What’s ironic is that they are flat out wrong if they think they would be getting screwed no matter who’s in charge. Things like an increase in the minimum wage, improved access to good health care, affordable higher education, etc. would all benefit them. Yet they continue to oppose those policies because they don’t want to share the benefits of those policies with anyone not in their group.
Evangelical Christians are the base, not SWMs without a college education. True, nonevangelical white males without a college education preferred the GOP to the Democrats during the 2018 midterms by a 53 to 44% margin. But among white male evangelicals, GOP vote share was 78% whatever your level of education. Among white female evangelicals it was 71-73%.
That’s the base. Not white male. Not whites without a college education. Evangelicals.
To quote the internet, “Classic trilemma: You cannot be honest, intelligent and Republican/modern conservative at the same time; chose two of these.” For a pre-Trump view on modern conservative grifting see Perlstein (2012) in the Baffler: The Long Con.
The culture in the South has changed alot. I grew up here, and have lived here my entire life. It’s very different than when I was growing up.
People don’t believe it. But the races here actually get along much better than in the past. You can go anywhere in the south (almost any town, large or small) and you will see inter-racial couples. It’s not dominant, but you see them, and they are rarely harassed (I haven’t seen harassment in decades). You are likely to see neighborhoods and churches and schools that are integrated. Things are not like what you see in movies about the jim crow days.
Also, many areas of the south have been settled by people from the Northeast and Midwest. So, it’s not a uniform culture by any means. You still can eat southern food, and people still hunt & fish and go to church. But there are other outlets, too, in the larger towns.
I seem to recall reading an article from a conservative commentator who was shocked, shocked, to discover that all oh is traditional ideological views (tax cuts, support for the military, anti-abortionist) were actually just cover for the general strategy of keeping whites on top.
All I was saying was that more of them (as a %) have remained in the Never-Trump camp. I’m thinking of guys like Max Boot, John Podhoretz, Bill Kristol, David Frum, and a few others. There also seems to have been more introspection on their part. I’m not absolving the neocons of their sins. But compared to other conservative groups, the neocons seem to have actual principles and willingness to stand against the Trump Mob.
And that’s what the pro-Trump world is now. It’s just a mob, and all the negatives that entails.
Or at minimum, they would be if Republicans would stop being so blatant about their oligarchal and bigoted attitudes. Most of the Republicans who are leaving the party still believe fundamentally in inequality, they just have a problem with the indecency and naked, unapologetic corruption of their ilk.
“I was fairly deep within the conservative bubble working for what I thought was the good of America, and I was shocked — and perhaps I shouldn’t have been shocked, I should have seen this all along …”
Should have seen it all along? After a generation of Gingrich. Limbaugh, Coulter and Palin? :smack:
Hilarious. He’s like those scientists in a Michael Crichton novel…“We were just trying to clone dinosaurs – how would we know they’d start eating the tourists?!?” :smack::rolleyes:
Yes, Republicans in 1980 were not very friendly to gay people. But then, neither were Democrats.
There is little doubt that Republicans are different now than they were 30-40 years ago, and in universally worse ways. Society was not at all accepting of gay people in 1980, and that’s an evil we’ve come a long way fixing. But as compared to the rest of society, conservatism in 1980 wasn’t this… mean, for want of a better way of putting it. Politicians have always been mean from time to time, but meanness and cruelty now seems to be the main purpose of conservatism.
This is not, incidentally, just an American thing. Conservatives in Canada are becoming weirdly, inexplicably mean in a way they just weren’t in the past. The conservatives of Canada’s past in the 1970s and 1980s were conservative but they seemed to want to do things that would be good for the country. They had big ideas and thought strategically and for the common good. Today’s version don’t seem to have big ideas; beyond the standard mindless “Cut taxes cut regulation” stuff it’s just about being mean to someone and trying to hustle and insult their way to the next political win.
I used to call myself a conservative, many years ago; today I’m nowhere near conservative, and it really doesn’t have a lot to do with ideas. I remain firmly in support of free trade, free enterprise, and minimizing government interference to only what is necessary and that the market can’t take care of. Those things don’t seem to be at all important to conservative political parties, though. They just want to scream and insult and divide and hurt people, and I cannot oppose that shit strongly enough.
As an American ultra-liberal (centrist by European and democratic Asian standards) I sign off on free trade and free enterprise, but think that governmental intervention should be judged by cost/benefit considerations. That said, we are both neo-liberals by this guy’s definition. That sort of neoliberalism covers the gamut from Milton Friedman to Paul Krugman to Robert Reich, as well as 99% of the Democratic Party. It excludes the modern GOP, though not the party of Nixon or Eisenhower.
There’s a grand conceptual coalition outside of the crazy.
I don’t like “neoliberal” because it’s become a snarl term used by the left and the right, and prefer something more along the lines of just liberal, as in the liberal consensus, which broadly dominated American politics until the Civil Rights Movement caused the Republicans to go bugfuck.