Last night after Trump had a few blatantly anti Muslim questions at his speech in NH-and didn't correct a question from a guy who went birther; my take is he knew it was a hornet's nest but didn't want to push back too much as this is what a lot of his supporters think-I wrote a post that argued that too much of the media is trying to show how virtuous they are by attacking Trump in a vacuum.
http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2015/09/trump-mccain-and-muslim-questtion.html?showComment=1442576604050#c1667385358536876022
Chris Matthews in particular kept trying to get Eugene Robinson and other guests state how much of the GOP base believes the birther stuff and the Muslim stuff.
It was pointed out that two thirds of Trump supporters believe this.
Good he answered, so that's two thirds of just 27% of the Republican vote.
In my mind this is very telling. Matthews is dead wrong of course. Two thirds of Trump supporters think the President wasn't born in this country but 54% of Republican voters polled believe this.
There is a much higher correlation between Trump voters and the rest of the GOP field.
I don't think Matthews and other media folks are doing us any favors by trying to exonerate the Republican party.
Then Matthews and later Lawrence O'Donnell held out the contrast of John McCain who in 2008 corrected an old lady who told him that she doesn't trust or like Obama because he's an Arab.
Ok, I agree McCain did the right thing-certainly the expected thing there.
Still I further argued, McCain' wasn't so admirable later on when he heartily advocated for the Paper's Please law, the notorious SB 1070 which ultimately was struck down by the SJC, in his own home state of Arizona which enabled police to demand proof of citizenship to anyone they felt may not be here legally-the powers were that broad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arizona_SB_1070
Tom Brown-my best reader as he reads me a lot; and just as great leaves me comments; some of you other readers could learn form him-hint hint-though argues that there is a distinction between Trump and McCain.
In my view, I disagree. To me what McCain and Trump have in common is much more important than their superficial differences.
But Tom, here, I think articulates a pretty conventional view:
"Here's the important difference between McCain and Trump in this particular case though: however bad the laws are that McCain has supported, it is not relevant to the particular difference in this case. When McCain was confronted with full on delusional insanity from a supporter he was uncomfortable enough (for whatever reason: I don't care what it was), to do something to dispel the insanity. Trump may have been uncomfortable but didn't do anything. He rolled with it. These are basic facts about reality, and he still rolled with the delusional insanity rather than confront it. To me it's no different than if the deluded fool had said the Earth was flatand that it was a big conspiracy of liberal Satan worshipers who denied this and instead pushed the un-Biblical spherical Earth hoax, and Trump had responded "Yes, I'm concerned about these liberal Bible-hating Satan worshiping 'scientists' and their lies as well, and I promise my administration will launch a full investigation and bring these scientist traitors to justice!"
"In other words, on this particular point Trump sounds like he was encouraging full on insanity and delusional thinking about basic facts of reality. That is inexcusable under any circumstances. Absolutely no good can possibly come from that."
"Now, on balance, when we consider all the delusional thinking that goes on in the GOP on all kinds of topics, perhaps Trump is no worse than anyone else, and perhaps he's even significantly better overall. That might be true, but it doesn't excuse him here."
For the record, my point here is not to excuse Trump here at all. But I feel that the Chris Matthews of the world are sort of trying to excuse the Republican party.
First of all, if we have gone from McCain in 2008 at least not openly endorsing such talk but eight years later the GOP frontrunner is, this tells me one thing more than anything else.
The party has regressed. But this also tells you that McCain's stance against nativism was ineffectual.
This is because it was sort of hypocritical. I have here to use an old Marxist notion that someone can be Subjectively innocent but objectively guilty. .
Subjectively, McCain is more decent a man than many in his party but objectively he is no better but just another cog in the racist machine.
And he's not that decent or he would never have supported SB 1070 which even a conservative SJC-which struck down part of the Voting Rights Act-ruled unconstitutional.
Until Trump, the party has sounded more like McCain on immigration-or at least the more reasonable establishment figures like him and Lindsay Graham who impressed many in his kid's table debate the other night.
Yet even Lindsay Graham is a Trumpist in practice. He too is opposed to birthright citizenship. And no one in the part is more reasonable on immigration than Lindsay Graham.
