Also, couldn’t one argue that the predecessor of Limbaugh be Charles Coughlin?
I can’t help but notice that (with the arguable exception of abortion) none of the things alleged happened when Democrats were in power but all of the ones under “Republicans in power” have happened or are happening.
I mentioned elsewhere that a few years ago the UK drastically ramped up regulation of payday lenders, debt management companies and other consumer credit companies and did a massive housecleaning. Many of the existing companies were virtually criminal enterprises which were shut down, and even the reputable ones were engaged in seriously questionable behaviour (such as sending out “warning” letters under the heading of a fictitious law firm) and got hit with massive fines.
Note that there are still thousands of these companies operating in the UK, but now they’re not allowed to actively cheat their customers and have to be open and transparent about costs and conditions of their loans. I’m curious why some people think it would be a bad thing for the US to follow suit.
Pretty sure you’re thinking of Joe Lieberman (R-Aetna), or maybe both. Point being, there was no public option in ACA, not even a lowering of the Medicare eligibility age to 55 that was discussed, because there weren’t 50 votes available to do it. Most of the responsibility for that goes to the 49 automatic No votes on the Republican side than the 1 or 2 bought-out ones on the Dem side.
Careful with the bothsidesism there. Here we go again with basis in fact.
All those things you list under “fear” of the Republican agenda have actually come to pass. Those fears are fact-based and legitimate. The ones you have listed under fear of the Democrats are imaginary, or more to the point manufactured. You could also list non-fact-based fear of the Democrats imposing Sharia law and grabbing yer guns. The common retort of “Yeah, well, they *want *to!” is just lame.
And either don’t know, or don’t care, what people say in flyover country.
Voter ID has majority support across the country. Democrats in Congress are against it. Banning late-term abortion has majority support across the country. Dems in Congress won’t hear of it. Death penalty has majority support across the country. Dems in Congress are against it. Etc.
Regards,
Shodan
I’m not so sure about that. Now that they’ve gotten a taste of red tRump meat, they aren’t going to respond as well to the pink slime offered by the Republican Establishment. Certainly, if the base voters see anything that even remotely resembles their idol being stabbed in the back by the “RINOs”, the GOP would be very lucky if all they do is pick up their marbles and go home.
Here are the milestones of partisan rancor that I remember in my adult life.
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In 1994, Republicans flat-out rejected the legitimacy of the Clinton presidency. This was from the day of the election. This is the first time I recall the normalizing of day-one calls for impeachment without any grounds being in evidence. I do acknowledge part of this was fueled by Democrat disregard of Bill’s sins, at Hillary’s pretending to the throne of co-president, and at the general idea that the counterculture had arrived at the White House.
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I left the US in 2004. Returning overnight, it seemed to me that the rancor had reached a fever pitch. The right-wing rage machine was at full pitch on TV and in bookstores. On the other hand, I heard liberals routinely calling for Bush to be jailed as a war criminal. I happen to agree with the sentiment, but I also think it was the dawn of the “Lock Him/Her Up” trope that is still making the rounds.
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When Obama got elected in 2008, again we saw day-one calls for impeachment with no evidence of criminality ever surfacing. The right simply up and lost its shit.
But, milestones notwithstanding, I also think this is historical continuity, not change. If we look back to the Civil War, remember that though there were many causes, the proximate trigger was* the simple fact of Lincoln’s election*. The South realized it wasn’t going to get the slavery expansion that it wanted, nor the fugitive slave concessions, nor control of the national discourse in general (but especially regarding slavery).
Lincoln’s election wast the trigger for the South to lose its collective shit over all of these issues. I can’t help seeing echoes of this in the Clinton and Obama elections, where the right (now Southerners since Nixon, you recall) going apoplectic over the prospect of losing control of the national conversation on race and equality, once again. I can’t say why this seemed so especially threatening in 1865, 1994, and 2008. My only guess is that in a period of long relative peace and prosperity, for the first time we see minorities becoming the majority, and climbing in affluence relative to the same Southern-strategy whites who went for Nixon.
Anyway, my $0.02 ended up being more like six bucks, so enjoy for what it’s worth.
Because the Republicans have been spreading lies about the level of voter fraud for years.
Because the need for it is based on a manufactured narrative and the application of it is being used to discourage and disenfranchise legitimate voters.
