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Thursday, May 7, 2015

The GOP, the Baltimore Riots, and Time Dislocation

      There is a tendency with us humans to always fight the last war. The GOP is always fighting the last successful war. So it is that in 2012 Mitt Romney honestly tried to convince us and himself that it was 1980, Obama was Jimmy Carter and Mitt was Ronald Reagan.

      http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/05/06/this-isnt-1968-baltimore-isnt-watts-and-hillary-clinton-isnt-michael-dukakis/?tid=pm_opinions_pop_b

      Now some say 'Love means never having to say you're sorry' but GOpers say 'Being a Republican means never learning from any electoral disasters no matter how bad.'  Now they've convinced themselves that the Baltimore riots resemble the 1968 Chicago riots, and that Hillary Clinton resembles Michael Dukakis.

     The whole narrative is silly. Supposedly Hillary is going to go down for not taking a tough stand on crime. Look I understand why they talk about 1968-that went very well for them. Richard Nixon and Patrick Buchanan were able to sit back and eat popcorn as the Democratic party imploded.

     http://www.amazon.com/Greatest-Comeback-Richard-Defeat-Majority-ebook/dp/B00HXYLW8K/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1431010875&sr=1-3&keywords=patrick+buchanan

     Meanwhile today's Democratic party couldn't be more unified. Even though a lot of Democrats want Hillary to have a primary opponent, most of them want her to win anyway.

     http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/democrats-want-clinton-to-face-a-primary-challenger-but-they-want-clinton-to-win/

     As Harry Enten put it 'Hey, we're Americans, we like choices.'

    Maybe the fact that I don't care about her facing a primary opponent is I was born in Britain? It seems silly to me to demand a choice for the sake of a choice.

    Anyway, today's Democratic party has never been more unified, where as in 1968 the party couldn't have been more fractured.

    This is a structural problem with conservatism, It's part and parcel with judicial Originalism. The idea that our feelings and opinions are frozen in time.

    It's as if the electorate is the same today as it was in 1968. Yet today's electorate is both much less white and much less intolerant than in 1968-if you were to gauge just the views of white folks vs. 1968 you'd see a huge difference. Another huge difference is that 'law and order' is just not the hot button issue it was even 25 years ago-after all starting in the 90s we saw a major drop in crime across the country.

   For more on conservatism and how it has nothing to do with 'liberty' as conservatives claim see here.

   .http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2015/04/on-americans-and-libertarianism.html

 

   

   

    

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