"The GOP’s autopsy of its 2012 election loss laid out “how precarious our position has become” vis-a-vis the Hispanic community. Mitt Romney had performed dismally among Hispanics voters, famously suggesting that America’s 11 million undocumented immigrants self-deport, and those voters comprise an increasingly important bloc in swing states like Ohio, Colorado, New Mexico, Virginia, and Florida. The report, which came short of advancing policy solutions, suggested that Republicans reverse this trend by being more “inclusive and welcoming” to Hispanics. George W. Bush secured 44 percent of the Latino vote in 2000 by preaching a compassionate brand of conservatism, the report claimed. Any candidate hoping to seize back the White House in 2016 needed to do likewise."
"Graham made this same point Wednesday. Bush “won with Hispanics,” he said (abeit inaccurately), and chastised Santorum and others for supporting politically unfeasible, unpopular hardline proposals like mass deportation."
“What we need to do,” Santorum responded, “is we need to win—we need to win fighting for Americans. We need to win fighting for Americans in this country.”
“Hispanics,” said Graham, cutting in, “are Americans.” In the 2016 Republican primary race, this has become an assertion worthy of the applause it received.
"Graham is hardly liberal on immigration: For one, he favors ending birthright citizenship. His grievance with Santorum stems solely from the practical difficulties and political inexpediency of deportation on such a bold scale. That is, he's one of the few prominent Republicans to put the message of the 2013 GOP report into practice. In the aftermath of President Barack Obama’s re-election, he worked with Senator Marco Rubio and Senate Democrats on a comprehensive immigration bill to establish a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Faced with intense backlash from conservatives like Senator Ted Cruz, who joined Santorum on Wednesday night in referring to the plan as “amnesty,” Rubio went on to oppose his own bill. Two years later, with an ongoing debate over how best to do away with the Fourteenth Amendment, and Mitt Romney’s self-deportation proposal seems downright friendly."
"Later Wednesday, on the main debate stage, the closest anyone came to challenging the hardline anti-immigration stance was Chris Christie, who, like Graham, took care not to object to the principle. Instead, Christie said only that the identification, tracking, and forced removal of 11 million individuals from the United States is “an undertaking that almost none of us could accomplish given the current levels of funding, and the current number of law enforcement officers.” Ben Carson, another deportation skeptic, clarified that he “would be willing to listen” to anyone who could explain “exactly how” such a purge would be accomplished. In over five hours of debate Wednesday, the only candidate to express a moral opposition to mass deportation was Jeb Bush, who said it would “destroy community life” and “tear families apart”—but only after lamenting the “hundreds of billions of dollars” it would cost. Bush also defended his bilingualism and his wife’s Mexican heritage, which Donald Trump has suggested is influencing Bush's "soft" immigration position, but he did it so tepidly as to merely raise further doubts about his ability to challenge the real-estate magnate, on immigration or anything else"
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122842/republican-party-has-given-hispanics
Don't even get me started on Jeb. This is what's dangerous. I really wish that in America like in Parliamentary systems. we voted party rather than just individuals. That would solve a lot of problems.
http://www.rit.edu/~w-ethics/resources/manuals/dgae1p10.html
http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2015/09/trump-mccain-and-muslim-questtion.html?showComment=1442576604050#c1667385358536876022
Chris Matthews in particular kept trying to get Eugene Robinson and other guests state how much of the GOP base believes the birther stuff and the Muslim stuff.
It was pointed out that two thirds of Trump supporters believe this.
Good he answered, so that's two thirds of just 27% of the Republican vote.
In my mind this is very telling. Matthews is dead wrong of course. Two thirds of Trump supporters think the President wasn't born in this country but 54% of Republican voters polled believe this.
There is a much higher correlation between Trump voters and the rest of the GOP field.
I don't think Matthews and other media folks are doing us any favors by trying to exonerate the Republican party.
Then Matthews and later Lawrence O'Donnell held out the contrast of John McCain who in 2008 corrected an old lady who told him that she doesn't trust or like Obama because he's an Arab.
Ok, I agree McCain did the right thing-certainly the expected thing there.
Still I further argued, McCain' wasn't so admirable later on when he heartily advocated for the Paper's Please law, the notorious SB 1070 which ultimately was struck down by the SJC, in his own home state of Arizona which enabled police to demand proof of citizenship to anyone they felt may not be here legally-the powers were that broad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arizona_SB_1070
Tom Brown-my best reader as he reads me a lot; and just as great leaves me comments; some of you other readers could learn form him-hint hint-though argues that there is a distinction between Trump and McCain.
In my view, I disagree. To me what McCain and Trump have in common is much more important than their superficial differences.
