Just look at these forums and you’ll see how much we - a largely liberal and enlightened group of folks - just love to hate these people.
Well, the book was published in 2004, when the conservative ascendancy appeared likely to last.
Especially nonsensical as the farms and towns of the Heartland were built on land given to the hardy souls who farmed it, the railroads that connected it using free land, and the folks between who settled it*. Any claim that the West and Midwest was settled by people without Federal support doesn’t know its history.
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- ETA: Oh yeah, the guys who were smart enough to buy it from the hanjaks whose farms had failed. Not everybody from Europe knew how to farm.
Gresham’s Law as applied to politics? Interesting concept.
Sad thing is, I don’t mind the Sun. Maybe because it’s in a silent medium, on the other side of the Atlantic, & I only read it sporadically & then for funny pictures.
But yeah, most of it is crap. Does it have a political stance?
dropzone, What’s a hanjak?
Unfortunately, extremism gets ratings. I occasionally listen to the Salem Communications radio channel for William Bennett, Dennis Prager, and Michael Medved. Agree or disagree with them, these are mostly reasonable men (I’ve heard Prager & Medved occasionally go off the deep end). They tend not to grab the biggest audiences, though.
No prob.
Or, more importantly, where to farm.
You would be interested in a book called Badlands, by Johnathon Raban. He posits the notion that the settlement of the Central Plains of America (which had been known by the unfortunate name of the Great American Desert, or the Badlands) was intentionally fostered by the railroad companies in the certain knowledge that the “family farm” was simply impossible under the conditions that applied: poor soil, minimal rainfall, etc.
He says that, in essence, the railroads sold European and internal immigrants on the notion that such farming would be easy in the Great Plains, when, in fact, it was next to impossible. The kind of thick, black topsoil that is most prized by farmers simply didn’t exist, the flatness of the prairies assured a constant, unprotected wind that would blow any plowed topsoil away.
They were cruelly conned into staking their life’s savings on a fools errand. This, he says, is why when you travel the highways there you constantly see the fossilized remains of small farms. Because the railroads, having built their railroads largely on the public dime, needed customers. So they imported them with lies about how easy it was going to be to farm in Buttfuck, North Dakota.
Joe Bob 'luc says “Check it out!”
Nice…bird. The other one’s not bad either.
Yep. “Making money for the publisher is good. Selling newspapers makes money. Sex sells. Scandal sells. People don’t want to think; that doesn’t sell. Do what sells; that makes money.”
You forgot articulate.
It has a couple of pages on politics most days with no attempt to separate news from opinion - and the opinions would sound familiar to Glenn Beck fans. The editorial column - The Sun Says - is distilled nastiness disguised as Man on the Street common sense.
I left England just before the Blair years but, before then, it was consistently pro-tory anti-labour. Most famously, when it looked liked Neil Kinnock’s Labour party was going to win the general election, the front page just said “IF KINNOCK WINS TODAY WILL THE LAST PERSON TO LEAVE BRITAIN PLEASE TURN OUT THE LIGHTS” and the next day, “It’s The Sun Wot Won It” cite.
Just make the link more explicit, here’s a quote from a 2003 article in The Guardian noting that all of Murdoch’s media properties around the world supported the Iraq War.
American’s often think The Sun is England’s version of The National Enquirer but it’s not. It’s by far the biggest newspaper in England and the main source of news (and political opinion) for a large chunk of the population.
The Sun is Fox News in print.
The Calgary Sun prints, or printed, Ann Coulter. And James Dobson. I’d assumed the English Sun exhibits symptoms of a similar softness in the editorial head.
I agree with a lot of what you guys are saying. The last ‘intellectual’ Republican party was the 1994 Gingrich Congress. Since then, the Republicans have been increasingly taken over by the Christian Right and various buffoons.
I think there are several causes here. The end of the cold war destroyed the old Republican coalition. Until then, the power of the Christian Right was held in check somewhat by the ‘old guard’ Republicans who were elected on principles of strong defense and opposition to Communism. Bill Buckley was one of those. Ronald Reagan was another. People forget that Reagan was actually somewhat of an intellectual - he could sit down and have a long discussion with you about the influence of Burke and Locke on Republicanism, and tell you the difference between Keynes and Friedman. I can’t imagine Sarah Palin doing that.
But anyway, the Republican coalition broke up, and the main group left standing was the Christian Right. They were the only bunch to actually have a ‘ground game’, and could get out out the vote and help you get elected.
The next thing that happened was Republicans lost their values. Republicanism used to be about several major things: Strong defense, limited government, fiscal responsibility, individual freedom. Individual freedom started taking hits from the Christian right, who didn’t much care about that - especially if it came into conflict with their own moral code.
