If you look into Johnathan Cahn's material @subhub174014 or anyone else it's all there.
Trump lost moving on with new year go Biden
- Thread starter Allforthewifey
- Start date
8 Year term is not a dictator nice try . your spreading fear like a homegrown terrorist. You thrive on fundamental problems well keep hoping Go Trump 4 more years
Trump children are 2 of the top 4 choices for Republicans in 2024
It's a vivid illustration of just how strong Trump's brand is with the GOP.
www.axios.com
The Corruption of the Republican Party
The GOP is best understood as an insurgency that carried the seeds of its own corruption from the start.
Why has the Republican Party become so thoroughly corrupt? The reason is historical—it goes back many decades—and, in a way, philosophical. The party is best understood as an insurgency that carried the seeds of its own corruption from the start.
I don’t mean the kind of corruption that regularly sends lowlifes like Rod Blagojevich, the Democratic former governor of Illinois, to prison. Those abuses are nonpartisan and always with us. So is vote theft of the kind we’ve just seen in North Carolina—after all, the alleged fraudster employed by the Republican candidate for Congress hired himself out to Democrats in 2010.
And I don’t just mean that the Republican Party is led by the boss of a kleptocratic family business who presides over a scandal-ridden administration, that many of his closest advisers are facing prison time, that Donald Trump himself might have to stay in office just to avoid prosecution, that he could be exposed by the special counsel and the incoming House majority as the most corrupt president in American history. Richard Nixon’s administration was also riddled with criminality—but in 1973, the Republican Party of Hugh Scott, the Senate minority leader, and John Rhodes, the House minority leader, was still a normal organization. It played by the rules.
The corruption I mean has less to do with individual perfidy than institutional depravity. It isn’t an occasional failure to uphold norms, but a consistent repudiation of them. It isn’t about dirty money so much as the pursuit and abuse of power—power as an end in itself, justifying almost any means. Political corruption usually trails financial scandals in its wake—the foam is scummy with self-dealing—but it’s far more dangerous than graft. There are legal remedies for Duncan Hunter, a representative from California, who will stand trial next year for using campaign funds to pay for family luxuries.* But there’s no obvious remedy for what the state legislatures of Wisconsin and Michigan, following the example of North Carolina in 2016, are now doing.
Republican majorities are rushing to pass laws that strip away the legitimate powers of newly elected Democratic governors while defeated or outgoing Republican incumbents are still around to sign the bills. Even if the courts overturn some of these power grabs, as they have in North Carolina, Republicans will remain securely entrenched in the legislative majority through their own hyper-gerrymandering—in Wisconsin last month, 54 percent of the total votes cast for major-party candidates gave Democrats just 36 of 99 assembly seats—so they will go on passing laws to thwart election results. Nothing can stop these abuses short of an electoral landslide. In Wisconsin, a purple state, that means close to 60 percent of the total vote.
The fact that no plausible election outcome can check the abuse of power is what makes political corruption so dangerous. It strikes at the heart of democracy. It destroys the compact between the people and the government. In rendering voters voiceless, it pushes everyone closer to the use of undemocratic means.
Today’s Republican Party has cornered itself with a base of ever older, whiter, more male, more rural, more conservative voters. Demography can take a long time to change—longer than in progressives’ dreams—but it isn’t on the Republicans’ side. They could have tried to expand; instead, they’ve hardened and walled themselves off. This is why, while voter fraud knows no party, only the Republican Party wildly overstates the risk so that it can pass laws (including right now in Wisconsin, with a bill that reduces early voting) to limit the franchise in ways that have a disparate partisan impact. This is why, when some Democrats in the New Jersey legislature proposed to enshrine gerrymandering in the state constitution, other Democrats, in New Jersey and around the country, objected.
Taking away democratic rights—extreme gerrymandering; blocking an elected president from nominating a Supreme Court justice; selectively paring voting rolls and polling places; creating spurious anti-fraud commissions; misusing the census to undercount the opposition; calling lame-duck legislative sessions to pass laws against the will of the voters—is the Republican Party’s main political strategy, and will be for years to come.
Republicans have chosen contraction and authoritarianism because, unlike the Democrats, their party isn’t a coalition of interests in search of a majority. Its character is ideological. The Republican Party we know is a product of the modern conservative movement, and that movement is a series of insurgencies against the established order. Several of its intellectual founders—Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham, among others—were shaped early on by Communist ideology and practice, and their Manichean thinking, their conviction that the salvation of Western civilization depended on the devoted work of a small group of illuminati, marked the movement at its birth.
David Frum: The Republican Party moves beyond hypocrisy
The first insurgency was the nomination of Barry Goldwater for president in 1964. He campaigned as a rebel against the postwar American consensus and the soft middle of his own party’s leadership. Goldwater didn’t use the standard, reassuring lexicon of the big tent and the mainstream. At the San Francisco convention, he embraced extremism and denounced the Republican establishment, whose “moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.” His campaign lit a fire of excitement that spread to millions of readers through the pages of two self-published prophesies of the apocalypse, Phyllis Schlafly’s A Choice Not an Echo and John A. Stormer’s None Dare Call It Treason. According to these mega-sellers, the political opposition wasn’t just wrong—it was a sinister conspiracy with totalitarian goals.
William F. Buckley—the movement’s Max Eastman, its most brilliant pamphleteer—predicted Goldwater’s landslide defeat. His candidacy, like the revolution of 1905, had come too soon, but it foretold the victory to come. At a Young Americans for Freedom convention, Buckley exhorted an audience of true-believing cadres to think beyond November: “Presuppose that the fiery little body of dissenters, of which you are a shining meteor, suddenly spun off no less than a majority of all the American people, who suddenly overcome a generation’s entrenched lassitude, suddenly penetrated to the true meaning of freedom in society where the truth is occluded by the verbose mystification of thousands of scholars, tens of thousands of books, a million miles of newsprint.” Then Goldwater’s inevitable defeat would turn into “the well planted seeds of hope, which will flower on a great November day in the future, if there is a future.”
The insurgents were agents of history, and history was long. To avoid despair, they needed the clarity that only ideology (“the truth”) can give. The task in 1964 was to recruit and train conservative followers. Then established institutions that concealed the truth—schools, universities, newspapers, the Republican Party itself—would have to be swept away and replaced or entered and cleansed. Eventually Buckley imagined an electoral majority; but these were not the words and ideas of democratic politics, with its ungainly coalitions and unsatisfying compromises.
During this first insurgency, the abiding contours of the movement took shape. One feature—detailed in Before the Storm, Rick Perlstein’s account of the origins of the New Right—was liberals’ inability to see, let alone take seriously enough to understand, what was happening around the country. For their part, conservatives nursed a victim’s sense of grievance—the system was stacked against them, cabals of the powerful were determined to lock them out—and they showed more energetic interest than their opponents in the means of gaining power: mass media, new techniques of organizing, rhetoric, ideas. Finally, the movement was founded in the politics of racism. Goldwater’s strongest support came from white southerners reacting against civil rights. Even Buckley once defended Jim Crow with the claim that black Americans were too “backward” for self-government. Eventually he changed his views, but modern conservatism would never stop flirting with hostility toward whole groups of Americans. And from the start this stance opened the movement to extreme, sometimes violent fellow travelers.
Peter Beinart: Why Trump supporters believe he is not corrupt
It took only 16 years, with the election of Ronald Reagan, for the movement and party to merge. During those years, conservatives hammered away at institutional structures, denouncing the established ones for their treacherous liberalism, and building alternatives, in the form of well-funded right-wing foundations, think tanks, business lobbies, legal groups, magazines, publishers, professorships. When Reagan won the presidency in 1980, the products of this “counter-establishment” (from the title of Sidney Blumenthal’s book on the subject) were ready to take power.
Reagan commanded a revolution, but he himself didn’t have a revolutionary character. He didn’t think the public needed to be indoctrinated and organized, only heard.