But Tom, here, I think articulates a pretty conventional view:
"Here's the important difference between McCain and Trump in this particular case though: however bad the laws are that McCain has supported, it is not relevant to the particular difference in this case. When McCain was confronted with full on delusional insanity from a supporter he was uncomfortable enough (for whatever reason: I don't care what it was), to do something to dispel the insanity. Trump may have been uncomfortable but didn't do anything. He rolled with it. These are basic facts about reality, and he still rolled with the delusional insanity rather than confront it. To me it's no different than if the deluded fool had said the Earth was flatand that it was a big conspiracy of liberal Satan worshipers who denied this and instead pushed the un-Biblical spherical Earth hoax, and Trump had responded "Yes, I'm concerned about these liberal Bible-hating Satan worshiping 'scientists' and their lies as well, and I promise my administration will launch a full investigation and bring these scientist traitors to justice!"
"In other words, on this particular point Trump sounds like he was encouraging full on insanity and delusional thinking about basic facts of reality. That is inexcusable under any circumstances. Absolutely no good can possibly come from that."
"Now, on balance, when we consider all the delusional thinking that goes on in the GOP on all kinds of topics, perhaps Trump is no worse than anyone else, and perhaps he's even significantly better overall. That might be true, but it doesn't excuse him here."
For the record, my point here is not to excuse Trump here at all. But I feel that the Chris Matthews of the world are sort of trying to excuse the Republican party.
First of all, if we have gone from McCain in 2008 at least not openly endorsing such talk but eight years later the GOP frontrunner is, this tells me one thing more than anything else.
The party has regressed. But this also tells you that McCain's stance against nativism was ineffectual.
This is because it was sort of hypocritical. I have here to use an old Marxist notion that someone can be Subjectively innocent but objectively guilty. .
Subjectively, McCain is more decent a man than many in his party but objectively he is no better but just another cog in the racist machine.
And he's not that decent or he would never have supported SB 1070 which even a conservative SJC-which struck down part of the Voting Rights Act-ruled unconstitutional.
Until Trump, the party has sounded more like McCain on immigration-or at least the more reasonable establishment figures like him and Lindsay Graham who impressed many in his kid's table debate the other night.
Yet even Lindsay Graham is a Trumpist in practice. He too is opposed to birthright citizenship. And no one in the part is more reasonable on immigration than Lindsay Graham.
"The GOP’s autopsy of its 2012 election loss laid out “how precarious our position has become” vis-a-vis the Hispanic community. Mitt Romney had performed dismally among Hispanics voters, famously suggesting that America’s 11 million undocumented immigrants self-deport, and those voters comprise an increasingly important bloc in swing states like Ohio, Colorado, New Mexico, Virginia, and Florida. The report, which came short of advancing policy solutions, suggested that Republicans reverse this trend by being more “inclusive and welcoming” to Hispanics. George W. Bush secured 44 percent of the Latino vote in 2000 by preaching a compassionate brand of conservatism, the report claimed. Any candidate hoping to seize back the White House in 2016 needed to do likewise."
"Graham made this same point Wednesday. Bush “won with Hispanics,” he said (abeit inaccurately), and chastised Santorum and others for supporting politically unfeasible, unpopular hardline proposals like mass deportation."
“What we need to do,” Santorum responded, “is we need to win—we need to win fighting for Americans. We need to win fighting for Americans in this country.”
“Hispanics,” said Graham, cutting in, “are Americans.” In the 2016 Republican primary race, this has become an assertion worthy of the applause it received.
"Graham is hardly liberal on immigration: For one, he favors ending birthright citizenship. His grievance with Santorum stems solely from the practical difficulties and political inexpediency of deportation on such a bold scale. That is, he's one of the few prominent Republicans to put the message of the 2013 GOP report into practice. In the aftermath of President Barack Obama’s re-election, he worked with Senator Marco Rubio and Senate Democrats on a comprehensive immigration bill to establish a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Faced with intense backlash from conservatives like Senator Ted Cruz, who joined Santorum on Wednesday night in referring to the plan as “amnesty,” Rubio went on to oppose his own bill. Two years later, with an ongoing debate over how best to do away with the Fourteenth Amendment, and Mitt Romney’s self-deportation proposal seems downright friendly."
