Delaware Liberal

The Confederates launched a surprise attack, under cover of darkness. It was 8:30 Wednesday night, and the House was plodding toward its 20th hour of debate on a little-watched appropriations bill, when Rep. Ken Calvert (Calif.), who had been leading the Republican side of the debate, rose. “I have an amendment at the desk,” he said. Yes he did: A proposal to protect the sale and display of the Confederate battle flag at national parks and cemeteries. ... In the Speaker’s Lobby off the House floor, Rep. Lynn A. Westmoreland (R-Ga.) ... told reporters, including Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times, that the Confederate battle flag isn’t racist and that he didn’t think Confederate soldiers had “any thoughts about slavery.” ... Republican leaders, trying to end the humiliation they brought on themselves, pulled the appropriations bill from the floor. But how could such a fiasco occur in the first place? It’s not as if there’s a huge groundswell within Republican ranks to fly the Confederate flag — particularly after its association with the alleged killer in last month’s South Carolina black-church massacre.

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.

“When asked in general whether they support allowing same-sex couples to marry, 51% of Americans say they do, while 35 percent oppose it. Forty-eight percent of independent voters back gay marriage, making it difficult for a conservative Republican to win general election votes on the issue.”