Yes. Who took that poll, by the way?
But how many of that 40% do you think are the kind of conservatives you’re talking about? I.e., the kind who cheer for Sarah Palin, are not disgusted by Free Republic or the teabaggers, and might actually support a third party to the right of the GOP?
Using a finer instrument, with five categories instead of three, reveals a very different picture.
Brainglutton, your source for that is almost five years old. I’m not sure how much relevance it has.
In any event, I didn’t say that the conservatives growing in strength had to be far-right wackos. You guys are the ones that characterized the ‘tea party’ people as being a tiny fringe, thereby allowing you to indulge in a ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy when it comes to conservatives.
But there are plenty of data points which indicate the conservative movement is quite large. Besides that poll, you also have the fact that conservative books continue to be huge best sellers, and that FOX news not only beats all other news networks, it beats them by a huge margin.
In addition, Republican/Conservative candidates are raising more money than Democratic/liberal candidates.
If anything all of the data shows that it’s the left that’s losing ground. You happen to have the Presidency and the Congress because of Bush hatred, punishing the party in power when the economic crisis hit, and because Barack Obama ran as a centrist who promised to end political and racial divisions in the country.
Your side chose to see this as a mandate to govern a center-right country from the left, and the result is that you’re losing support rapidly. The Virginia Governor’s race is another data point - the Republican is leading there by 11 points.
Captain Carrot: I got the result from RealClearPolitics, here.
The source in post #82 is from this year.
Bush wasn’t blamed or hated for the economic crisis. He was the most unpopular President in modern history long before the recession hit. The recession was pretty much a non-issue as far as people’s opinions of Bush.
There is no growth in the conservative movement. Sorry. The nutballs are just more vocal right now. Do you seriously think that mental defectives painting Hitler mustaches on Obama and toting guns to town halls is indicative of any kind of majority of populist sentiment?
I asked you before and I’ll ask you again. What IS the teabagger cause if it’s not the crazy stuff they chant and paint on the signs? When you take away the birthers, the deathers, the racists the gun nuts, the religious nuts who think Obama is literally the Antichrist, the people calling him a “nazi,” a"socialist," a “Muslim,” and a “fascist” all at the same time, the idiots who think that advisory “czars” are taking over the world, etc. etc. ad nauseum, what do you have left? What is the driving principle? The core ideal? They don’t like it that their taxes are going down? Yeah, right.
So… Care to explain the Gallup results?
About 90% of the Tea Parties. The loons are on the fringe. The left has them, the right has them. They’re the ones that seem to make the news. All you’re doing is attempting to smear the entire movement based on a small percentage of nutbars.
I think the movement has grown as big as it has because it’s many things that have built on each other. There was unease about TARP, followed by more unease about the bailouts. The deficits got people even more nervous. Finally, the trillion dollar health care program pushed a lot of people over the edge. There’s just a growing sense that government is becoming much bigger very fast, and people don’t like it.
Done did.
Look, you’ve got a whole TV network promoting these things. If you regard the Tea Partiers as not particularly representative of contemporary conservatism (and unflattering to boot), you need to blame Fox News for the smear job, not anyone on the left.
There’s nobody anywhere near as influential on the left that’s trying to give positive publicity to left-wing nutbars. And therein lies the difference.
Remind me which president started the bailouts and deficits. You didn’t see them painting Hitler moustaches on Bush for his Big Government takeover of the financial sector.
Fact is, most of these guys don’t give a shit about fiscal issues. They care about the culture war. And as proof, note that they didn’t make a peep until Bush was out of office.
They hate Obama, not because he increased the deficit or bailed out the financial sector, but because he’s a Democrat.
I didn’t say the Tea Partiers weren’t representative of contemporary conservatism - I said that the handful of loons you see on TV are not representative of the Tea Partiers.
The problem a lot of you have is that you hang out in an echo chamber. Your ideas of who the Tea Partiers are come from lefty blogs, the left-wing media, and the left-wing SDMB. You have no sense of who the opposition is other than what you hear after it’s filtered through the commentary of fellow travelers.
The reason I stay engaged on the SDMB is precisely because I don’t want to debate in an echo chamber. I’d rather debate the opposition and gain more perspective in how they think. You should try it.
I’m not going to apologize for Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck. I wish the two of them would shut up, or at least tone it down and stay on more substantive issues and away from the crazy. But the fact is, the majority of people attending those tea parties were not crazies. Nor is the right full of crazies. There’s a crazy fringe on the right, and it’s YOU that are trying to turn them into the representatives for everyone on the right. For every ‘birther’ carrying around ‘Obama-as-Hitler’ signs, there are twenty people who are opposing him because they are scared of having their small businesses regulated to death, or of having unionization of their work forces rammed down their throats, or of having their perfectly good health care plans taken away from them.
But aside from the specific policy issues, there are simply many, many people on the right who don’t share your ‘progressive’ vision and will fight to stop it. Their vision of who they are and what they want their country to be centers around individual freedom, self-reliance, local authority as opposed to federal authority, low taxes, the right to keep what you earn and to leave it to your children when you die, etc. They don’t want to live in a nanny state, they don’t want the UN to have more power over their lives, and they don’t want someone constantly evaluating them to see if they are living up to someone else’s expectations about ‘service’ or their contribution to the ‘common good’.
The reason the right is growing in size and anger right now is because the sheer number of changes that have been put forward have moved the political divide away from specific issues on which many people on the right can disagree, and into a more generalized ‘statism vs individualism’ dynamic. They see big government encroachments in every direction, and it’s alarming them. So social conservatives, libertarians, corporate conservatives, and all the other factions have joined together.
