAFTA) and mass low-skilled immigration. The workers' revolt is against the ruling class in general - be it "conservative" or "liberal." The labels don't matter much so long as those who wear them are owned by Wall Street.
Something like that 57, but as far as I can see, it's not a "black vs. white" thing now so much as it is a "poor white Americans" vs. immigrants and jobs going overseas.
Here's the better way, imho, for the Rs to go:
Of course it is white v black or in nicer 21st century terms (politically correct ? ), "Us vs those people" said with a wink and a nod
The plight of "poor white Americans" was Wallace's appeal. Adopted by Nixon (with the urging of Roger Ailes of Fox News) , Reagan and the GOP to this day.
The foundation was race.
Always was, still is
The best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to make sure he doesn’t get a gun.
I think that a bit too jaded and superficial of a take. Certainly racism is involved, but why? And particularly today with a greater mingling between "white trash" and poor blacks. If I were to reduce it, I think I'd reduce it more to class, than to race.
Last edited by BedellBrave; 02-16-2016 at 01:05 PM.
What, you mean this hasn't happened already?The combination of an anti-statist ideology inherited from the Cold War, and a natural inclination to be responsive to an ever-more-rich donor class, puts the conservative movement in danger of rationalizing all the work the movement and the government does in the economic interests of their elite clients, and de-rationalizing any work it might do in the economic interests of workers. Such a course is a sure way of delegitimizing the state and the American political class.
On the question of R vs. D, I am where I am largely because I think that half of something is better than all of nothing. A broad swath of party elites support the trade and immigration policies referenced here:
So, during the years of my political consciousness, that bipartisan swath of elites has supported said policies. On the other hand, the Democrats' halfhearted stabs at halfass social democracy have represented, to me, the least worst thing for the most people. If you acknowledge the ills of that concentration of consequences, why doesn't it follow that you have policy to mitigate it? Are we just that afraid of anything that smells like redistribution of wealth?At the same time as this decline of work, the returns are starting to come in on the post-Cold War policies that elite conservatives have championed, namely free trade and liberal-to-uncontrolled low-skill immigration.
The results of these policies look like a major transfer of wealth and, more crucially, wealth-generating power, away from workers and to capital....
...the American political class seemed blind to the effects of globalization on its working population...
...We also see better now than before that mass immigration of low-skilled workers does actually interact with the laws of supply and demand as you would expect; it lowers the wages of low-skilled American workers. Yes, technology has played a role in displacing workers. And yes, some forms of trade liberalization were obviously coming after the fall of the Iron Curtain. But economists did not expect the costs of these policies to be this concentrated.
I at least see a glimmer of that on the left side of the aisle. The Republican answer to the question is their answer to everything: tax cuts and deregulation. In that Republican middle class tax reform plans are usually just sneaky delivery devices for tax cuts for the wealthy, I just find myself asking cui bono?, yet again. Who on that side of the spectrum is saying or doing anything different?
Originally Posted by BedellBrave
It’s the Racism, Stupid
The GOP establishment can’t freak out about Trump now. It’s been playing his game for decades, just more artfully.
By Gary Younge | February 12, 2016
Three years ago, as the Republican-led House of Representatives engineered a brief government shutdown, Congressman Marlin Stutzman (R-IN) explained the strategy underpinning the protest. “We have to get something out of this,” he said. “And I don’t know what that even is.” The shutdown wasn’t a tactic so much as a tantrum, an act of collective petulance posing as politics — inexplicable to the outside world, incoherent in its aims and incandescent in its rage.
The bizarre circus that the GOP presidential primary has become is not a freak occurrence. Regardless of the eventual nominee, the rise of Donald Trump (“I would bomb the **** out of [ISIS]”), the ascent of Ted Cruz (“To God be the glory”) and the endurance of Ben Carson (“Putin is a one-horse country: oil and energy”) do not contradict the general trajectory of the party, but rather confirm it. This fact-free, bigoted populism awash in money and drowning in misanthropy may illustrate the GOP at its most brazen, but it’s hardly in any way aberrant.
In this regard, Trump is the party’s most obvious emissary. His blatant xenophobia emerges from the GOP’s half-century of race-baiting since Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy was first conceived. The initial idea was to woo Southern whites, who were angry about the advances of the civil-rights movement, with coded racial messaging that wouldn’t alienate the party’s Northern supporters. “You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks,” Nixon once explained to his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman. “The key is to devise a system that recognizes that while not appearing to.” This method was once very effective. Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 campaign at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, not far from where three civil-rights activists had been murdered in 1964, by talking about states’ rights. George H.W. Bush had his infamous Willie Horton ad in 1988, while Bush Jr. spoke at Bob Jones University in 2000, where interracial dating was banned at the time.