But conservatism remained an insurgent politics during the 1980s and ’90s, and the more power it amassed—in government, business, law, media—the more it set itself against the fragile web of established norms and delighted in breaking them. The second insurgency was led by Newt Gingrich, who had come to Congress two years before Reagan became president, with the avowed aim of overthrowing the established Republican leadership and shaping the minority party into a fighting ******* that could break Democratic rule by shattering what he called the “corrupt left-wing machine.” Gingrich liked to quote Mao’s definition of politics as “war without *******.” He made audiotapes that taught Republican candidates how to demonize the opposition with labels such as “disgrace,” “betray,” and “traitors.” When he became speaker of the House, at the head of yet another revolution, Gingrich announced, “There will be no compromise.” How could there be, when he was leading a crusade to save American civilization from its liberal enemies?
Even after Gingrich was driven from power, the victim of his own guillotine, he regularly churned out books that warned of imminent doom—unless America turned to a leader like him (he once called himself “teacher of the rules of civilization,” among other exalted epithets). Unlike Goldwater and Reagan, Gingrich never had any deeply felt ideology. It was hard to say exactly what “American civilization” meant to him. What he wanted was power, and what he most obviously enjoyed was smashing things to pieces in its pursuit. His insurgency started the conservative movement on the path to nihilism.
Tom Nichols: Why I’m leaving the Republican party
The party purged itself of most remaining moderates, growing ever-more shallow as it grew ever-more conservative—from Goldwater (who, in 1996, joked that he had become a Republican liberal) to Ted Cruz, from Buckley to Dinesh D’Souza. Jeff Flake, the outgoing senator from Arizona (whose conservative views come with a democratic temperament), describes this deterioration as “a race to the bottom to see who can be meaner and madder and crazier. It is not enough to be conservative anymore. You have to be vicious.” The viciousness doesn’t necessarily reside in the individual souls of Republican leaders. It flows from the party’s politics, which seeks to delegitimize opponents and institutions, purify the ranks through purges and coups, and agitate followers with visions of apocalypse—all in the name of an ideological cause that every year loses integrity as it becomes indistinguishable from power itself.
The third insurgency came in reaction to the election of Barack Obama—it was the Tea Party. Eight years later, it culminated in Trump’s victory, an insurgency within the party itself—because revolutions tend to be self-devouring (“I’m not willing to preside over people who are cannibals,” Gingrich declared in 1998 when he quit the House). In the third insurgency, the features of the original movement surfaced again, more grotesque than ever: paranoia and conspiracy thinking; racism and other types of hostility toward entire groups; innuendos and incidents of violence. The new leader is like his authoritarian counterparts abroad: illiberal, demagogic, hostile to institutional checks, demanding and receiving complete acquiescence from the party, and enmeshed in the financial corruption that is integral to the political corruption of these regimes. Once again, liberals failed to see it coming and couldn’t grasp how it happened. Neither could some conservatives who still believed in democracy.
The corruption of the Republican Party in the Trump era seemed to set in with breathtaking speed. In fact, it took more than a half century to reach the point where faced with a choice between democracy and power, the party chose the latter. Its leaders don’t see a dilemma—democratic principles turn out to be disposable tools, sometimes useful, sometimes inconvenient. The higher cause is conservatism, but the highest is power. After Wisconsin Democrats swept statewide offices last month, Robin Vos, speaker of the assembly, explained why Republicans would have to get rid of the old rules: “We are going to have a very liberal governor who is going to enact policies that are in direct contrast to what many of us believe in.”
The GOP is best understood as an insurgency that carried the seeds of its own corruption from the start.
Why has the Republican Party become so thoroughly corrupt? The reason is historical—it goes back many decades—and, in a way, philosophical. The party is best understood as an insurgency that carried the seeds of its own corruption from the start.
I don’t mean the kind of corruption that regularly sends lowlifes like Rod Blagojevich, the Democratic former governor of Illinois, to prison. Those abuses are nonpartisan and always with us. So is vote theft of the kind we’ve just seen in North Carolina—after all, the alleged fraudster employed by the Republican candidate for Congress hired himself out to Democrats in 2010.
And I don’t just mean that the Republican Party is led by the boss of a kleptocratic family business who presides over a scandal-ridden administration, that many of his closest advisers are facing prison time, that Donald Trump himself might have to stay in office just to avoid prosecution, that he could be exposed by the special counsel and the incoming House majority as the most corrupt president in American history. Richard Nixon’s administration was also riddled with criminality—but in 1973, the Republican Party of Hugh Scott, the Senate minority leader, and John Rhodes, the House minority leader, was still a normal organization. It played by the rules.
