Saturday Open Thread [7.11.15]
Damon Linker at The Week says the GOP should be less worried about Donald Trump himself and more worried about why he appeals so much to the Republician base:
The GOP’s Trump problem goes all the way down to the roots of the party — the grassroots.[…] that faction’s roots go back much further than 2012 — all the way back to the origins of the modern conservative movement in the right-wing populism of the postwar John Birch Society and similar groups. They were a ragtag conglomeration of ideological radicals animated by rage against various actors, forces, trends, and policies in mid-20th-century American life: the New Deal, Big Government, communists, negroes, elites, decadent city folk, Catholics, Jews, immigrants, feminists, homosexuals, and secularists. Some feared them all, others focused on one or a few. All of them saw the world through a fog of paranoia and conspiracy.
The populists are the now base of the party — its most loyal and devoted members, surpassed only by super-rich donors for influence among the party’s leading politicians and strategists. Candidates for president have no choice but to woo this base, to legitimize its obsessions and flatter its prejudices. And the underdog candidates, meanwhile, pin their entire campaigns on these voters, hoping that the flattery will pay off in a surge of support, catapulting them to prominence.
That’s how we’ve ended up with a vulgar blowhard like Donald Trump riding high (almost certainly for a brief time) in the polls. Trump’s policy positions (to the extent that he’s bothered to articulate them) place him on the far-right flank of American political culture.
Patrick Healy and Maggie Haberman make a case in their NYT article that “Hillary Clinton’s Economic Agenda Aims at a Party Moving Left.” The hope is that “Mrs. Clinton is revealing her natural political self: a blend of progressive and pragmatic, an apostle of government policy as a force for change, and a more left-of-center leader than her husband.”
Aren’t some of those “super rich” the movers and shakers behind thevJohn Birch Movement and like organizations?
Is it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNtTylNR7ks
Support the EVERETT THEATRE in Middletown DE tonite!
Blue Grass favorite Bob Amos and Tantamount Crossing is making a one night appearance!
7:30pm Children under 18 free—all others 15 bucks. Of course, benefits the volunteer historic Everett Theatre! Tickets available on-line or at the door. Liquor available on site. Thanks…….
There are plenty of people not on the far right fringe that are empathetic to the idea that if you are here illegally you are breaking the law.
Sure there are. They are here illegally. Am I willing to try and deport 12,000,000 people because of their illegality? Break up families comprised of citizens and non-citizens? Send parents away while their American citizen children stay? Do I believe that those coming here are killers and rapists? Hell no!
We cannot have open borders in this nation (or any other nation for that matter). The practical question is, how to secure the borders and what to do about those who live on edge because of their status. That doesn’t mean automatic citizenhood but it also doesn’t mean condemnation and deportation.
You can tell the difference between the far right fringe and the those who recognize a point of law and a problem by the vitriol with which they articulate their views. Those who speak like Trump are quite simply the arrogant among us who forgot that their ancestors where once illegal immigrants and that the whole of our nation is founded on illegal immigration.
Until the far right fringe no longer speaks for the right, they all get painted with the same brush. If the non-fringe wants to ever stand up and speak, I’ll bet people will listen. Until then, they remain the silent and compliant majority.
Dave I disagree that the non fringe Right don’t speak up. It’s just that they don’t make good headlines on even local media such as this blog. Media gains viewership through sensationalizing things so of course they will report more on people with views like Trump and Sanders. Those are the type who make for good headlines and social media posts.
How do they speak up, DEvoter302? Jeb just keeps blowing off questions about Trump, like he’s above it. Truth is, he knows he needs Trump supporters to win which is why he, and others, aren’t calling out this nonsense.
But I could be wrong… could you link to non-fringe Right/GOP primary candidates speaking up against Trump?
I’m unaware because I don’t follow national politics, more of a political philosophy guy.
I think I may be wrong because I misinterpreted Dave’s comment. I thought he meant that the fringe people are the ones leading on the issues.
The fringe is the Republican base and they are the driving force (leading on issues) in the Republican primary (and in the general) – the GOP can’t win without them. Which goes a long way to explaining GOP “moderates” silence when it comes to Trump, Cruz, etc..
Both sides are full of misinformed people hence Sanders and Trump.
Really? You’re trotting out the both sides do it canard?
Not an excuse. A sad reality.
Please elaborate. Compare Trump and Sanders… in detail.
I’ll have to check back later. It is Saturday night – and I have plans! 😉
Not an excuse. A sad reality.
How would someone who doesn’t follow national politics even know this? Seriously, if you aren’t following the entire thread, how can you even be in this conversation?
Sanders is economically illiterate. He doesn’t comprehend subjective value theory or the benefits of competition in the pricing system. His entire philosophy is based on feeling that free markets, which we don’t have, are immoral. Yet he believes that government, a collection of those same immoral greedy individuals who have the power of force unlike natural markets, can somehow correct externalities that don’t exist- like having too many deodorant choices. It’s laughable. I don’t need to elaborate on Trump.
Cassandra, not following TMZ type interest in politics doesn’t mean one doesn’t know about policy and political philosophy. That’s a black/white logical fallacy.
Ignoring Austrian school economics isn’t “economically Illiterate.” It’s relegating junk economics to the dustbin of history in which it belongs.
Sorry DEvoter the markets are not natural but human creations. You don’t know much about economics either.
Cassandra, not following TMZ type interest in politics doesn’t mean one doesn’t know about policy and political philosophy. That’s a black/white logical fallacy.
Then you aren’t very good at the philosophy part, either, then. The logical fallacy is claiming that you don’t follow national politics and then proceeding to spin up one of the current media’s laziest narratives as an extended commentary on the national politics you have already claimed you don’t know.
And the evidence that you should quit demonstrating that you don’t know what you are talking about is in the bullshit Bernie Sanders characterization you did there. Because you are clearly not paying attention to anything other than the TMZ portion of the media if that is what you got.