There’s a lot of truth in that. Conservatives oppose welfare because they don’t want any of them (blacks) getting our (whites’) money. If the Republicans really want to kill Social Security all they have to do is show pictures of Muslims cashing their SS checks and old white people would trip over themselves getting to rallies to disband Social Security.
These are serious positions?
Has it occurred to you that the missile strike was a GOOD thing to do, and that 86% of Republicans agree as opposed to only 37% of Democrats? If that is the case, then the question could just as easily be asked of Democrats: why are they so partisan that they refuse to support something good for the country? Is it just because Trump did it? It would be interesting to find out.
That is possible.
But then explain why most republicans were against doing the exact same thing when Obama was president?
A big part of the explanation, in my opinion, is that they are thoroughly instructed on how to be. What they hear from the propaganda machines tends to comport with what they want to believe anyway, so it ends up in a really ugly feedback loop that few of them are able to recognize. But we see the effects every day on this message board.
Fox “News” consolidates and summarizes the Message of the Day as dictated by their corporate sponsors for the masses. The messages are simple and easy to digest for almost any uncritical mind. The messages are disseminated to the leadership, who then disseminate them to their party adherents, who then disseminate them to their constituents. It doesn’t take long for a meme to take hold and almost overnight, they are in lockstep over what they believe – even if they don’t necessarily understand why they believe it. It just all feels so right, in every sense of the word.
Example: The recent Susan Rice smear. Fox “News” and their corporate masters pick a figure who has already been (wrongfully) tainted by the Benghazi smear and is as a result is already widely despised by the alt-right. They suggest through pure innuendo she has done something wrong by “unmasking” American citizens who were swept up in incidental surveillance. They never clarify that “unmasking” is not the same as “leaking,” and suggest she has violated the law by couching the story in unfavorable terms, complete with spooky music and every sort of disgusting innuendo. They never clarify that she did nothing more than what her job as a National Security Advisor required. Bingo: Instant Susan Rice “scandal” that must be “investigated.”
Watch them do this over and over again. It’s a despicable tactic, but a very effective one that keeps the Republicans marching in lockstep against even their own best interests.
Other popular memes with no basis in truth:
Poor people are always undeserving losers who brought their situation on themselves;
People with money always earned it themselves and pulled themselves up by the bootstraps;
Taxes can never be too low;
Government is always bad and wrong (especially if a black guy is heading it up);
Utilizing the military is always correct, right and good when America does it;
America was founded as a Christian nation;
Corporations are people;
Immigrants are bad, scary people, probably terrorists, and a sensible immigration policy with a path to citizenship benefits no one. Every immigrant is either a terrorist or a “taker.”
I could go on and on, as I’m sure most of us could.
I guess when your “news” sources validate what you already want to believe, it’s pretty hard to think critically about them and you end up thinking the same thing as every other Republican.
Although it has been interesting if horrifying to watch a credibility gap develop between even Fox “News” and the alt-right “news” sources such as Infowars, Breitbart and Zerohedge. The alt-right got so batshit that even Fox couldn’t completely go down those rabbit holes. Most unfortunately, Trump subscribes to the beliefs of the latter and has been working hard to marry them to the former.
Seems more like an inaccurate caricature than useful analysis.
So, why has Dem support for attacking Syria remained largely flat since the missile strikes?
Maybe because they are partisan. It is reasonable to believe that a second chemical attack would increase general support for a response (IMO, of course). However, since it’s Trump, partisan Democrats refuse to give it.
Is it ironic that this post appears in a thread claiming Republicans are partisan? (I blame Morissette for confusing me forever.)
Or maybe it’s because they are consistent, and don’t jump at every little thing whenever fox news tells them to.
So, ~65% of Democrats opposed an action when a Democrat proposed it, and ~65% of Democrats opposed the same action when a Republican does it. And this is taken as evidence that the Democrats are partisan.
Sure.
He kept that promise right away! I became tired of Donald Trump winning as of, oh, roughly, November 8.
But that’s not what the thread is about. It’s about Republicans’ massive flip flop, not Democrats’ lukewarm but steady support.
It’s hard to argue that this strike was a good thing. Hell, it wasn’t really a thing. All we did was shoot up an empty airfield that was back in use killing civilians the next day and nobody knows wtf our Syria policy is because the lights are on at 1600 Pennsylvania but nobody’s home.
I’m not against using force in Syria, but I’m against using farce and unless the administration wows us with a well thought out Syria strategy, so far it looks like we’re using the latter.
OP, if you want more detailed analysis try searching for “asymmetric polarization.” That’s the fancy wonk term.
To trace the origin you could go way back: the Civil War, Reconstruction, the various red scares, the Cold War, the Civil Rights era, Vietnam, the Fourth Great Awakening, the conservative backlash against the '60s, the John Birch society, labor’s decline, Newt Gingrich, right-wing radio, Fox News, 9/11, Iraq, and the Tea Party.
The structure of American government doesn’t do much to help this, either. AFAIK most emerging democracies model their government after parliamentary systems, nor ours. A healthy democracy would have multiple parties instead of a duopoly between two business wings that battle over social wedge issues while screwing over the workers. That won’t be changing anytime soon, though. Too bad.
Heh. I’m not even American.
And remind me, what did Obama do then? Nothing, wasn’t it?
Remember, this is the same Congress (more or less) that on the GOP side is overwhelming on Trump’s side for doing the same thing they refused to support Obama doing under the same circumstances.
I agree with the OP that Republicans are slightly more likely to put party ahead of country than Democrats.
That being said, it’s worth noting that when Sonia Sotomayor was nominated by Obama, 9 Republican Senators crossed the aisle to vote for her, whereas only 3 Democratic Senators crossed the aisle to vote to confirm Gorsuch.
(Yes, the Garland issue, but it was completely unrealistic to expect the Trump administration to withdraw Gorsuch and re-nominate Garland. It was a fait accompli by that point.)
I think one reason Republicans may also be more partisan is because they have more to lose. Countries and societies tend to become more liberal over time, so for Democrats, any setback is just a temporary one, and liberals can simply win again the next time. But conservatives and Republicans are, at any given moment, only 3-4 election cycles away from going extinct.
Something to realize, is that the whole idea about what is and isn’t conservative has by now been thoroughly and purposely corrupted.
The Republican Party as a group still thinks that it is conservative, but it has added a ton of “special rules” in order to more or less bribe certain subgroups to vote for them as knee-jerk as possible.
There’s nothing at all conservative in denying science, for example. That ongoing stupidity was only adopted, because the Democrats jumped on the climate change bandwagon first, so the GOP decided to pretend it was all a lie. Since it became obvious now that climate change IS occurring, they shifted slightly, to saying “okay, it is happening, but we insist both that it’s always been like this, and that there’s nothing to be done about it.”
There’s nothing conservative, and CERTAINLY nothing remotely Republican about supporting extreme States Rights. The republican Party was FOUNDED on the idea that the entire nation had a say in things like human rights. The modern pretense of the opposite, again, isn’t driven by philosophical convictions, it’s driven entirely by their certainty that they need the white racist vote, in order to stay in control of the various state legislatures which in turn allowed them to rig voting in their favor, and gain control of the House, Senate, White House, and now the Supreme Court.
Voting on purpose to damage the international credit rating of the country, in order to make a very lame political statement to their base, is VERY un-conservative.
They are mostly pure politics-of-the-moment, now, which is why Trump won the nomination and the Presidency. But they sure as hell aren’t conservative.
Pretty sure there was a study recently suggesting both sides were about as bad as each other in terms of partisanship.