Thursday, February 11, 2021

Pubbie Politics in Reality

Here's a fellow who comments on Idiocy by Hayes in The Atlantic.

....his meandering take is so slyly but profoundly backwards it must meet a response. The thrust of his argument is that Republicans have given up on policy fights of the past and are instead motivated today by “a set of resentments (often intensely gendered and racialized) about who will run the country.”...

Passing strange that virtually-identical language was used by a State Senator who states that this idea came from a book called American Carnage.  Could Hayes have been cheating?  Is the Senator a devoted fan of The Atlantic and he slipped a gear in his essay?

Anyhow.

...Hayes is wrong to explain all this in terms of “gendered and racialized” resentments, as if Trump voters either don’t understand or don’t care about policy, and view the GOP simply as a vehicle to express their prejudices. A more cogent (and less contemptuous) explanation requires a deeper understanding of how and why the Republican Party changed since 2004....

No matter the chaff and, frankly, bullshit the NeverTrump Holier-Than-Thou and Oh, So Superior crowd claims........

 ...In 2016, Trump exposed that drift for the chasm it had become, not by stoking “a set of resentments” but by giving voice to policies that GOP voters really cared about but that their party leaders and the donor class had begrudgingly paid lip service to—like abortion and immigration and trade—then totally ignored whenever Republicans gained power.

Trump won the Republican nomination by exposing and exploiting this rift in the GOP. By siding with the voters on issues they care about over and against the donor class, Trump was also able to bring in new voters to the party and win the presidency.

In so doing, he pointed the way forward for the GOP to become a populist conservative party—unapologetically patriotic and pro-American, yes, but also willing to use the power of the federal government to help ordinary people rather than always serve special interests....

Trump has one other significant virtue.  He, like Grant, fights.

 ...Republican voters might have acquiesced on gay marriage, for example, but that doesn’t mean they agreed to being forced to bake cakes for gay weddings. They might have made peace with the Affordable Care Act, but that doesn’t mean they support Catholic nuns being forced to provide birth control in violation of their religious beliefs. They might be willing to use a person’s preferred pronouns or talk about the legacy of slavery in America, but that doesn’t mean they’ll tolerate the insanity of transgenderism or the institutionalization of critical race theory in public schools....

As to Policy-Wonking to Paradise, well.......

 ...when Hayes asks, “What if the overwhelming number of Trump supporters simply won’t vote to give control to the Democratic Party, even if the party is pushing agenda items they like? What if the driving imperative for the large majority of voters—but particularly for those on the aggrieved right—is that they want their people in control?” The answer is that the driving imperative for the large majority of GOP voters is that they want to be left alone, and they know an increasingly radicalized Democratic Party won’t ever leave them alone. 

Marginal policy agreements or compromises aren’t enough to overcome this reality....

Paul Ryan and his predecessor The Drunk, just like China-Man McConnell and GWBush, will never understand that reality.  Want proof?  Look at the Green Line now established in D.C.--which all of these jamokes regard as "THEIR" city.

 ... the idea that there’s a “strange paradox” whereby the policy gap between Republicans and Democrats is narrowing even as a growing faction of GOP voters “seeks to destroy majority rule” is pure fiction. The policy gap overall is widening, not narrowing, and a growing faction of GOP voters are drawn to Trumpism because it doesn’t shy from opposing Democrat efforts to dismantle our constitutional system. 

That’s not opposition driven by resentment, it’s opposition driven by a renewed conservatism....

You could call that 'renewed conservatism' "Right Order" if you like.  Trust me:  it's the same thing.  By the way, it's the same at State level:  the nominally-(R) Wisconsin Legislature simply refuses to stuff Radical-Left Gov. Evers back into his own end-zone.  Instead, they play Prevent Defense.  Eventually, the Patty-Cake Prissies will be vomited from the mouth, to borrow an apt expression.

One hopes that Party "Leaders" are paying attention.

There are two paths.  Ballots or Bullets.

Choose wisely.


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