What they have wrought....
What has happened to the Republican party?
After all those years of fueling their base with hate and misinformation, probably peaking in the 2008 election, their people have finally gone insane. (This is from a townhall in Delaware. The speaker is Republican Mike Castle.)
I mean, seriously. Do you expect moderates to come to this party? Do you expect sane people to want to associate with this?
And yet, Republicans are now tied to it, and individual candidates really can't succeed without, at least, humoring these people.
A couple months ago, I did what I thought was an interesting macro post looking at four decisions of electoral expediency the Republicans have made over the past 40 years which have won the moment, but cost them dearly down the line. (Nixon - Southern Strategy. Reagan - empowering the Christian right, Gingrich - anti-60's reactionism, and 2000's anti-immigration.)
It's still too early to say if this brand of fervent irrationalism will have the same permanent/long term alienation of some of those past decisions, but in the short term, I think you gotta say that the Palin-McCain campaign's feeding of the crazies has cost the Republicans many, many moderates.
(Maybe the Republicans should take a page from the Dems on how to deal with their fringes. The Dems haven't listened to whole sections of their base for decades....)
One more thought: The "birthers" and the "he's a terrorist/socialist/gonna take away our guns" people aren't really all that fringe inb the GOP. Admittedly, I live in a red state, but I run across seemingly rational/normal people making these complaints regularly.
After all those years of fueling their base with hate and misinformation, probably peaking in the 2008 election, their people have finally gone insane. (This is from a townhall in Delaware. The speaker is Republican Mike Castle.)
I mean, seriously. Do you expect moderates to come to this party? Do you expect sane people to want to associate with this?
And yet, Republicans are now tied to it, and individual candidates really can't succeed without, at least, humoring these people.
A couple months ago, I did what I thought was an interesting macro post looking at four decisions of electoral expediency the Republicans have made over the past 40 years which have won the moment, but cost them dearly down the line. (Nixon - Southern Strategy. Reagan - empowering the Christian right, Gingrich - anti-60's reactionism, and 2000's anti-immigration.)
It's still too early to say if this brand of fervent irrationalism will have the same permanent/long term alienation of some of those past decisions, but in the short term, I think you gotta say that the Palin-McCain campaign's feeding of the crazies has cost the Republicans many, many moderates.
(Maybe the Republicans should take a page from the Dems on how to deal with their fringes. The Dems haven't listened to whole sections of their base for decades....)
One more thought: The "birthers" and the "he's a terrorist/socialist/gonna take away our guns" people aren't really all that fringe inb the GOP. Admittedly, I live in a red state, but I run across seemingly rational/normal people making these complaints regularly.
posted by mikevotes at
1:19 PM
8 Comments:
Wowww.. Really, wow. The GOP has admittedly compromised values the last two elections to win though, maybe now Gore and Kerry, boring and on-message don't seem that ridiculous huh?
By
c'รจ montessori, at 4:23 PM
Still boring, but they didn't bring America this.
And, I couldn't quite find the right word. Xenophobic? Nativist...?
By
mikevotes, at 4:28 PM
a black man is the leader of the free world. plain and simple. that alone has brought them to crazy town. and they love it!
By
Anonymous, at 6:19 PM
Don't want to cast the whole group, but, yeah, that's there.
MAny of them aren't even conscious of their feelings of racism/other. They just feel a discomfort with his image. They can't admit their racism to themselves, so he must be foreign, other, illegitimate.
He makes them feel uncomfortable and they can't consciously admit why.
By
mikevotes, at 6:53 PM
When facts continually run up against your mythic vision of "America" and your deeply held, but wrong, understanding of history, you have two choices. Either accept reality and reason and evolve, or further entrench into myth by layering on one fantastical fear-myth after another to justify your world view.
I think it's nativist. I think it's racism/xenophobia. I think it's anti intellectualism. I think it Christianist Nationalism. To some degree I think we're revisiting the fundamental fissures that gave rise to the Civil War. That is, the role of the federal government versus the independent sovereignty of states.
The Civil War never ended. It just went underground... for a while.
By
-epm, at 10:16 PM
It's funny you mention the Civil War. About a week ago, I re-watched the first episode of Ken Burns' Civil War series that lays out the issues and groundwork for secession, and the language and the reasoning sounded extremely similar to alot of what we're hearing.
(And it's funny how the states' rights argument is almost always invoked against progress. Slavery. Discrimination laws in the 50's and 60's. Gay marriage. Abortion restriction...)
By
mikevotes, at 6:49 AM
I think a fundamental flaw in the American experiment is the ambiguity of our organization: the blurry line in the formation of our Union. Between being a true nation on the one hand, and a collection of autonomous nation-states on the other. At some level, we are neither fish nor fowl.
This, I think, has allowed Americans to develop such widely divergent visions of what it means to be American and what "American Values" are.
Who is the next Calhoun?
By
-epm, at 10:17 AM
That distinction is now more in tradition and momentum than law. Lincoln pretty much killed the true states' rights claims during the civil war, and we now have case after case, incident after incident establishing the precedence of Federal over state.
But, states rights does still hold a popular image in the mind, so, yeah, I get your point.
By
mikevotes, at 3:29 PM
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