Fiscal responsibility started to die when the economy entered the longest sustained economic boom in history, starting in the late 1980’s. Deficits didn’t seem to matter when unemployment was under 5% and the economy was growing 3-4% every year with only a couple of short, mild recessions along the way. The memory of stagflation and 70% tax rates faded, and Republicans started throwing money around willy-nilly just like the Democrats.
Limited government? The Republicans paid lip service to it, but their own actions made them hypocrites. In addition, the crack-up of the Democrats made people forget what they didn’t like about Democratic policies. Clinton governed from the center-right through six of his 8 years. Real Democratic policies hadn’t been seen since the Carter Administration - which many voters today never lived through. So that issue faded away as well.
So here we are today, with the Republicans drifting around trying to find what they stand for, and the Democrats controlling everything.
In my opinion, however, the Democrats are blowing it. Rather than governing from a centrist position and building a new lasting coalition based on the best ideas from the right and left, they’ve turned hard to the left and are trying to impose left-wing policies on a center-right nation. They’re helping to reformulate a new Republican coalition. Now we need to see what form that coalition takes.
The thing that should worry Democrats the most is that they’ve lost a huge percentage of the independents they worked so hard to win over. Six months ago, the Republicans were a regional southern party, and Obama won over large percentages of independents across the country. Now, Obama’s support is coming largely from the hard left and the black community. His support among white Democrats has dropped 11 points. His disapproval rating among independents is now at 59%. Those are Bushian kinds of numbers.
So the Republicans have a chance to build a new coalition. If they do it right, they could be back in power very soon.
America’s turn to the left is actually very out of step with the rest of the world right now. Europe has moved substantially to the right. Canada has moved to the right. Asia has moved to the right. It seems to me that large numbers of countries are zeroing in on a common form of government, built around fiscal responsibility, moderate taxes, moderate secularism, and civil liberty.
Take a look at Canada. Our conservatives moved slightly left, the Liberals moved slightly right. For a while now, both parties have been fiscally conservative, moderately socially liberal, and both parties support lower business taxes. This is all pretty rational - it’s a globalized world, and if you want to compete you need to do it from a strong economic base and you can’t hamstring your manufacturing and production with high taxes and regulations. The United States is rapidly moving from a position of strength in terms of taxes and regulation to being well behind many of its competitors. Canada has no estate tax, our corporate tax rate will be 15% by the end of Obama’s first term, and our capital gains and dividend taxes will be about half of the U.S.'s We will also have a less progressive income tax system. Other countries are heading in the same direction. What is that going to do to America’s competitiveness?
So that’s what a new Republican coalition should look like: fiscal responsibility, lower regulations, reasonable social welfare policies, and enhanced civil liberties. If the Republicans can put that together, they’ll recapture the center. If that means alienating some of the Christian Right base, then so be it.
A lot of the energy on the right at the moment is coming from the Libertarian side of Republican party. The Libertarians are way more advanced on the internet than are the Christian conservatives. They are increasingly made up of wealthy intellectuals rather than starry-eyed college kids, and I predict they will have increasing clout inside and outside the party. That will help push the Republicans in the direction they need to go.
Nice cite.
Buckley might have drawn the line at turning the treasury into a corporate slush fund.
I had my own hit on the OP on another thread.
The U.S. is a big place and it would be a mistake to so easily characterize it as center-right on the whole. A country that elected FDR to an unprecedented four terms as president and let LBJ at least get started on his Great Society wasn’t a country that was inherently center-right. In this day and age, the U.S. is a mixed country, with opinions on many issues defying any easy right/left categorization. No one talked about independents as a voting block 30 years ago, now it’s a block that largely turns the tide of any presidential candidate.
I don’t know where you get your polling data from, but the only very recent poll I’ve been able to find online says that Obama’s disapproval rate among independents is 53%. As for Bushian numbers, his disapproval ratings among independents were a good ten points higher for a good chunk of his last term.
I don’t think there is a general trend to the left or the right going on throughout the world right now. The left has somewhat recently (in the last few years) come to power throughout South America, the Labour party’s ascending to power in Australia in 2007, Obama’s win last year, and now the DPJ’s win in Japan. It’s safe to say there is no worldwide consensus or even a pretense of cohesion among the world’s left and right parties, let alone any sweeping worldwide trends.
Zogby has Obama’s approval rating among independents at 59%. CNN has it at 53%. Those were the only two recent polls I could find that broke out independents. Either way, the majority of independents now disapprove of Obama’s government. And the ratings in Congress have dropped rapidly as well, with 51% of the country saying it’s too liberal (with only 22% saying it’s too conservative), and overall ratings at a 24 year low.
Your cite doesn’t show your claim that the country thinks Congress is too liberal. However, it does say: