:mad: Don’t worry! We’ll show those damned Canuckistani savages who’s boss!
N.B.: The last time we had an economic situation anything like the present one, public response was massive support for the New Deal.
Have you been asleep since 1980?! There is no “inner conservative” left to “reawaken.” Market saturation for that message was reached a long time ago!
I’d like to know exactly what “big government laws” the Democrats have passed since Obama has been in office. Bush sure passed some (PATRIOT Act, for instance), but I’m not aware of Obama passing any.
Here, once again, is the lastest version (2005) of the Pew Political Typology. I submit that the only defined groups to which a pure-conservative party to the right of the GOP would appeal (defining “pure-conservative” as (1) consistently small-government, and (2) social-religious conservative) are the Enterprisers (10% of registered voters) and the Social Conservatives (13%). (The Pro-Government Conservatives definitely would not be interested, for obvious reasons.) That only sums to 23% of the vote at most. Add all the Disaffecteds and you’ve still got only 33%. Not enough to form a majority or even a plurality.
That’s all well and good, and maybe I missed Sam Stone’s point for this thread, but most of the opposition to Scozzafava is that she’s pro-choice and pro-gay rights. If everyone wants to talk about the potential appeal of a right of GOP pure conservative small government party, it’s fine by me. But in the context of NY-23’s special election, Hoffman is appealing to angry people who hate socially liberal ideas.
Its always amusing how myopic people are about their own political beliefs. I’m talking about you, not the tea baggers.
Mswas, Sarah Palin IS finished. She’s never going to hold another elective office. She might have a future as a ultraright hood ornament, but she’s a nobody who has nothing going for her besides identity politics.
The teabaggers don’t love Palin because of anything she’s done or any skills she might have, they love her because she’s “one of them”. She’s Al Sharpton for white people.
Well, you don’t think “angry people who hate socially liberal ideas” form a majority in the state of New York, do you?
No I don’t. But I do think that fiscally conservative people could become disgusted with the angry people running the GOP and field their own candidate. Then your useful data would support the fact that there aren`t enough of them to ever be a serious party.
I was merely pointing out that that hasn’t happened. Instead of fiscal conservatives splintering off from deranged angry people, we have even angrier people splintering off from the deranged angry people. None of them are really serious about fiscal conservatism, some are just really mad about supporting gay rights and reproductive rights.
Ouch. Insightful, but ouch.
Oh, where to start? If they are former Republicans, they didn’t “break ranks” with their party to endorse the Conservative candidate. If they are former Republicans they did not fail to endorse the candidate from “their own party.”
Are they “former Republicans” because they no longer hold elective office? Are they still Republicans who broke ranks to endorse the candidate from another perty?
I think the interesting story in this is not the election at all – it’s the breakdown in Republican party discipline. If there was one area in which Republican were far and away superior to Democrats it was in maintaining a united front and a solid voting block for their leadership.
All the people listed in the OP are CLEARLY associated with the Republican party. I don’t think they want to leave – I think they want to complete a takeover that has been happening for some years. I think they are daring the more moderate Republicans (it almost makes me gag to think of Newt Gingrich as a moderate) to try to discipline them – they are looking for a showdown. I think the idea is to cast out the leadership that makes it possible for nominal moderates to get a Republican nomination. And it if costs a few seats in the House, it will be worth it to them, or so they think.
Right. They’d rather be absolute rulers of a small unified party than players in a large coalition party.
The fact that their rump party will never form a majority in their lifetimes doesn’t concern them, because as we have seen from the history of Republican majorities, they aren’t interested in passing “conservative” legislation. They are interested in being members of think tanks, appearing on TV, having books ghostwritten for them.
The whole K Street project wasn’t about transforming the country in a conservative direction, it was about selling themselves to the highest bidder.
The modern conservative movement is all movement and no conservatism.
I know a way. It would involve sheer Blut-und-Boden demagoguery and would probably lead to organized mob violence, but it could be done.
Sure, but Diogenes is engaging in wishful thinking but trying to say that a movement of people he is politically opposed to isn’t ‘really’ a movement. It is ‘really’ a movement, whether he likes it or not.
It’s a temper tantrum, not a movement. A movement needs a coherent goal or cause, and needs to actually move somewhere. The teabaggers are just people whiming because they lost the last election.
I think “End the Poor” would be a compelling cause. Not “End Poverty,” mind you, but focus on the people: career leeches who think they’re too good to have to support 2 kids on minimum wage, people with funny colored skin, people claiming exotic “diseases” you suspect they made up, oh, and of course eggheads preaching compassion and humaneness. Start dressing up in khaki and breaking their windows, then being beating them silly. Maybe a few lynchings.
Oh, I can see that being a very effective cause under the right leader.
No, it’s worse – they’re in denial on that point. They think they really are in the majority, or would be if the independents would just wake up to common sense. Sam has made comments to that effect in this very thread. It’s very similar to the thinking that led the left-liberal New Politics wing to take over the Democratic Party in 1972, and marginalize it.
No, it’s all conservatism and no movement.
But, there are too many of the poor in America; and, except for the noncitizens (and convicted felons in some states), they can vote – they usually don’t, but they can, and will if pushed into a corner.
They can also riot.
Hitler never had to worry about the Jewish vote; there were just enough Jews in Germany to make them a plausible scapegoat, but too few to matter electorally, let alone play any significant role in the street-fighting politics of the period.
Luckily for us, there’s a brand new Gallup poll out today:
Conservatives Maintain Edge as Top Ideological Group
While you guys are trying to paint conservatives as a tiny, fading group of people, the reality is that there has not been a single time since at least 1992 when more people identified as conservative.
In fact, it’s the liberals that are shrinking, which is what I said above. And it’s not even close:
Conservative: 40%
Moderate: 36%
Liberal: 20%
These numbers are based on surveys from January to September of this year. In any event, this marks a high-water point for people self-describing as conservative (40% was matched in 2003 and 2004, and has been lower in every other year since 1992).
Within the Democratic party, liberals are also losing. In 2008, 39% of Democrats called themselves liberal and 21% called themselves conservative. In 2009, liberals made up 37%, and conservatives 22%.
But even worse for Democrats, Independents are not only growing in size, they are becoming more conservative. In 2008, 29% of independents identified as conservative, vs 20% who identified as liberal. This year, the split is 35/18 - a 10 point shift in favor of conservatives and more than double the previous gap.
It gets worse for liberals: On most specific issues, the people are trending towards conservative positions. For example:
These are not small changes. Conservatives now outnumber moderates for the first time since 2004. The biggest increase in conservative attitudes comes from political independents. 76% of the country now defines itself as conservative or moderate.
So in truth, it’s you far lefties that are getting hammered. You’re losing your support of independents, and even Democrats are moving to the right. And we’re not even through the first year of the Obama administration. Wait until you see what the numbers look like next year.
Gallup’s conclusion:
You, my friend, need to get angry and cynical, and stop falling back on the tired old intellectual jack-off game of learning from history.
New poll out today: Hoffman 31%, Owens 27%, Scozzafava 20%. And since then, Tim Pawlenty has also endorsed Hoffman.
Still sure he’s going to lose?