Because the Republicans have been spreading lies about what “late-term abortion” entails (and indeed what the Democrats want) for years.
They certainly won’t sign off on the lies, if that’s what you mean.
Really, all you are showing is that in certain parts of the country the right-wing have been very effective at spreading anti-left propaganda - and now you’re blaming the Democrats for that.
Politics has always been nasty. What we’re seeing is two things. One is simply a return to the norm. We had a few decades of relative political tranquility due to the fact that the parties were very ideologically mixed following the civil rights switch where Democrats went from being the party of oppressing black people to being the party of supporting them, while Republicans used the southern strategy to start sweeping up disaffected Democrats from the south. What this did was make the two parties very divided internally. You had Democrats like Bob Byrd who was a former Klansman mixed up with west coast liberals and so it required parties to be more moderate. In the past, political parties were very nasty and political rhetoric was not kind and would break out in violence at times.
I think this current iteration of nastiness has a lot to do with Roe v. Wade. The abortion debate is extremely polarized and very, very moral in nature. To the point that it offends our basic senses of decency. If you are anti-abortion, it is very likely you actually believe that the government is allowing an industrial murder complex that kills a million people a year. That’s not something that lends itself to compromise. It’s difficult to say, “Hey, let’s just split the difference and enact policies that will only kill half a million people.” and expect them to buy it. On the other side, it is seen as enslaving a woman to a piece of tissue. Saying, “Well, it’s only slavery for nine months.” to them is not a realistic compromise either. To be honest, there’s really not a good solution to the problem, so we just dig into camps. Political parties are taking a ton of money from both sides and they find it difficult if not impossible to allow any breach in the line on the issue. It’s at the point where you can agree with every single policy that Democrats want, but if you’re pro-life even a soft pro-life, they won’t support you. That pushes people into the arms of one party or another just based on a single moral issue and once you’re in that party, the party itself becomes a moral agent. Republicans become ‘the party fighting against industrial infanticide.’ That gives them a very outsized proportion of moral strength with their supporters. It’s very difficult for someone to criticize tax policy when that party is literally the defender of human life.
I think the other big thing is that we’re more socially isolated, but casually connected so this allows us to attack without the fear of consequence that occurred in earlier times. In the past, a social circle was something that you were part of due to geography and class. If I got in an argument with Billy, then I would likely see Billy again tomorrow and the next day and I would see Billy’s friends and family and that causes us to curb our behavior. In the age of the internet, I can spout off on SDMB and have essentially no social penalty for any argument I want to engage in beyond possibly getting banned and moving on to another relatively anonymous corner of the internet where I can begin arguing again. I can go on Facebook and comfortably pan a high school classmate comfortable in the fact that I won’t see them or their family ever again. I"m a church-goer in a relatively liberal church filled with many gay couples and that takes a relatively liberal stance on pretty much every social issue-our sermon on Sunday was essentially an attack on Trumpists and how Christians who support evil for the sake of power deny their faith. At the same time though, I know for a fact that there are many older conservatives who attend the church as well. Because of that, I keep my mouth shut about politics beyond vague allusions. The reason why is that I know these people and have known them for quite some time and I know that at heart they are good, caring people despite their political affiliation and I don’t want to hurt them or hurt our relationship. On the internet though, I lambaste Trump and his minions effortlessly and constantly because there is no social penalty for doing so.
http://news.gallup.com/poll/194741/four-five-americans-support-voter-laws-early-voting.aspx
You are kind of missing my point.
Large majorities, including Democrats, support voter ID. Likewise for late-term abortions. Refusing to consider that, and dismissing it out of hand, means that you are missing a real opportunity. Is there a chance that the support is based on something other than lies? It goes to what I said above - if you don’t want to know, you will never find out anything, including that you might be wrong. Especially you might be wrong about why people think what they do.
So yes, to some extent I am blaming Democrats for that. They don’t seem willing to consider that there could be some other reason for the failure of their narrative besides racist/sexist/homophobe/stupid/deplorable/you don’t count.
If they’d rather be right than President, that’s fine. But then they aren’t President, and they will never know if, maybe, just a little - they aren’t as right as they think.