The corruption I mean has less to do with individual perfidy than institutional depravity. It isn’t an occasional failure to uphold norms, but a consistent repudiation of them. It isn’t about dirty money so much as the pursuit and abuse of power—power as an end in itself, justifying almost any means. Political corruption usually trails financial scandals in its wake—the foam is scummy with self-dealing—but it’s far more dangerous than graft. There are legal remedies for Duncan Hunter, a representative from California, who will stand trial next year for using campaign funds to pay for family luxuries.* But there’s no obvious remedy for what the state legislatures of Wisconsin and Michigan, following the example of North Carolina in 2016, are now doing.
Republican majorities are rushing to pass laws that strip away the legitimate powers of newly elected Democratic governors while defeated or outgoing Republican incumbents are still around to sign the bills. Even if the courts overturn some of these power grabs, as they have in North Carolina, Republicans will remain securely entrenched in the legislative majority through their own hyper-gerrymandering—in Wisconsin last month, 54 percent of the total votes cast for major-party candidates gave Democrats just 36 of 99 assembly seats—so they will go on passing laws to thwart election results. Nothing can stop these abuses short of an electoral landslide. In Wisconsin, a purple state, that means close to 60 percent of the total vote.
The fact that no plausible election outcome can check the abuse of power is what makes political corruption so dangerous. It strikes at the heart of democracy. It destroys the compact between the people and the government. In rendering voters voiceless, it pushes everyone closer to the use of undemocratic means.
Today’s Republican Party has cornered itself with a base of ever older, whiter, more male, more rural, more conservative voters. Demography can take a long time to change—longer than in progressives’ dreams—but it isn’t on the Republicans’ side. They could have tried to expand; instead, they’ve hardened and walled themselves off. This is why, while voter fraud knows no party, only the Republican Party wildly overstates the risk so that it can pass laws (including right now in Wisconsin, with a bill that reduces early voting) to limit the franchise in ways that have a disparate partisan impact. This is why, when some Democrats in the New Jersey legislature proposed to enshrine gerrymandering in the state constitution, other Democrats, in New Jersey and around the country, objected.
Taking away democratic rights—extreme gerrymandering; blocking an elected president from nominating a Supreme Court justice; selectively paring voting rolls and polling places; creating spurious anti-fraud commissions; misusing the census to undercount the opposition; calling lame-duck legislative sessions to pass laws against the will of the voters—is the Republican Party’s main political strategy, and will be for years to come.
Republicans have chosen contraction and authoritarianism because, unlike the Democrats, their party isn’t a coalition of interests in search of a majority. Its character is ideological. The Republican Party we know is a product of the modern conservative movement, and that movement is a series of insurgencies against the established order. Several of its intellectual founders—Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham, among others—were shaped early on by Communist ideology and practice, and their Manichean thinking, their conviction that the salvation of Western civilization depended on the devoted work of a small group of illuminati, marked the movement at its birth.
David Frum: The Republican Party moves beyond hypocrisy
The first insurgency was the nomination of Barry Goldwater for president in 1964. He campaigned as a rebel against the postwar American consensus and the soft middle of his own party’s leadership. Goldwater didn’t use the standard, reassuring lexicon of the big tent and the mainstream. At the San Francisco convention, he embraced extremism and denounced the Republican establishment, whose “moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.” His campaign lit a fire of excitement that spread to millions of readers through the pages of two self-published prophesies of the apocalypse, Phyllis Schlafly’s A Choice Not an Echo and John A. Stormer’s None Dare Call It Treason. According to these mega-sellers, the political opposition wasn’t just wrong—it was a sinister conspiracy with totalitarian goals.
