Let that sink in. Conservative voters are being scolded for supporting a candidate they consider conservative because it would be bad for conservatism? And by the way, the people doing the scolding? They’re the ones who’ve been advocating for open borders, and nation-building in countries whose populations hate us, and trade deals that eliminated jobs while enriching their donors, all while implicitly mocking the base for its worries about abortion and gay marriage and the pace of demographic change. Now they’re telling their voters to shut up and obey, and if they don’t, they’re liberal.
It turns out the GOP wasn’t simply out of touch with its voters; the party had no idea who its voters were or what they believed. For decades, party leaders and intellectuals imagined that most Republicans were broadly libertarian on economics and basically neoconservative on foreign policy. That may sound absurd now, after Trump has attacked nearly the entire Republican catechism (he savaged the Iraq War and hedge fund managers in the same debate) and been greatly rewarded for it, but that was the assumption the GOP brain trust operated under. They had no way of knowing otherwise. The only Republicans they talked to read the Wall Street Journal too.
Conservative. Idaho. Software engineer. Historian. Trying to prevent Idiocracy from becoming a documentary.
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Friday, January 29, 2016
An Awesome Tucker Carlson Column About the GOP Establishment
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That is a great article, should be required reading by the GOP "strategists" and other poobahs.
ReplyDeleteFor further insight, read Scott Adam's blog (he's the Dilbert author) at http://www.dilbert.com He writes a daily post and is convinced that it will be "President Trump". Not because he supports Trump (he doesn't), but because Trump understands people and how to relate to them. Including things like Carleson's relating how Trump handled Hillary's "sexism" charge.
I'm personally undecided on who to support, but I'd be quite happy with either Trump or Cruz.
Speaking as a mathematician, when mathematicians "crossed the border" after the Soviet Union collapsed, I did not regard it as a crisis.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, I must admit many mathematicians inside the United States did regard an earlier wave of refugee mathematicians as a crisis. In particular, Harvard kept out mathematicians fleeing the National Socialists. (Harvard's motto: We're Harvard; we can get away with anything.)
I don't think most Washington types understand what most Americans are going through. We've had median wages decline, and the stability of jobs that are out there for 90% of workers is terrible. Yet the folks in Washington are insulated from all that and are doing fine. The GOP and the Democrats both think the TPP is great, but most Americans have concluded that "free trade" isn't "fair trade", and that unmanaged immigration is hurting them and their children, for example. Yet it's only Trump and Bernie who were willing to buck the established Washington wisdom.
ReplyDeleteMy prediction: Trump will win the election if he really wants to be president, and he'll do it on the backs of "Trump Democrats". It will be much like the blue collar revolution that put Reagan into office to kill stagflation and unindexed taxes that will killing the middle class, and for the same reason: both political parties have settled into a consensus on economic policies that the American workers don't agree with. There was more to Reagan, but it was his attention to economics and willingness to buck the establishment that won Democrats to his camp.
(No, I don't like Trump for many policy reasons. But after the Omnibus budget just passed and the immigration amnesty deal that was almost passed, I don't think you could say that any GOPer from Washington can make a creditable claim to being able to govern differently than Trump would. And that's the GOP's real problem fighting Trump right now: they've lied and underperformed for too long to be able peel voters away from Trump by trying to adopt his positions.)