Honestly, in the last 3 years, I’ve come to think an awful lot of Dopers are mealy-mouthed centrists who think voting Trump out will solve all of our problems. It won’t. The fascist enablers who voted him in are still out there, still totally impervious to reality, still working to make this country a shithole, as their orange savior is so fond of calling other countries.
But we can see them now. Before sometime after 2008, I would have disagreed, but without evidence, with the argument that mealy-mouthed centrists are part of the problem because they’ve personally been in power for so long and there hasn’t been as much movement toward equality as there should have been.
Now, starting with the anti-Obama backlash, I think it’s been made pretty clear that the problem isn’t moderates, it’s a bunch of actual fuckin’ regressives.
You realize that some of the backlash is coming from the Left? Obama, in real, practical policy terms, was Reagan but slightly less assholish. That is how far to the right “conservative” has slid. I see the Republican Party sliding so far to the right that they are going to end up in BullMoose territory by the early to mid '30s, coming down well to the left of the Democrats.
Or instead of discrediting them, give them a homeland.
Declare North and South Dakota “Whitopia” and let them move right in. They can keep busy worrying about the border with Canada and building a nice big wall.
It’s true that would bring us down to 48 states, but there’s no need to throw out the flags: just give D.C. and Puerto Rico statehood, and we’re good to go.
There was definitely left-leaning criticism of Obama. I was talking about the idea that the real problem with America is that there are too many moderate liberals without the guts to get tough on structural issues. The past 12 years have shown that the far right grab bag of racists and fascists had been hiding under a rock all of these years, and their surfacing to the top once Obama took office shows them to be of a size probably larger than the supposedly weak liberals and thus, by their extremism and size, they contribute a lot more to the lack of progress.
Wiping them out isn’t a practical or moral option, but neither is getting along with them. Right wingers are* never* “gotten along with”; they are avoided, ignored or overridden, but never gotten along with. They will be filled with implacable hatred for everyone else until the day they die, and nothing anyone can do will change that.
Which would absolutely irrelevant in this case because Forks is about as far west as Washington (and technically the whole continental US) gets.
Whenever there’s a story about POC in the outdoors large swaths of people jump up to proclaim that there’s no discrimination!! ever!!! no one cares what color you are!!! blah blah blah blah blah.
The area around Forks is gorgeous and a great place to camp, and I likely would have ended up there some time this summer as vacations to places I can drive to are a great idea. Now, that’s out.
Just want to clarify…are you speaking of the “Bull Moose” party of Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 (Officially known as the Progressives). Because that party was about as far left as you got in 1912 America. To wit, their platform stated (Quotes are from wikipedia: Bull Moose Party - Wikipedia)
Among other points. The fact is, that’s a pretty radical agenda even today and it was 108 years ago.
So please, if I am wrong, please educate.
Yes, I do mean that Bull Moose Party – for the first 50+ years of their existence, the Republicans were the party on the Left; they moved so far left that they ran out of room and came up for air on the right; they are now so far to the right that they are on the verge of repeating the transition and coming up on the left. The Democrats, by contrast, have drifted back and forth around the middle but never really moved into the extremist territory that generates that kind of polar reversal.
On this point, I tend to be radically pragmatic. Our system is currently configured to favor a more or less mainstream composition, which seems sensible enough, but it creates this particular problem. We have a non-trivial number of people who perceive that the system has no interest in their concerns and so become disaffected. That disaffection can be harnessed and turned into something ugly, perhaps deplorable, as we have recently seen.
Now, I certainly would not want Aryan Nations, III% or the PETAns running the country (though Sierra might please me, unrealistic as that is), I think telling the fringes to shut up and go to their corners is dangerously unproductive. Making them at least feel heard/involved would probably improve the stability of the social order (and some of the scary people might have useful contributions outside the bounds of their weird kinks).
I have some thoughts on ways that this could be done reasonably, but not to be put in this thread.
That sounds like a vague rhetorical flourish that doesn’t have much to do with the actual history of the Republican Party.
So I think your proposed circular transitions from left to right and vice versa are basically a bunch of hooey. The Republican Party for the past century and a half has been consistently pro-business, pro-military, pro-paternalistic morality in the context of established Protestant churches, and anti-socialist. Namely, they’ve been fundamentally conservative on most matters of public policy.
Republicans’ one big shift in the 20th century was switching from their previous moral-economic support for racial equality (which had significantly dwindled anyway in the period from slavery to the Civil Rights era) to moral-economic arguments against it. A lesser, longer shift was their abandonment of employer paternalism (“we should treat our workers humanely in order to promote their docility and moral rectitude”) in favor of a sort of paternalistic libertarianism (“we should keep our workers docile by means of economic power alone, as coddling them with unnecessary generosity would be an affront to their independence and freedom”). But none of that adds up to the completely unmoored traveling round in ideological circles that you hypothesize.
To exhibit my bona fides as a serious politico-economic thinker, I assumed he was talking about Bashington T. Bullmoose, the tyrant billionaire from Lil’ Abner. “What’s good for General Bullmoose is good for the USA!”
Warning: TPFW. (The linked article is too Pollyannaish for work. But at least there’s an image of the General.
Since when is that a secret?
It was a very poorly guarded secret, that Leningrad Lindsey was still trying to hide. It was swept under the rug for ummmm forever and ignored. The “news” kept giving him a free megaphone for his political goals and bullshit too.
I’m generally against outing anyone against their will and without their permission.
But fuck Graham. he’s a closet case who enables and helps homophobic shit stains do their dirty work, he is a traitor and a Russian asset, and he is doing his best to help Trump become a dictator and create a police state.
I hope the threats to expose him are real and credible. I hope they follow through on this. I hope he is ruined, and if he goes as far as committing suicide, well fuck him.
he used to claim to HATE Trump, now he’s the biggest ass kisser of the bunch. Being one of the most hypocritical of them is really quite an achievement.
The incoming chair of the Harris County, Texas GOP has stepped down after posting an MLK quote with a background of bananas.
So the incoming is outgoing:rolleyes:
Republicans - we hardly knew you:
[del]Family Values[/del]
[del]Women’s rights - Rape - lie back and enjoy, if you squeeze real tight-no pregnancy, should dress like that, had it coming, didn’t practice abstinence, gift from god[/del]
[del]Free trade and security alliances[/del]
[del]International disarmament agreements; testing, limits, non-proliferation treaties[/del]
[del]International cooperation in health research[/del]
Intolerance and Racism - currently the hot button/red meat issues. Ban the mooslems, ban the Mexicans, build the wall, no more brown immigration (Norse goddesses and east euro brides are okay), the country’s full, good men on [del]both[/del] the whuh-right sides, Chinese flu, and they’ll get around to the Jews (yes, Jared) and Catholics in due time.
Compromat is by far the most charitable explanation for his about-face. Otherwise you have to believe he became a Trump lickspittle all on his own.
Nah, he just doesn’t want to get primaried.
Compromat or gutless weasel who wants to keep his position and power.
Whatever.
Right now, whatever can be done to destroy him utterly needs to be done.
Those are my exact feelings about Moscow Mitch.