But with white people heading toward minority status and becoming a lower percentage of the voting public every cycle, the message necessarily gets cruder — particularly with the presence of a black president. In the 2012 GOP primaries, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum told a crowd in Iowa that “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money,” while Newt Gingrich branded Obama the “food-stamp president.”
So by the time Trump came on the scene, the party had done away with the dog whistle in favor of a police whistle — no codes necessary. The Mexicans are sending us “rapists”; the Chinese are “cheating”; America needs “a total and complete shutdown” on Muslims coming into the country.
Elements of the Republican establishment bristled, of course. Back in 2012, Senator Lindsey Graham was already warning that when it came to “the demographics race,” the GOP was “losing badly. We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”
But that was the business they were in: For a generation, the party had galvanized its base on precisely this kind of message, only more artfully put and more plausibly denied. So when Trump rails against political correctness — which always goes down well on the stump — he’s really just calling for a return to unbridled hate speech. No wonder he comes first in a crowded pack for those Republican voters who want a candidate who “tells it like it is.”
Trump’s rallies are also unburdened by either actual policies or tangible facts. He just says stuff — whatever comes into his head, it seems — and people cheer or laugh, but rarely call him on it. Whether it’s true or consistent really doesn’t matter. The fact that Trump was previously pro-choice and pro-single-payer, or that he’s donated money to Hillary Clinton’s senatorial campaigns and had the Clintons at his wedding, is shrugged off. Nobody cares that there’s a net flow of Mexicans leaving America: “We’re gonna build a big wall,” Trump says. “It’s gonna be a beautiful wall. It’s gonna be a great big beautiful wall.” His healthcare policy? He’s going to replace Obamacare with something “super-terrific.”
Any mystery as to why this is working vanishes once one realizes that he’s talking to the Republican base, 43 percent of whom still believe that Obama is a Muslim — roughly the same percentage who believe that he was born in America. This is the same party that swift-boated John Kerry and insisted that the Clintons were bumping people off and running drugs into Arkansas. They really don’t care about the facts.
Nor did Trump invent this trend. In 2011, GOP primary contender Herman Cain proudly announced that he did not know the name of the president of “Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan.” More than one in four Republicans in Mississippi, and one in five in Alabama, believed that interracial marriage should be illegal, while closer to two-thirds in both states didn’t believe in evolution. Trump is just the most ostentatious and successful manifestation of this trend, and the Republican hierarchy is stumped on what to do about it.
In 2008, Senator John McCain, the GOP nominee, memorably took the mic from campaign volunteer Gayle Quinnell, who said she couldn’t trust Obama because “he’s an Arab.” “No, ma’am,” McCain said. “He’s a decent family man, [a] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.” Yet without millions of people like Quinnell, McCain would have suffered not just a defeat but a rout. Now the GOP’s leaders have ceded the mic once again, and they’re struggling to seize it back.
Of course, the Republican establishment never openly embraced such statements. Nonetheless, it was this mixture of racially charged messaging and a tacit acceptance of falsehoods that underpinned the Tea Party’s rise. This is the wave of sewage that the GOP surfed all the way to majorities in both houses of Congress. Now they’re up to their necks in it.
of Congress. Now they’re up to their necks in it.
Last edited by 57Brave; 02-16-2016 at 03:29 PM.
The best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to make sure he doesn’t get a gun.
Like I said - superficial - and lazy.
I think "we" are (afraid of redistribution of wealth). But, I think Trump is actually showing a chink in that R armor. Lint heads aren't as bothered by the 1% (or whatever percentage you want to pick) getting taxed more.
And it's not just the Lint head, white trash, Crackers, you're seeing it even with a Douthat (see his column on Trump's populism run amuck). It's one of the points of contention between libertarians and populists within this battle. It's also where Roman Catholic voices can help, imho.
Right?
Last edited by BedellBrave; 02-16-2016 at 06:16 PM.
I used to be Republican. Listened to Rush Limbaugh because when your a kid you dont control the car radio. I was a big fan of W the candidate. Not so much W the President. Last straw for me was when Republicans floated the idea of giving Obama whatever he wanted so they had something to run against and then obstructed everything Obama did. It was clear to me then they arent in this for the good of the country they are in this for power. Ron Paul brought me to the Libertarian light. They are the party I thought Republicans were.