"Later Wednesday, on the main debate stage, the closest anyone came to challenging the hardline anti-immigration stance was Chris Christie, who, like Graham, took care not to object to the principle. Instead, Christie said only that the identification, tracking, and forced removal of 11 million individuals from the United States is “an undertaking that almost none of us could accomplish given the current levels of funding, and the current number of law enforcement officers.” Ben Carson, another deportation skeptic, clarified that he “would be willing to listen” to anyone who could explain “exactly how” such a purge would be accomplished. In over five hours of debate Wednesday, the only candidate to express a moral opposition to mass deportation was Jeb Bush, who said it would “destroy community life” and “tear families apart”—but only after lamenting the “hundreds of billions of dollars” it would cost. Bush also defended his bilingualism and his wife’s Mexican heritage, which Donald Trump has suggested is influencing Bush's "soft" immigration position, but he did it so tepidly as to merely raise further doubts about his ability to challenge the real-estate magnate, on immigration or anything else"
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122842/republican-party-has-given-hispanics
Don't even get me started on Jeb. This is what's dangerous. I really wish that in America like in Parliamentary systems. we voted party rather than just individuals. That would solve a lot of problems.
Play the party not the man. Jeb may say some nice and humane sounding platitudes and may have a nice biography. But remember he too defended the use of the term anchor babies.
More substantively his position is still implicitly to deport 11 million people as he says that we can only do immigration reform after the border is secure.
This by the puts him to the Right of his brother's immigration policy. As I told Tom in my answer to him in the comments section, I'm basically a moral consequentialist on social and economic issues.
There are three types of moral reasoning based on this premise:
"The first we may call consequentialist(or utilitarian or teleological) reasoning, in which ends are identified as good and means are selected that will lead to those ends; the second is generally called nonconsequentialist (or deontological) reasoning, in which rules are accepted as good and acts are judged right or otherwise according to their conformity to those rules. A third, complementary to those two but not yet included in the decision processes, is called virtue-based (or ontological) reasoning, in which the type of person one is, and the type of moral community one belongs to, determines the obligations to act. In consequentialism, the rightness of an act is linked with the goodness of the state of affairs that it brings about; in non-consequentialism, it is linked with its derivability from a rule; in virtue ethics, it is linked with the character of the agent."http://www.rit.edu/~w-ethics/resources/manuals/dgae1p10.html
It seems to me that you see rule based morality when conservatives keep emphasizing that illegal immigrants have broken the law and that's all that matters, full stop. No context is allowed to be considered. As to what law they really broke and why and what their conduct has been in our country.
On the other hand the firebaggers-or Emoprogs-often argue in terms of virtue based reasoning where everything is a test of your own virtue.
Like if someone donates a lot of money and helps individuals or a community, an Emoprog will still be kind of cool towards this if they think the person did it out of ego or for a tax break. They want charity to be done for only the purest of motives.
If someone makes a proposal they decide whether this proposal shows that the person is good or evil.
There is something I've heard said a lot 'good intentions are what matter.'
I don't totally agree. I mean they are part of it and in saying that I'm a Consequentialist doesn't mean that the other types of morality don't have a part to play in some cases. I wouldn't say I'm pure on this as purity is the illusion.
Ok, we have your intentions in your actions but we also have to look at the consequences of what you did.
Parents can mean well all the time and yet totally fuck their kids up..
So purity of intentions or motives I think is overrated. I wouldn't say motives are irrelevant but far from the whole enchilada.
So with Trump I also think about consequences. And I still think that as a phenomenon he has been positive in the sense that in the future the GOP can never so simply use its strategy of sounding like McCain in public but governing like Trump on policy.
I believe when we look back on this election year, it will be seen as a watershed and the GOP party will never be the same again.
The country will never be the same again. And this will be a very good thing.
Mike, good post. Here's my response vis–à–vis promoting the worst kind of delusion (by which I mean the denial of simple facts about reality, and their replacement with fantasy) in *any* group: right, left or center: the consequences of that are not worth it. The only exception being during a struggle to the death: a violent conflict where military psy-ops, propaganda and spreading of misinformation can be helpful to utterly destroying the enemy (mostly through killing them).
ReplyDeleteUntil we actually get to the point where we're having a violent (shooting) civil war, I'm not comfortable with anyone spreading or being supportive of full on delusional thinking. IMO it's one of the factors that leads to unnecessary war because it actually leads to a state of affairs where you literally can't even agree on fundamental facts with the deluded people you're in opposition to. The 9/11 hijackers were full on delusional: they thought that their tickets to paradise were guaranteed by flying hijacked planes into buildings and killing themselves and as many other innocent people as humanly possible.
