GOP Seppuku
Manufacturing is weak, the housing market still comatose, GDP growth an anemic 1.7% half of what it should in ordinary times, compare it with China's growth rate possibly five times higher. Additionally unemployment levels are quite high; 8.3% with the labor force participation rate, labor force divided by the overall size of the employable cohort, at historic lows. There is no handy foreign policy rallying point on the horizon. That is the president has not started or ended a war triumphantly. That's not exactly true, the Iraq war is over, he has set up what ought to be a solid roadmap to end the Afghan war, barring the inevitable errors of attenuation. Further the primary enemy for which so much was done, al Qeada, is now decapitated and largely blind. There is nothing; though, like starting a good war for popularity, they're nothing but trouble once up and running
The Ordinary Result of such circumstance on a presidential race is that the incumbent loses. This is the crux of it. There is simply no way this election should be in contention, yet manifestly it is. The republicans have managed to perversely organize this into an odds on proposition. Part of this may simply be that despite a conventional wisdom that any president owns the prevailing economy by re-election time, the people may remember some of how all this came about.
The GOP has made a hard right turn along their road Anti-Government Extremism Thrives As Politics Get Angrier | TPMMuckraker. The push to establish tenants of conservatism, social conservatism at least, as Matters of Conscience is their key to abrading rights won - restored rather - by women and minority groups over the course of the 20th century. It is their work-around to the commerce clause's forcing open all those bus and lunchroom counter seats. A right turn echoing that of Yukio Mishima's fatalistic fascistic nationalism. Mishima after a lifetime as novelist, playwright and poet, decided as a matter of conscience that Japan had grown soft and weak, not properly venerative of religious sentiment. So he pitched himself (and a small cadre of followers) into an intensive program of martial arts and Bushido. Then sort of lost his head and tried to stage an amateur coup...not necessarily in that order. It didn't really work out. Fewer than he supposed thought the answer was to turn back to the past.
Make no mistake about this; though, the intent, the desire is there to undertake a re-litigation of the 20th century point by point case by case. Suffrage, the legality of unions -- any rights for workers. To overturn it all until America again resembles their preferred version of the nineteenth century Republicans for Revolution by Mark Lilla | The New York Review of Books. A project of this magnitude requires that conservatives remake themselves as the new relativists. Objective facts of current life as reported by the media (the despised main stream media) are to be cast as false and created by the media. This really requires that, at end you, believe that there are no facts merely opinions about fact constructs.
But all this is chasing what exactly? This small article on the the way "American Exceptionalism" has come to grip the popular imagination of the right is instructive How Joseph Stalin Invented 'American Exceptionalism' - Terrence McCoy - Politics - The Atlantic. An image of the future as myth of the past. Reagan Remembered. Thirty years revisionism of the GOP's most popular politician in a generation, spun and re-spun until he becomes an empty symbol of the most extreme and un-compromising conservatism. His real existence as a man simultaneously forgotten and advanced as proof of the attainable nature of ideological ambition. Reagan's Morning in America reelection campaign the emotional appeal of which is still playing on these people was advertising, it was marketing. It was designed to push the buttons of a certain subset of the population and invoke nostalgic feelings for an American past that never existed. Simplified, orderly, appealing, sepia tinted. It is now accepted as a true reality and model for the future they strive for. What they want to get back to. What they wish to gain is the image of control those ads represented. A control that reflected an assumed natural superiority and dominion by white males over the rest of creation. Over wealth women reproduction and sexuality Frank Rich: The GOPís Problem With Women -- New York Magazine:. A continuum of patrimony and property. And most certainly that America was to always mean European settled America, its true owners.
Before looking for reason or logic in this, it's worth asking to what degree is this an accident or intentional? Is the intent to crash the republican party as it exists? That is to wrest control of it intact mid-air, or take ownership of what pieces can be dug out from the crater. Others look at this more mundanely as just a disagreement of means but not way. To defeat Obama retake the White House and Congress. I think that it really seems more like a battle for the soul of conservatism. That there is a faction that no longer believes in divided government in any rapprochement with liberalism of any kind or strain. Still, believing in a aspirationally rational world for any event I ask Cui Buono who will benefit from all this. The center cannot hold, it shifts tectonically. Wealth always seems to land on its feet.
Movement conservatism has been more willing recently to engage in local and retail politics and is more successful at it. Primarily by building majorities in state legislatures. This could be somewhat of a dead end eventually as radical state legislatures may not prove a precise analogly to national legislatures or even state executive priorities Symbolic Legislation to Nowhere: Why Statehouses Fail in Governance - Andrew Cohen - Politics - The Atlantic:. But as the federal government is weakened and paths for constitutional amendments are forged through these legislatures, the future of the nation is formed.
It's difficult to pry apart the cause and effect of the matter, but it is also very likely that the widespread and increasing practice of creating Gerrymandered incumbency-safe congressional districts often at the hands of these same radicalized state legislatures had a hand in the total evaporation of national level moderates, the near enemy in the Republican party. In uni-party districts there is never a nod toward the center only flight to the edges Snowe identified problems; fixes up to us - Opinion - Bangor Daily News - BDN Maine:.
This republican party is divided, not only as to who will lead the party but as to what the party is about. The season's primaries test the parties candidates, Gov. Rommey, Sen. Santurum, Speaker Gingrich, Rep. Paul against the parties affinities. None have been able to mesh effectively with the un-embodied nascent swirl within the party Republican Party at odds with itself in presidential nomination fight - The Washington Post:. It is still unclear how much voting blocs like the Tea Party -- revealing more of a social conservative construct to their debt reduction rhetoric -- will have on the party as it decides itself. The Tea Party blocs are geographically balkanized and as they look across county and state lines from one collective to an other they may mistake all that lies between as being like them. Over estimating the national desire to pick up the reins of a previous centuries mores.
There are problems facing the United States many of them part of a suite of problems shared by the rest of the developed world. The aggrieved wing of the Republican party clings steadfast to the belief that Obama is the only problem The demonizing of Barack Obama - The Washington Post. This is the primary logic error of conservative America. They are an echo chamber listening only to themselves.
When libertarians (and near-libertarions talk about rights. I always think of soap bubbles. Libertarian focus overly on rights as experienced by themselves, a special case of individual rights. The ideology of personal and property rights leads them to subscribe to these rights in absolute terms. Equating a right to a bubble expanding from a point infinitely untrammeled into the universe. Of course when a second bubble from a second entity point is introduced and expands, the two come together in a wall the way two soap bubbles meet. As more bubbles come into being the press of concerns create an intricate geometric plane. It is at this boundary that rights, all rights, all property, all law exist. They are not in the point or the expansion, that is simply the hunger of the id. It's at the wall this adjudicated plane of existence answering to nature and mathematical balance that right comes into existence. This barrier, elastic to a point, will hold and push back every time someone believes they have a right to possess according to desire, or assert a special order of conscience. Suborning the will and well being of others by gender race and whim.
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