BrainGlutton, you seem to be ideologically committed to a vision whereby all that is good and right and to be sought is to the left, and the duality has to be Center v. (Real)Left. I OTOH though I have no use for the 21st Century GOP, I would not mind having a legitimate Lib/Con match (which is not what we’re getting). Heck yeah, it could end up that the entity named “Democrats” ends up being a CenterRight/StatuQuo party and we both get our wish.
No, only that nothing good or right is to be found on the Right, any more. Not quite the same thing. Sure the LW side has its cranks and woo-ists, anti-vaxxers, anti-GMOs, Luddites, but they are incidental, not essential the way cranks and bigots and heartless bizcons and warhawk neocons and vulgar libertarians are on the RW side now.
Thomas Frank (author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?) makes a pretty strong case that the Dems are that already and have been for decades.
Is there actual data that he’s bringing tons of new voters into the fold?
I hope that their solution to the loss is to get even crazier, leading to a bunch of Trumps in 2020.
Here’s something worth chewing on: a majority of the republican voters did not vote for Donald Trump. The voters who most closely identified with the current republican power brokers did not vote for Trump and some still might not. The republicans have problems with or without Trump. It’s just that Trump has exposed those problems.
I agree that the party may not ‘get it’ but I don’t know if that’s important. These factions in the republican party can’t coexist into perpetuity. The God vote and the Alex Jones libertarian conspiracy nuts cannot peacefully coexist with anyone. Barry Goldwater warned his fellow republicans years ago. It’s the republican establishment who made the conscious decision to invite the Jesus cult into their tent. And now they’re going to pay for it.
Trump could win while the party collapses. In fact it seems like this is exactly how we’ve gotten to this point so far. Trump losing the general presupposes that voters will naturally all repudiate Trump by flocking to Clinton, which I’m not so confident about. Where I disagree with Sanders and his supporters is in the belief that they’d flock to Sanders – they wouldn’t. Trump would beat Sanders, despite what some polls say.
Interesting you mention a bunch of Trumps because what I see happening at the moment is alarming enough. On the one hand, I’m grateful that Trump appears to have brushed back the religious kook element. However, when I see billionaires Peter Thiel and T Boone Pickens lining up to support Trump, this is starting to resemble the billionaires club taking over politics. And that’s the real danger that I see with Trump, aside from the fact that he’ll probably have a hell of a time finding qualified people to run his administration. We’re heading back into the 19th Century.
It’s not so much the religious right (Cruz was their guy, and he ultimately flamed out) as the overall pattern of pandering to the lowest instincts of the Teeming Millions.