"Donald Trump will serve a second term as president of the United States.
It’s over."
Little Thethe Nov 19, 2020.
Gosh, if a slightly curmudgeonly Jewish senior citizen from New England by way of Brooklyn can't sell socialism to crackers and lintheads, who could?
Nor did Trump invent this trend. In 2011, GOP primary contender Herman Cain proudly announced that he did not know the name of the president of “Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan.” More than one in four Republicans in Mississippi, and one in five in Alabama, believed that interracial marriage should be illegal, while closer to two-thirds in both states didn’t believe in evolution. Trump is just the most ostentatious and successful manifestation of this trend, and the Republican hierarchy is stumped on what to do about it.
.....
actually lazy was allowing your party to be, this
superficial is your "who me?" stance
Last edited by 57Brave; 02-17-2016 at 07:55 AM.
The best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to make sure he doesn’t get a gun.
more lazy and superficial
.................
Public Policy Polling’s latest survey of South Carolina Republicans yields some shocking results for those who assume most of their fellow Americans don’t take issue with gays living in the country and believe it was a good thing the Confederacy was vanquished 150 years ago.
The poll, which involved 897 likely Republican primary voters who were contacted Sunday and Monday, revealed significant support for banning homosexuals from the country (20 percent in favor), shutting down U.S. mosques (29 percent), creating a national database of Muslims (47 percent), banning Islam (25 percent), and allowing South Carolina to hang the Confederate flag on the state capitol grounds in Columbia (54 percent).
In fact, more than a quarter of respondents (30 percent) said they wished the South had won the Civil War.
Sixty percent of South Carolina Republicans support banning Muslims from entering the United States. While that result is largely in line with what New Hampshire exit polls indicated last week, perhaps more surprising is the finding that one in five South Carolina Republicans favor banning homosexuals from the country.
The results are even uglier when confined to the state’s Donald Trump supporters, a group that made up 35 percent of the sample. (Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio tied for second with 18 percent support each, John Kasich came in fourth with 10 percent support, and Jeb Bush and Ben Carson each have less than 10 percent support.)
From PPP:
Trump’s support in South Carolina is built on a base of voters among whom religious and racial intolerance pervades. Among the beliefs of his supporters:
-70% think the Confederate flag should still be flying over the State Capital [sic], to only 20% who agree with it being taken down. In fact 38% of Trump voters say they wish the South had won the Civil War to only 24% glad the North won and 38% who aren’t sure. Overall just 36% of Republican primary voters in the state are glad the North emerged victorious to 30% for the South, but Trump’s the only one whose supporters actually wish the South had won.
-By an 80/9 spread, Trump voters support his proposed ban on Muslims entering the United States. In fact 31% would support a ban on homosexuals entering the United States as well, something no more than 17% of anyone else’s voters think is a good idea. There’s also 62/23 support among Trump voters for creating a national database of Muslims and 40/36 support for shutting down all the mosques in the United States, something no one else’s voters back. Only 44% of Trump voters think the practice of Islam should even be legal at all in the United States, to 33% who think it should be illegal. To put all the views toward Muslims in context though, 32% of Trump voters continue to believe the policy of Japanese internment during World War II was a good one, compared to only 33% who oppose it and 35% who have no opinion one way or another.
“New York values,” indeed.
The South Carolina Republican primary is Saturday. While PPP’s survey indicates Trump is doubling up Cruz and Rubio and has a plurality of supporters across a range of demographic groups, it also suggests the race could tighten between now and the weekend — 29 percent of likely voters report they could still change their minds before casting their ballot on February 20
-Think Progress
Last edited by 57Brave; 02-17-2016 at 07:51 AM.
The best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to make sure he doesn’t get a gun.
Methinks I struck a nerve. Think it kinda proves my point.
No haven't struck a nerve. The GOP is a ghost .
I'm just telling you why and how it devolved
are you still afraid of ghosts ?
The best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to make sure he doesn’t get a gun.
No. Nor am I of demons.
It's an exciting time to be an anti-Republican. The carnage Trump wreaks on the party is going to be fun to watch, but I do fear what will come after him.
goldfly (02-20-2016), Metaphysicist (02-22-2016)
" Which raises a question: Does the GOP that Rubio hopes to lead even exist in any meaningful sense? "
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...may-not-exist/
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evidenced by this tweet
Justin Barasky @JustinBarasky 50m50 minutes ago
Never seen so many establishment R's flock to a guy who just spent 12 million to win 0 delegates in South Carolina.
The best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to make sure he doesn’t get a gun.
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