As I once explained on these Boards, even though I’m Canadian, I was a vicarious Republican for most of my life. It was the party that seemed to best represent the essence of the USA (at least to this furriner). Then something happened. It became the party of intolerance, ignorance, and hypocrisy.
So, I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised that Ben Carson, a Republican, potentially the next Republican presidential candidate, says Muslims aren’t fit to be POTUS? But, no one in his party calls him on it? Where is the outrage among the other contenders? Venal as they are, they could come across as tolerant by taking him to task (even if they believe the same in their heart). Yet they remain silent.
I thought I had seen the full extent of Republican intolerance, ignorance, and hypocrisy in 2012 when I made the above-linked post. I was wrong. WTF have they become?!
The moment I found that Ben Carson was a young earth creationist it was the moment that I knew that he was a crank magnet and that many other loopy things were going to come up from him.
They say that we should expect the other shoe to fall? Well, we will hear a lot more falling, this guy is a shoe maker…
I heard him say it on tv today. It was an unpatriotic, intolerant, un-American, according to American principles, thing to say. But then again, he’s a Republican, so it wasn’t a surprising thing to hear. I’m outraged. I’m “yawn, republican” outraged. I think their strategy is to just wear everyone down with stupidity.
I’m sad: I hadn’t realized he had sunk so far into bigotry.
It shouldn’t, I suppose, have come as a surprise. Hatred for Islam is one of the uniting planks of the modern Republican Party. They also still maintain an alarming level of Judeophobia, as well as bigotry regarding blacks and Hispanics.
It is convenient, at least, that they work so energetically to alienate various voting blocs.
Near the bottom of the linked article, only Graham comes right out and says it’s wrong. Of course, it’s only wrong to insult American soldiers who are Muslim.
The others display the usual GOP lack of backbone and moral compass.
The process began back in 1964 when Goldwater celebrated extremism and denigrated moderation during the Republican national convention. But Goldwater was trounced electorally. And both parties had their wackos anyway.
What happened is that Republican craziness, crackpot promotion, civic well poisoning and bomb throwing ratcheted up starting with Nixon, while the left started seriously self policing after Mondale got trounced in 1984. In 1992 there were signs that something was seriously wrong with the GOP, but in fact the saner elements generally had a firm upper hand. Those who governed figured they had to throw red meat to the dogs every election year (in Nixon’s formulation) but that was treated as just the cost of doing business. Sure, Reagan had rhetorically boosted supply side crackpottery and formed close ties with anti-science evangelicals. But at bottom he was an ideologically hard right President who was willing to compromise for his ends. That matters.
The inflection point was Newt Gingrich during the early 1990s. Deciding to shut down the government in order to blackmail his way over a Presidential veto threat betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding or rather indifference to the habits of compromise that form the basis of the US democratic system. The fact is, systems formed on division of powers are susceptible to gridlock, which is why Parliamentary systems have a better survival rate in the world.
The 2nd development was the early 1990s rise of the conservative electronic media, which didn’t care too much about getting their facts right. It’s all emotional appeals, all the time.
Back in 1960, Republicans had an absolute lock on the professional class. Now they are anti-science and anti-scholarship: the level of debate is just sad. It’s no surprise that the professional class is trending Democratic, notwithstanding their affluence.
He’s not alone among Republicans in this viewpoint. Chances are most of the other contenders agree with him on it. However, they also see that beating that drum, on one side or the other, is not going to help them get ahead in this election. Trump got them all used to the idea of giving the other candidates enough rope to hang themselves, and they’re just going to let him go off on his own tangent. Too bad he’s not a mathematician; he might see how that’s a problem.
Personally, I feel that neurosurgeons with no political experience aren’t fit to be President, so he won’t be getting my vote in any case.
I honestly feel sorry for non-batshit conservatives. E.g. those who believe that on balance (which avoids nitpicky claims of HYPOCRITE! for agreeing with some large programs), small-government approaches work better than broad-based ones; that irrespective of their personal feelings, some (but not all) issues are best approached legislatively rather than judicially; that overall economic and social progress would be greater with a combination of significantly lower taxes and lower spending; or that a combination of market forces and information accessibility will, in general, lead to more optimal outcomes than command and control regulations.
Instead, they have to deal with batshit like this because a few decades ago, someone realized that pandering to ignorance and peddling an anti-intellectual stance would increase the market share of their infotainment enterprise. That, coupled with a cynical use of such a pulpit to propel policies that coincided with broader ends and many other factors that are not necessarily related to the political spectrum (e.g. the growing penchant for sound-bitey and overly simplistic packaging of news), led to an overall minimizing of rational discourse of issues within the party.
And this is what you get. The ideals, direction and identity of the party being voiced by those who out-batshit their competition.
Poor, non-batshit conservatives. Who speaks for thee?
ETA: Drafted this before the excellent analysis by Measure for Measure; it is a much broader and better description of what started to happen decades ago.
As I alluded to earlier, lots of respectable people in 1960 were Republican. Which doesn’t contradict your point.
Speaking of 1960, Kennedy faced a fair amount of anti-Catholic sentiment when running for the Presidency. And Jim Crow existed in the South. But I am unaware of any national figures whose rhetoric was as extremist as Ben Carson’s was in the Op’s link. The bigotry was generally couched in terms of fears of Papal influences. No such fig leafs in today’s example.
In 2002, President George W. Bush came to my workplace and gave a speech in which he condemned the 9/11 terrorists as people who had “hijack(ed) a great religion” for their evil goals.
Carson’s statement is a sign of how curdled the attitude towards Islam and Muslims in the Republican party has become in a relatively short time.
In Carson’s defense, I’d make a distinction between two possible meanings of his statement. If he is saying that he personally doesn’t favor a Muslim becoming president, that’s a little different than if he interprets the constitution as forbidding it.
The former interpretation makes him of course a bigot. But not much different than many on the right these days.
The latter interpretation means that he is also an idiot, who doesn’t see the contradiction of invoking the constitution to advocate ignoring it.
One of the problems is that market fundamentalist positions became less empirically tenable over time. Bentham and JS Mill were 19th century liberals who believed in poor houses: what the impoverished needed was better discipline. In the absence of empirical experience, get-tough and go-easy arguments are of equal weight. But fast forward 100+ years and we can see that Europe with a far more generous social welfare state doesn’t in fact suffer economic collapse and spiraling tyranny.
I agree though that there remains a broad territory of debate regarding what proper economic policy is. But hard measurement and experience has basically destroyed certain far left and rightist reactionary positions. Speaking generally, the Democrats and the US left has adapted to this reality. Unfortunately, the conservative media has responded with paranoid theories about liberal bias with respect to ideologically inconvenient facts.
Though to answer your question narrowly, I might say that Bruce Bartlett, architect of the Kemp Roth tax cuts, speaks for sane conservatives. Following critical statements made of GWBush, he was sent to the cornfield. Transplant the Democratic Party to Europe and it would be right of center. I’m actually comfortable with that: I’m a centrist by standards of OECD countries, which puts me on the far left fringe of the American political spectrum.
And I did bet to myself that since Ben Carson is a young earth creationist that then a lot of scientific subjects that do look at the earth as being billions of years old would be disparaged by him.
It was easy to deduce that evolution is already dismissed by him, deducing that then human induced climate change was also going to be denied by him was a gimme.