William F. Buckley—the movement’s Max Eastman, its most brilliant pamphleteer—predicted Goldwater’s landslide defeat. His candidacy, like the revolution of 1905, had come too soon, but it foretold the victory to come. At a Young Americans for Freedom convention, Buckley exhorted an audience of true-believing cadres to think beyond November: “Presuppose that the fiery little body of dissenters, of which you are a shining meteor, suddenly spun off no less than a majority of all the American people, who suddenly overcome a generation’s entrenched lassitude, suddenly penetrated to the true meaning of freedom in society where the truth is occluded by the verbose mystification of thousands of scholars, tens of thousands of books, a million miles of newsprint.” Then Goldwater’s inevitable defeat would turn into “the well planted seeds of hope, which will flower on a great November day in the future, if there is a future.”
The insurgents were agents of history, and history was long. To avoid despair, they needed the clarity that only ideology (“the truth”) can give. The task in 1964 was to recruit and train conservative followers. Then established institutions that concealed the truth—schools, universities, newspapers, the Republican Party itself—would have to be swept away and replaced or entered and cleansed. Eventually Buckley imagined an electoral majority; but these were not the words and ideas of democratic politics, with its ungainly coalitions and unsatisfying compromises.
During this first insurgency, the abiding contours of the movement took shape. One feature—detailed in Before the Storm, Rick Perlstein’s account of the origins of the New Right—was liberals’ inability to see, let alone take seriously enough to understand, what was happening around the country. For their part, conservatives nursed a victim’s sense of grievance—the system was stacked against them, cabals of the powerful were determined to lock them out—and they showed more energetic interest than their opponents in the means of gaining power: mass media, new techniques of organizing, rhetoric, ideas. Finally, the movement was founded in the politics of racism. Goldwater’s strongest support came from white southerners reacting against civil rights. Even Buckley once defended Jim Crow with the claim that black Americans were too “backward” for self-government. Eventually he changed his views, but modern conservatism would never stop flirting with hostility toward whole groups of Americans. And from the start this stance opened the movement to extreme, sometimes violent fellow travelers.
Peter Beinart: Why Trump supporters believe he is not corrupt
It took only 16 years, with the election of Ronald Reagan, for the movement and party to merge. During those years, conservatives hammered away at institutional structures, denouncing the established ones for their treacherous liberalism, and building alternatives, in the form of well-funded right-wing foundations, think tanks, business lobbies, legal groups, magazines, publishers, professorships. When Reagan won the presidency in 1980, the products of this “counter-establishment” (from the title of Sidney Blumenthal’s book on the subject) were ready to take power.
Reagan commanded a revolution, but he himself didn’t have a revolutionary character. He didn’t think the public needed to be indoctrinated and organized, only heard.
But conservatism remained an insurgent politics during the 1980s and ’90s, and the more power it amassed—in government, business, law, media—the more it set itself against the fragile web of established norms and delighted in breaking them. The second insurgency was led by Newt Gingrich, who had come to Congress two years before Reagan became president, with the avowed aim of overthrowing the established Republican leadership and shaping the minority party into a fighting ******* that could break Democratic rule by shattering what he called the “corrupt left-wing machine.” Gingrich liked to quote Mao’s definition of politics as “war without *******.” He made audiotapes that taught Republican candidates how to demonize the opposition with labels such as “disgrace,” “betray,” and “traitors.” When he became speaker of the House, at the head of yet another revolution, Gingrich announced, “There will be no compromise.” How could there be, when he was leading a crusade to save American civilization from its liberal enemies?
Even after Gingrich was driven from power, the victim of his own guillotine, he regularly churned out books that warned of imminent doom—unless America turned to a leader like him (he once called himself “teacher of the rules of civilization,” among other exalted epithets). Unlike Goldwater and Reagan, Gingrich never had any deeply felt ideology. It was hard to say exactly what “American civilization” meant to him. What he wanted was power, and what he most obviously enjoyed was smashing things to pieces in its pursuit. His insurgency started the conservative movement on the path to nihilism.
Tom Nichols: Why I’m leaving the Republican party
The party purged itself of most remaining moderates, growing ever-more shallow as it grew ever-more conservative—from Goldwater (who, in 1996, joked that he had become a Republican liberal) to Ted Cruz, from Buckley to Dinesh D’Souza. Jeff Flake, the outgoing senator from Arizona (whose conservative views come with a democratic temperament), describes this deterioration as “a race to the bottom to see who can be meaner and madder and crazier. It is not enough to be conservative anymore. You have to be vicious.” The viciousness doesn’t necessarily reside in the individual souls of Republican leaders. It flows from the party’s politics, which seeks to delegitimize opponents and institutions, purify the ranks through purges and coups, and agitate followers with visions of apocalypse—all in the name of an ideological cause that every year loses integrity as it becomes indistinguishable from power itself.
The third insurgency came in reaction to the election of Barack Obama—it was the Tea Party. Eight years later, it culminated in Trump’s victory, an insurgency within the party itself—because revolutions tend to be self-devouring (“I’m not willing to preside over people who are cannibals,” Gingrich declared in 1998 when he quit the House). In the third insurgency, the features of the original movement surfaced again, more grotesque than ever: paranoia and conspiracy thinking; racism and other types of hostility toward entire groups; innuendos and incidents of violence. The new leader is like his authoritarian counterparts abroad: illiberal, demagogic, hostile to institutional checks, demanding and receiving complete acquiescence from the party, and enmeshed in the financial corruption that is integral to the political corruption of these regimes. Once again, liberals failed to see it coming and couldn’t grasp how it happened. Neither could some conservatives who still believed in democracy.
The corruption of the Republican Party in the Trump era seemed to set in with breathtaking speed. In fact, it took more than a half century to reach the point where faced with a choice between democracy and power, the party chose the latter. Its leaders don’t see a dilemma—democratic principles turn out to be disposable tools, sometimes useful, sometimes inconvenient. The higher cause is conservatism, but the highest is power. After Wisconsin Democrats swept statewide offices last month, Robin Vos, speaker of the assembly, explained why Republicans would have to get rid of the old rules: “We are going to have a very liberal governor who is going to enact policies that are in direct contrast to what many of us believe in.”
more communism blocking the facts...…..try reading it.....probably to much for your short attention span....just forward a copy to Moscow and let them read it and brief you
Offering opposing views is healthy. It's called democracy, not homegrown terrorism. You are part of the problem.
I was born in 1980 I can only attest from there forward and say you are utterly deranged.
He is imploring a dictatorship disinformation and fear mongering is terrorist 101
How the Republican Party Became a Threat to Democracy
They abandoned policy in favor of identity politics and ethno-nationalism.
For years now we’ve known that Donald Trump lied and cheated in his business dealings. We know that—at minimum—he welcomed Russian interference in the 2016 election and that he obstructed justice to thwart the investigation of those efforts. We know that he extorted the Ukrainian president to get dirt on his political opponent and then covered it up by obstructing investigations in congress.
What wasn’t clear until last week is how far the Republican Party, particularly in the Senate, would go to enable the president’s abuse of power. It has now become clear that not only will they exonerate Trump, but they also refused to call witnesses who would document his guilt. That is why so many people are beginning to contemplate the demise of our democracy—and rightly so. Facing that possibility raises the question of how Republicans got to the point that they are willing to risk our democracy for the sake of Donald Trump.
Any attempt to explore the historical roots of current events is an endless process. That’s because there are no periods (as in punctuation) in history. Focusing on one point in history as the cause inevitably leads to an exploration of what led up to that moment, sending us back even further to find its antecedents.
But I believe there are two significant inflection points when Republicans made choices that led them to be willing to exonerate the most corrupt president in our country’s history. One of those moments came in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson beat Barry Goldwater 486 to 52 in the electoral college. That led Republicans to complete the process of abandoning their support for civil rights and launch an effort to regain the party’s competitiveness by appealing to white grievance. Here is how Nixon’s strategist, Kevin Phillips, described the so-called “Southern Strategy.”
In other words, for Republicans, the votes were with white people whose racism could be triggered by dog whistles, such as an appeal to “state’s rights” and “law and order.” That strategy worked. Richard Nixon won handily in 1968 and in a landslide in 1972.
The second infection point came with the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Just as significant as the emergence of this country’s first African American president was the fact that he was elected after the entire Republican policy agenda was in shatters. The Bush-Cheney administration had demonstrated the folly of the party’s policies in both the foreign and domestic arena with the invasion of Iraq, the failed response to Katrina, and the emergence of the Great Recession.
At that point, Republicans decided to completely abandon the idea of having a policy agenda (other than tax cuts for the wealthy) and go all-in on obstructing anything the Democrats attempted to do. In order to justify that decision, they cast aside the dog whistles and openly inflamed the xenophobic fears of their white base with attempts to paint the first African American president as a dangerous extremist who didn’t love America.
That decision became even more pronounced in the reaction to Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012. Recognizing demographic trends, the Republican National Committee issued an autopsy that called on the GOP to do more to win over “Hispanic, Asian and Pacific Islanders, African Americans, Indian Americans, Native Americans, women, and youth.” On the other hand, Michael Anton warned that 2016 was “the flight 93 election.”
The election of Trump was a definitive rejection of the RNC autopsy recommendations and an embrace of Anton’s suggestion that it was time to “storm the cockpit or die.”
Those decisions left the GOP without a coherent agenda other than a common heritage. As Yoni Appelbaum writes:
Whether consciously or subconsciously, Republicans know that the United States is on a path to the inevitable day when their “numbers no longer add up.” As Zachary Roth wrote, the response to those facts led them to decide that “being outnumbered doesn’t have to mean losing.” The calculation was that they could maintain their power at the expense of our democratic norms and institutions.
But as Appelbaum notes, something more fundamental to our democracy broke.
In his book Trumpocracy, David Frum identified the cost Republicans are willing to pay when he wrote that, “if conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”
That is the challenge we face today. After casting aside policy and ideas in favor of ethnonationalism, the Republican Party is now in the process of rejecting democracy as their only alternative for survival. What that portends, as Appelbaum suggested, are some dark possibilities that will remain, even if Trump is defeated in November.
They abandoned policy in favor of identity politics and ethno-nationalism.
For years now we’ve known that Donald Trump lied and cheated in his business dealings. We know that—at minimum—he welcomed Russian interference in the 2016 election and that he obstructed justice to thwart the investigation of those efforts. We know that he extorted the Ukrainian president to get dirt on his political opponent and then covered it up by obstructing investigations in congress.
What wasn’t clear until last week is how far the Republican Party, particularly in the Senate, would go to enable the president’s abuse of power. It has now become clear that not only will they exonerate Trump, but they also refused to call witnesses who would document his guilt. That is why so many people are beginning to contemplate the demise of our democracy—and rightly so. Facing that possibility raises the question of how Republicans got to the point that they are willing to risk our democracy for the sake of Donald Trump.
Any attempt to explore the historical roots of current events is an endless process. That’s because there are no periods (as in punctuation) in history. Focusing on one point in history as the cause inevitably leads to an exploration of what led up to that moment, sending us back even further to find its antecedents.
But I believe there are two significant inflection points when Republicans made choices that led them to be willing to exonerate the most corrupt president in our country’s history. One of those moments came in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson beat Barry Goldwater 486 to 52 in the electoral college. That led Republicans to complete the process of abandoning their support for civil rights and launch an effort to regain the party’s competitiveness by appealing to white grievance. Here is how Nixon’s strategist, Kevin Phillips, described the so-called “Southern Strategy.”
In other words, for Republicans, the votes were with white people whose racism could be triggered by dog whistles, such as an appeal to “state’s rights” and “law and order.” That strategy worked. Richard Nixon won handily in 1968 and in a landslide in 1972.
The second infection point came with the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Just as significant as the emergence of this country’s first African American president was the fact that he was elected after the entire Republican policy agenda was in shatters. The Bush-Cheney administration had demonstrated the folly of the party’s policies in both the foreign and domestic arena with the invasion of Iraq, the failed response to Katrina, and the emergence of the Great Recession.
At that point, Republicans decided to completely abandon the idea of having a policy agenda (other than tax cuts for the wealthy) and go all-in on obstructing anything the Democrats attempted to do. In order to justify that decision, they cast aside the dog whistles and openly inflamed the xenophobic fears of their white base with attempts to paint the first African American president as a dangerous extremist who didn’t love America.
That decision became even more pronounced in the reaction to Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012. Recognizing demographic trends, the Republican National Committee issued an autopsy that called on the GOP to do more to win over “Hispanic, Asian and Pacific Islanders, African Americans, Indian Americans, Native Americans, women, and youth.” On the other hand, Michael Anton warned that 2016 was “the flight 93 election.”
The election of Trump was a definitive rejection of the RNC autopsy recommendations and an embrace of Anton’s suggestion that it was time to “storm the cockpit or die.”
Those decisions left the GOP without a coherent agenda other than a common heritage. As Yoni Appelbaum writes:
Whether consciously or subconsciously, Republicans know that the United States is on a path to the inevitable day when their “numbers no longer add up.” As Zachary Roth wrote, the response to those facts led them to decide that “being outnumbered doesn’t have to mean losing.” The calculation was that they could maintain their power at the expense of our democratic norms and institutions.
But as Appelbaum notes, something more fundamental to our democracy broke.
In his book Trumpocracy, David Frum identified the cost Republicans are willing to pay when he wrote that, “if conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”
That is the challenge we face today. After casting aside policy and ideas in favor of ethnonationalism, the Republican Party is now in the process of rejecting democracy as their only alternative for survival. What that portends, as Appelbaum suggested, are some dark possibilities that will remain, even if Trump is defeated in November.
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What we now know about Russia's cyber attack on America
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/6/25/1674258/...
Jun 25, 2017 · It's now been confirmed by the Washington Post that Vladimir Putin personally ordered this attack, a fact that was first hinted at on January 6th when U.S. intel first published their report on the Russian attack. We now understand that there were multiple layers and fronts involved in this fairly wide-ranging attack.
When there's no current problem make up future problems. You were a high up weasel at some point. Probably why you expect the worse
Iowa conspiracy theories show US democracy has bigger problems than foreign interference | CNN Business
Almost a year before the Iowa caucuses, a top US cybersecurity official said fears about foreign meddling in the 2020 election were the one thing that kept him up at night.
Did you desire a link to Rabbi Cahn speaking about Trump @subhub174014 ?
Iowa conspiracy theories show US democracy has bigger problems than foreign interference | CNN Business
Almost a year before the Iowa caucuses, a top US cybersecurity official said fears about foreign meddling in the 2020 election were the one thing that kept him up at night.www.cnn.com
A running list of Donald Trump's conspiracy theories ...
https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/13/politics/donald-trump-conspiracy-theories
Sep 13, 2018 · On Thursday morning, President Donald Trump suggested, via Twitter, that Democrats had inflated the death toll in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria in …
Conspiracy theories related to the Trump–Ukraine scandal ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theories_related_to_the_Trump%E2%80%93Ukraine_scandal
Since 2016, U.S. president Donald Trump and his allies have promoted several conspiracy theories related to the Trump–Ukraine scandal. One such theory seeks to blame Ukraine, instead of Russia (as supported by all reliable sources), for interference in the 2016 United States presidential election.
24 conspiracy theories Donald Trump has floated over the ...
https://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-conspiracy-theories-2016-5
- Questions about Ted Cruz's *******'s potential ties to President John F. Kennedy's assassin. On the …
- Questions about President Obama's birth certificate. While mulling a potential 2012 presidential bid, …
- Questions about a former Bill Clinton aide's suicide. After Vince Foster, a former aide to President …
- Questions about whether Syrian refugees are ISIS terrorists. Trump has, in part, justified his plan to …
Another fine example of tolerant liberal "mentality"
Man accused of driving through Republican voter registration tent arrested
Officers with the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office are looking for a brown Chevrolet van they said drove through a tent Sunday where volunteers were registering people to vote.www.news4jax.com
justifiable...….care to talk about charlotte or have yo forgot about that
Ok @subhub174014 something appears to be on your chest about Trump did you catch him doing any evil activities today? I have a feeling I'm going to regret asking the question though.
waste of time trying to converse with him...….he just wants to knowingly push falsehoods to promote his communistic leader
Ok @subhub174014 something appears to be on your chest about Trump did you catch him doing any evil activities today? I have a feeling I'm going to regret asking the question though.
nothing on my chest....just arguing with our resident Russian bot!
