There are only three reasons to support Trump at this juncture:
Racism
Hatred of other Americans
Sociopathy
It cannot be because of his agenda as he has none. It cannot be because of his dedication to conservative values… unless you define “conservative” as the above three items. It cannot be because you support his economics. I cannot be because you support his ability to negotiate. At this point in time, remaining support for this administration is based on purely hate, racism, sociopathy.
Conservatives have a choice - pull back, or jump gleefully into the maelstrom. There are no other options remaining.
I think anyone who cares for the Republican Party should vote Democrat in the fall. The Party has been taken over by the extreme and intolerant. Moderate Republican Conservatives don’t really exist anymore on the Party’s radar. That needs to change, and the only way to change it is to resoundingly repudiate the Republican Party in its present form.
Many people won’t do it because they think that one election like that would destroy their Party. That’s a ridiculous and irrational fear, and it is preventing the cleansing that the Republican Party so desperately needs. Was the Republican Party ruined by Barry Goldwater’s complete rout by Johnson? Hell no, they got the White House back in the very next election.
The problem is, ~35% of Americans apparently support Trump, no matter what. There’s no saving the Republican Party until enough of them die off that they and their attitudes are finally a ‘minority of a minority’ - when Trumpists and their ideological descendants no longer control the GOP, even when it’s the minority party.
I plan on living until somewhere around mid-century, but I think it’ll be touch-and-go as to whether I’ll see that day.
In the meantime, it’s up to Dems to campaign and govern in a way that makes them the more or less permanent majority party.
I don’t understand what the problem is here. The assertion is that the white men who supported Trump did it from racist and authoritarian impulses. This is not a brush that touches white men who didn’t vote for Trump.
I have resolved the conflict for myself. Being blond-haired, blue-eyed of North Sea ancestry, and seeing this vileness, I have concluded that “white” is not any kind of ethnicity, it is an ideology. Carson, Steele, Keyes, those guys are whiter than me. I reject whiteness.
I’m not completely disagreeing with you but I am more open to the interpretation that they are willing to tolerate the racism in service of other things that appeal to them. For some I think it is his actual delivering on judges, and not just in SCOTUS, that will defend their evangelical Christian worldview. His being immoral himself can be overlooked for that as well. For some it is that he is actively disrupting the power of government oversight and they like that. And some are still taken in by bluster and think that somehow his posturing internationally is going to result in good things as it plays out. Being willing to overlook or to even self-deny (a WestWorldish “I don’t see anything there”) the racism is not quite the same as being motivated by it.
Anyway, the GOP is not the party of the George Wills at this point. They had their own vileness but had a mindset that required a capacity to self-deny the implicit racism of their positions with a veneer of gentility. This GOP is too straight up about it for them.
A few judges is not worth the price of Congress becoming subservient to a corrupt President.
Conservatives are starting to realize that the Republican party is not advocating conservative principles anymore, but racist ones. The GOP only advances conservative causes by happenstance now. Conservative principles like family values, low public debt, low taxes, and free trade are routinely ignored.
I believe Trump won the 2016 election because of misogynists, racists, and those trying to ignore them. At this point, that last category is not morally defensible.
Every time I see someone claiming that the Democrats have gone “hard left” I picture a man standing in a westbound speedboat saying “Look how fast the shore is moving to the east!”. The Democrats have been drifting gently rightwards for decades; they’re only moving to the left relative to the Republicans who having been moving rightward at near-light speed since the Reagan era.
And George Will has been an unscrupulous hack for a long time (albeit one with excellent verbal skills). That our positions vaguely align at the moment is insufficient to make me like him again.
There are no racists in the Republican Party. There are no racists in Republican elected leaders. There is no racism in Republican policies. The 95% percent of African-Americans who don’t vote for us are stoopid doopids.
There. I Trumped the thread for you. Please thank me for having comforted you against the mean reality-based liberal bullies.
I’m not “feigning concern”. I was raised in a moderately Republican family, and my parents respected people like Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley, Jr. There was actually a time when many conservatives were intellectuals whose opinions you could at least respect even if you didn’t agree with them. it wasn’t the intellectual and moral disgrace it has now become.
That some conservatives feign concern for liberals and suggests courses of action to them that they wouldn’t choose for themselves? Yeah, it happens, on both sides of the political aisle. I can’t readily think of a conservative Doper that has done it here, but it wouldn’t shock me if you could find an example of it.
This philosophy that it is o.k. to do anything as long as you can point elsewhere and claim “They do it too!” never ceases to amaze/disappoint me. All lines are in the sand, and winning means never having to say you’re sorry.