Regards,
Shodan
Certainly since at least the GOP’s Southern strategy, there has been an effort to take push cultural wedge issues for political gains. Gingrinch in the 90s really accelerated that process and then after George W. Bush won the election thanks to a Supreme Court vote, but decided to run the country as if he had a mandate, it’s only got worse. Since the Clinton years, the GOP has been pushing the idea that there were two Americas and that red state America was the real America. The invasion of Iraq and the support it garnered in red America while being opposed in blue America made that divide even clearer. Then, when the GOP establishment, who had been pandering to white racists for generations, used that racism to undermine the nation’s first black president with the most vile hate, the break was complete. What had been a wedge issue became a real break.
As for when it ends, it doesn’t. I would never vote for a Republican because in a very real sense it is the party of climate change denial, racism and Donald Trump. For the past 30 years I was hearing how real America hates liberal east coast elites like me and during the Obama years it occurred to me: I hate you back. We’ll stagger along like this for the next couple of generations and it will continue to get worse.
I live in Delaware, a pretty diverse state, Biden’s home state, and consistently goes Democrat in most elections (last time a republican won in the presidential election was Bush Sr. for example)
I am required to show an ID when I vote. So does everybody else.
Why should I (or anybody for that matter) feel oppressed by that?
I presume I have to show it to say, “Yeah, I am who I say I am, and making a pretty consequential decision.” How is that suppression?
What people don’t get, and what the Right exploited, is that, for all his playing around, Bill and Hillary were a unit. She was a smart woman with her hands on power, something no self-respecting, patriarchal, conservative male will ever want, whatever lip service he pays to equality for women.
I’ve been saying it for years. The only way racism, and conservative hegemony, will end is by their being bred out. It will happen, eventually, for all the desperate stands and shady countermeasures Republicans try to pull off; unfortunately, it likely won’t be in my lifetime.
Who has more children? The secular or the religious?
It’s not suppression for you. This is one of those shady countermeasures that Republicans use, though. It’s a fact that voter ID disproportionately reduces the number of Democrat minority voters, not because they don’t have the exact same rights, but because for various reasons they don’t have the particular ID types that Pubbies are pushing for. And Pubbies know it, which is why you’ll never see them stop supporting it.
Voter ID laws are often accompanied by changes in policies making it more difficult for voters likely to vote Democratic to get IDs. They will, for example, change the hours of DMVs near black communities so that it is harder for those people to get IDs. In general, it can be a package of selectively enforcing the rules, or changing them close to the election to suppress votes.
Don’t take my word for it, there have been instances of Republicans admitting as much. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-acknowledge-leveraging-voter-id-laws-for-political-gain.html
Minorities are just as religious as anyone else, overall. But they also vote much more strongly Democratic in the aggregate.
You should have said the Catholic or the non-Catholic. Birth control is the issue there, and it’s the last holdout religion. Religions can preach abstinence all they want, but overall it’s not going to mean much when Billy and Mary are alone together in his pickup.
Meh, that only shows that you follow the caricature that the right wing media is telling you to follow about what the Democrats think. In reality the main issue is that while many do agree that in theory voter ID is ok, in reality the ones applying the ID solution have been found to grossly ignore that it should be funded properly or that access to it should not be denied for political or prejudiced reasons.
One thing I noticed that conservatives want to ignore or not ponder about is that when judges found that the ID law was actually fair (as in not removing voters for prejudice or to not deny access to the ID in practice to poor people) in a state like Virginia the state voted for Clinton. Guess for who the other states that were found to abuse their ID requirements did vote for?
But thank you for mentioning one big reason why hate is consuming the Republican party, it only requires a good number of Republicans to only see the Potemkin village arguments that the Republicans erect and to be misled by those. While the ones in power that do hate minorities, the poor or Democrats get away with their hate turned into action.
Again, you are missing the point. Doesn’t the fact that large majorities, including Democrats, support voter ID suggest that there might perhaps be reasons for it other than the ones you think?
Regards,
Shodan
What other reasons do you have to offer?
I am not sure why you think repeating the same tired old line over and over again is the same thing as responding to actual arguments, but I will answer your question one time.
I support Voter ID. I do think that it is in the best interest that people voting have shown that they are supposed to be voting in the precinct that they are voting in. If asked on a poll, whether I favor Voter ID, with no other part to the question I would answer “yes”.
OTOH, the method in which voter ID is being implemented I do not agree with, and I find that the ways that they are going about it to be discriminatory along class, party, and racial lines.
Do you get that there may be some nuance that you are missing?