You’ve managed the impossible - you’ve reunited the right, and animated them at the same time.
Oh, and I must have missed your explanation of the Gallup results - not surprising since you didn’t post anything after I posted them.
Yes they are. Have you been around one? Have you seen one? Can you see them from all the way up there in Canada? I’ve seen one in Minneapolis, and it’s almost all nutbags. There isn’t a coherent message. It’s ALL birther signs and “baby killer” signs, and Joker Obamas. Where are you getting your information, because it isn’t first hand that’s for sure?
Except, Sam, that your nightmare scenario bears absolutely no resembalence to the actual policies of the Obama administration. It’s a fantasy boogey-man that they’ve created to be afraid of.
And besides, since you’re a libertarian you’ve way, way, way overestimated the importance of economic issues to these people. They don’t want gays near their kids. They don’t want Mesikins or Chinamen taking der jerbs. They hate abortion. They wanna keep their guns. They want evolution out of schools and the Bible back in. They want government to keep its hands off their social security and medicare. They want the CIA to torture prisoners.
And to the extent that they care about economic issues, they are incoherent. For some reason all these people scared of losing their small business to the faceless Obamacrats all support the policies of the bankers and stockbrokers and corporate CEOs.
You think the Teabaggers are representatives of the “Individualists” vs Obama’s “Statists”. But they aren’t limited government conservatives, they’re white populists. This kind of conservatism is very common in Europe, and now it’s becoming the dominant strain of conservatism in the United States. Classic Conservatives certainly weren’t in favor of limited goverment as you well know.
The Democrats under Obama might end up party that’s closer to the classic liberals. Or we could end up with a European-style social-democratic Democratic party. I don’t argue that the Democratic party is a particularly libertarian party, although it might become more so.
But you’re dreaming if you think the Republican party is going to be the party of limited government any time soon. And here’s my proof. Who do they love more than anyone? Sarah Palin. Now, ask yourself why in hell anyone who wasn’t a populist nutball would love Sarah Palin.
And so you don’t have ANYBODY who represents your vision of individualism. The Democrats might not, but the Republicans and the conservative movement certainly don’t. You’re horrified about Obama, but you’re delusional if you think there’s any sort of coherent response to him that wouldn’t horrify you just as much, or more.
You’re dreaming if you think the right is united against Obama’s socialist vision. It’s true that they all hate Obama, sure. But it ain’t because of his economic policies, which are a continuation of the Bush era. They hate Obama because he’s not a conservative, but nobody can agree on what conservative should mean. Are Bush, Limbaugh, Beck, Rove, Cheney, and Palin conservatives as you think of them? You kick Bush and Rove out of the conservative movement, and what the hell were the last 8 years about?
Somehow these guys never turn out to be “real” conservatives when in power. They never reduce government spending. They never simplify regulations. They never stop shoveling money into corporate welfare. They never try to reduce the power of government. And of course, they also never ban abortion, recriminalize sodomy, or put the Bible back in schools. So the Republican party represents neither the small-government libertarian fiscal conservatives, or the religious right social conservatives, and never does a goddam thing for either of them. Because of course, it turns out that the people who really control the Republican party are the big business/big government corporate conservatives.
And this unites all these conservatives in a hatred of…Obama. Yes, they blame Obama for all of this. Now, how does that make sense?
I’ve said this for years and I’ll say it again: The Republican Party consists of rich people and suckers. (And I used to be a Republican, until I realized what a sucker I was.)
The rich people need the votes of the fundamentalists and the libertarians to win elections. But even when the Pubbies are in power, those two factions never get squat. Abortion is still legal and the government keeps getting bigger – because for years the party has been running a con on most of its members. It gets them riled up about their hot-button issues to get them out to the polls, then uses its power to make the rich (and rich corporations) even richer.
The growing schism the the result of the fundies realizing how much power they really have and how badly they’ve been screwed over the years. The libertarians are also doing it to a lesser degree (Ron Paul), but since they’re weaker and more marginal than the fundies, they’re never going to gain much traction.
I know of only two people who went to tea parties. Both of them voted for Clinton. At least one, probably both (they are maried), are pro-choice and pro-gay rights.
And they somehow imagine that Hillary is some sort of small-government libertarian? What kind of drugs are they on?
One of these things is not like the others. One of these things just doesn’t belong.
Agreed. Do you honestly think the GOP gives a shit about abortion or gay marriage or prayer in school. Those are just the carrots that they use to lure their base to the polls. They had eight years to tackle those issues, but didn’t do squat. However they had no shortage of ideas about how to make their rich cronies richer. That’s why I often rolled my eyes during the Bush administration when social progressives feared that the GOP was going to turn America into a theocracy. The faith that really matters to many Republican is that of the almighty dollar.
I think this is hilarious. The stand that this rogue’s gallery of losers is making are going to cost Republicans a district that they possibly could have won otherwise.
Hoffman looked like a fool by knowing nothing about the district he wants to represent.
I hope Kristen Gillebrand gets up in that campaign and points out what a carpetbagger Hoffman is. Looks like the Dems have just at least one secure seat in New York.
Thanks grandstanding ego-maniacs.
Somebody give Lemur866 a megaphone and a prominent pedestal in town square.
This needs to be loudly and consistently repeated.
Bill Clinton, not Hillary. They’ve just moved from being center-left to center-right over the years; a lot of it because they had kids. In that, they are not some kind of a mirror of the country or anything. But they are not raging right-wing loons; just people that think massive deficits are bad for the future of the country.
Why are they blaming Obama for Bush’s deficits? Have you made any effort to alleviate their ignorance?