Yeah, the Blunts weird me out, & I’m from here. The Carnahans are *maybe *a less outrageous case. OK, they weird me out a little too. And there was a Webster family in SW Mo., one of whom was a Roy Blunt rival before going to prison.
Funny thing, I don’t remember John Danforth, John Ashcroft, Kit Bond, or Mel Hancock having this kind of blatant dynasty thing, but maybe some of them had important relatives too.
You know, it’s generally considered that the candidate has some responsibility in making his/her position known to the voters. You seem to think that, in the absence of any coherent position statements from O’Donnell, that it is the responsibility of the media to start digging through the records to find the information on her views and political stances that she won’t make public herself. And then you complain because what the media chooses to publish is stuff that makes her look bad. They have NO responsibility to spin the available info to make her look good - that’s the job of O’Donnell and her campaign.
On that note, looking at the Pew Political Typology, I would say the groups most likely to make up the Tea Party’s base are the Enterprisers and the Social Conservatives – certainly not the Pro-Government Conservatives, nor the Conservative Democrats – and the Social Conservatives are “the oldest of all groups (average age is 52; 47% are 50 or older).” And, I don’t think it’s a matter of people growing more conservative as they grow older. While you could find many counterexamples, I don’t think most people change their basic political views or values much after the age of 25. No, this is a generation that sees things in a way no later generation will. And of the Enterprisers, “Only 10% are under age 30.”
“Tiiiiiiime is on my side . . . Yes, it is!”
The youngest group, BTW, is the Bystanders; the next-youngest is Liberals; then Pro-Government Conservatives and Upbeats.
William F. Buckley once said to Charlie Rose in regard to conservatism vs. liberalism: “Life is our secret weapon.”
Liberalism, socialism, communism, etc., are all naive notions of youth. Once people get some life experience under their belt and begin to develop an understanding of human nature and the way the world really works, they find themselves becoming more and more conservative.
Fortunately for the U.S., the largest population segment in history - the baby boom generation - is reaching that point in life and it will have a huge impact upon the politics of the future, with its impact being bostered even further by succeeding generations which will become more and more conservative the older they get.
I’m afraid the tenets of liberalism and the reverberations of the counter-culture era itself are, like Mick Jagger himself, becoming old, irrelevant and outdated. This country is solidly center-right and conservatism is asserting itself more and more aggressively as time goes by.
Liberalism, socialism, etc., never stand the test of time. The horrendous experiment that was communism is way to hell and gone, and the social democracies of Europe are turning more and more rightward as the social and economic problems inherent with socialism become more and more pronounced.
You may have some things on your side for the time being, but time, I’m afraid, ain’t one of them.
47, which puts me in the “13th Generation” (Nomadic) – the next generation after the Baby Boomers in Strauss and Howe’s generational-archetypes schema. Which theory I find somewhat persuasive, at least to the extent that I feel I have more in common, culturally, with people 10 years younger than myself (still within the 13th Gen) than with people 5 years older (Boomers).
People find themselves becoming less energetic as they age, perhaps. Less horny, less restless. More inured to disappointment. And they feel a sense of life’s possibilities closing off. But they don’t become more state-skeptical, small-government economic-libertarian, which is the particular kind of conservatism that the Tea Party is (purportedly) all about. In fact, as you get nearer and nearer to needing Social Security and Medicare . . .
As for traditionalist social-religious conservatism, the last thing it’s based on is “an understanding of human nature and the way the world really works.” C’mon, are ya fuckin’ kiddin’?!
Hilariously, I was far more Republican and conservative in my youth. As I’ve grown older and wiser, I now think the GOP is irredeemably full of shit . The Tea Bagger idiocy proves my point.
Couldn’t you just as easily say that Europe is an example that conservatism, fascism, and Naziism never stand the test of time? I mean, if you’re going to be calling twentieth-century communism “liberal”, then you also have to acknowledge that fascism was conservative.
The idea that there’s a 1) natural ideological drift rightward is silly to begin with; ever talk to an old British socialist?
But even given that assumption, the idea 2) that the GOP platform corresponds to the direction of such an age-related shift; & that mainstream social-democratic welfare-state liberalism belongs necessarily in the 3) same direction as totalitarian Bolshevism & thus 4) on the same ash-heap of youthful idealism–that’s just piles & piles of unfounded assumptions.
Ofttimes held by those who were silly right-wingers in their youth anyway, & still are, & want to feel superior to the normal sane people who tell them they’re foolsih.
The Villages in Florida is an enormous community of senior citizens. It is a hotbed of conservatives and they welcomed Palin this year. I have spent time there and was surprised how tea bagger, ultra conservative they are.
In Europe the political center is considerably to the left of where it is in the United States. In Europe there is virtually no nostalgia for laissez faire capitalism. In no country with universal health care has there been a politically significant demand for a return to a private system. In terms of actual policy, conservative parties in Europe are somewhat to the left of the Democrats. A right wing extremist is one who wants to restrict immigration of blacks, and Muslims, not one who wants to tear apart the social safety net that has been constructed for whites.
Back then there was a backlash against the anti-war movement, the hippies, and the new left. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a backlash against the Tea Party movement.
And ignorance does not interfere with strong opinions. If anything there seems to be an inverse relationship between knowledge and the assurance that one knows the absolute truth.