I don't think we should give up on the full-on delusional, but by letting delusions get that far just makes the job of engaging with them all that much more difficult. So when I see anyone doing that, I feel the long term consequences aren't worth it (unless, like I say we're already in a shooting war). Anyone promoting that kind of thing should pay a price.
Now I agree Trump's "crime" here is hardly the worst delusion the GOP promotes. And I think the left has some pretty bad delusions at times too, but the vast majority of the over the top harmful delusions are on the right. But Mr. Trump, in that one instance, was promoting a delusion every bit as damaging as this one. Like I say, I don't want to have to give up on someone like Mr. LaRuffa there... but when someone's that far gone, it's awfully tempting.
Krugman has a very interesting post on the debate. I didn't see either debate on Wed, so I'm not in a position to judge, but I'd be interested to see your take on Krugman's piece. I love it. Do you think it's accurate though?
As Krugman points out, elections for president are almost always very close. Jason Smith made that point too when I asked this. I think he's exactly right that anyone on that stage that takes the nomination has a reasonably good chance of becoming president. If some part of their psyche (for whatever reason) prevents them from becoming completely detached from the world of basic facts, then I applaud that. Again, I think the consequentialist position on that should be "what are the consequence of having a fully delusional president... or worse still, one who promotes fundamental delusions about basic facts in the population (regardless if he actually is or is not fully delusional)?" I think the Iraq War was a consequence of that kind of delusion promotion amongst the general population. It can only get worse when the politician in question becomes even less inhibited from promoting full-on delusional fantasies amongst their constituents.
DeleteHere's how I see it: say that if your political opponents nominate candidate X (rather than any other) it decreases the probability that your opponents will win the election by 1%, but at the same time it increases the probability that the country as a whole will become dangerously delusional by 10% (should candidate X win as opposed to any other). What do you want to happen?
Just to be clear, I'm not equating Trump with candidate X here. But this episode makes him look incrementally a bit more like candidate X. I'm not sure it warrants all the attention it's getting though.
I pasted the wrong link to Mr. LaRuffa. Here's the one I meant to post:
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-cHUZwEo3M
I wouldn't know where to begin with someone like that (assuming I felt an intervention would be helpful).
The more I think about it, the idea outcome of the Trump nomination is to cause terrible damage to unity on the right. That won't be accomplished if Trump runs away with it. There needs to be a terrible party rending struggle that goes on and on, pitting two or more groups against each other and covering each other with as much muck and slime as possible.
DeleteSo I don't necessarily see it as a bad thing to see Trump's opponents to use this incident to fling poo at him. I'll expect he'll fling it right back. Reading the comments on right wing blogs, it seems there's lots of rancor going on between groups. I want them to poop all over each other as much as possible. A 3rd party would be the optimal outcome of all this.
Should be "ideal outcome of the Trump candidacy" not "nomination"
DeleteI agree totally with everything Krugman says. Nothing he says that I see any disagreement with.
DeleteI think we've had full on delusion for a long time. And the two sides haven't agreed on the same facts since-well when was that exactly?
Actually I've argued recently that what has made the last almost 50 years-you can trace this roughly to the start of the Watts riots in the 60s and certainly to the election of Nixon-so frustrating politically is we have had 'bipartisanshipt'
But the catch is bipartisanship isn't this wonderful statemen's govt where we can agree without being disagreeable and come to reasonable compromise.
Just the opposite. My theory is that the times when the country has been most content and peaceful was the long era's of one party rule.
From 1800-1860 the old Dixie Democrats dominated. Of course the catch was their power was founded on the original sin of slavery.
So then Lincoln and the GOP rose up saved the Union, ended slavery and begun a 72 year era of dominance.
Then the GOP's sin was it's plutocractic policies that landed us in the Depression. This begun a era of domination by the New Deal Democrats.
However, like all good eras of bread and circuses the original sin here was that the New Deal Democratic coalition was only possible with an unholy alliance with the conservative Democrats in the Segregationist South.
When LBJ singed Civil Rights the Center could no longer hold.
The Democratic coalition split in three-the northern liberals, southern racist Dems and the ethnic white Dems in the big Northern Dem machines.
The GOP was able to take advantage of this and put together the old Southern Strategy.
Basically whites, shocked and firghtened by the level of social upheaval in the 60s-a seminal moment was that after LBJ singed civil rights this didn't please the black community; instead they rioted as they felt like they had equality in theory but not actuality.
A very complicated but fascinating story I would recommend Garry Wills in understanding first and foremost.
http://www.amazon.com/Nixon-Agonistes-Crisis-Self-Made-Man/dp/0618134328/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1442616919&sr=8-1&keywords=garry+wills+nixon%27s+agonistes
OK, on a totally different subject... sometimes I like to engage in science fiction fantasies about what would be fun and entertaining to me beyond all measure. I have a few recurring themes that put a smile on my face every time I think about them, but I just came up with a new one that occurred to me after reading the headlines today.... OK, so prepare yourself, this is going to sound kind of sick, but here goes:
ReplyDeleteImagine a terrorist scientist disgusted with the Planned Parenthood BS going on right now in congress who finds a way to cause all the MALE congressmen and senators and supreme court justices to start growing fetuses inside their bodies... Bwahahahahaha!!! Wouldn't that be priceless?? So it's not cruel to the fetuses, you can imagine they are essentially brain dead vegetative mutants, with only a rudimentary brain stem to keep their hearts pumping etc. Say the average number of fetuses per man is 10 or 20... enough that would kill him if left to go to term. And imagine they are attached *everywhere*... on his intestines, internal organs... perhaps inside his testicles. I'd read that male pregnancy is actually possible since the fetus creates it's own placenta. It would probably be fatal of course, to both adult and fetus, if left to go on too long. Here's more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_pregnancy
The front page shots of Ted Cruz trying to sneak in the back door of a PP clinic to have his fetus problem taken care of (quietly and discretely) would be absolutely priceless!
DeleteOK, now, back from my delusional fantasies to reality again. [sigh].
Maybe that can be the basis of a comedy ... film or skit or something. Hmmm... I'll have to think about that.
Ok, continuing my narrative in comment above:
ReplyDeleteRepublicans had hoped with the election of NIxon in 1968 and the rise of the Silent Majority they would usher in a new ear of GOP dominance.
But though they did dominated the Presidency over the next 24 years, the Dems would remain in control of Congress.
Then the GOP would take Congress in 1994 but by then the Dems figured out how to win the Presidency again.
The early 90s were an interesting realignment in that the parties continued to divide the government-bipartisanship-but the GOP went from the Presidential party to the Congressional party while the Dems did the other.
Right through unitl 2016 at least, then, since 1968 the GOP and Dems have been in a perpetual thumb war to gain a decisive advantage. Though both sides have at different times declared that we had a new Democratic majority or Republican majority-this was very popular after W won again in 2004-in retrospect those claims proved to be mirages every time.
Understand something though. Bipartisanship far from a good thing is gridlock. But if the US government is in gridlock with itself it's because the people are.
For a long time-since the late 60s we as a nation have not had a common frame of reference and have not had nay mutual facts that we agree on.
Until we do again-ie until one of the party's regain dominance-we will continue to have this very unsettling feeling of deep social divisions.
You can argue that in the previous three epochs of dominance I mentioned each time one party was clearly on the side of angels so to speak.
The Dems were right against the Federalists in 1800, the GOP was right against the Dems in 1860 and the Dems were right against the GOP in 1932.
So where are we now? The irony is we are still fighting the battles of 1932.
The GOP has never to this day fundamentally accepted the New Deal revolution.. So they remain the party of reaction.
Things will get better then when the Democrats are able to conclusively defeat them.
Trump may be a sign that this is coming as i think you may see the GOP truly split in half by the end of this election. There are various ways this could happen.
P.S. In a way it's shocking that the GOP still contradicts the clear lesson of 1932. But then when you think about it, the Dems hadn't totally learned the lesson of 1860 until over 100 years later when LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act.
Now that I've rattled off this history lesson I feel like this should have been a post. What a waste. LOL
"But if the US government is in gridlock with itself it's because the people are. "
ReplyDeleteI mean the Congress and President are divided because the people are divided.
Tom if Trump runs away with it there will be terrible disunity as he;s not a Republican-Krugman himself in your link says he makes a lot more sense than the rest of the field on taxes.
ReplyDeleteSo the establishment will never accept him. My take is that the GOP state delegates would probably refuse to be counted for him if he did win which would lead to a civil war.
The war will be between the establishment and the base. At this point it seems to me it's already inevitable.
But the establishment still hopes it can kill of Trump and end the conflict.