i am not a fan of the current GOP. but i am a fan of President Ronald Reagan, the GOP president after the Jimmy Carter fiasco, the greater communicator and a pragmaticist he was a lifelong Democrat who, in his mid-30s, had converted to the GOP as POTUS, he landed the KO punch to knock out the evil empire, the Soviet Union he implemented amnesty program for undocumented immigrants he was not a theocrat; one of his own son (Ron) was an avowed atheist he started his presiency w a tax cut, ACRS; but after realizing the extent of its adverse effect on the budget deficit, he changed course to increase taxes, MACRS and others, several times
I'm going to blame cable news and the internet. 2 issues, imo. Blending of news and entertainment. Blending of news and opinion (made tenable by the advent of media outlets tailored to specific viewpoints). Essentially, competitive pressures in the news marketplace have pushed conservative media to go from selling Chateau Margaux (very complex with steep point of entry to appreciation) to selling Coke-a-Cola (sugary, syrup for infantalized taste buds). No matter how objectively good a fine French wine is, you get much richer selling sugar water. And people repeat what they see. if all you ever eat is baby food, when you describe food you'll describe mush. Can you imagine dry-as-toast William F Buckley with a nightly show on Fox News? He'd put people to sleep. The movie "Network" wasn't a light comical farce, it was a prophetic vision of the future. I can't see the problem fixing itself, either. If TV News attempted to challenge people or make them think, half the audience would furrow their brow and change the channel because thinking is too much work. And no News business would do anything that would knowingly drive the cusomers elsewhere. it's the same reason that networks with lofty names like "Discovery" or "The Learning Channel" now show endless reruns of "The Cardassians" or "Duck Dynasty". All that matters is getting those eyeballs. And that dumbing down trickles down.
The fake news consumers naturally think non-fake news are fake. The old party is not willing to wake them up, and is changing to serve their base. Its becoming a party grounded in fakes, lies, conspiracy theories...
This would just be dismissed (if someone I have on ignore hasn't done is already) via "Oxford is just full of more liberals. Yawn." I don't see how we back out of our current predicament, to return to something closer to reason.
Democrats have to focus on making it easier to vote and gerrymandering. Nothing else matters. They need to do what the Republicans did in 1994 with term limits and put up ballot referendums across the country on non-partisan redistricting. And any time Democrats gain control of a state, they need to pass same day registration, automatic registration, no fault vote by mail, expanded early voting, etc.. at the top of the agenda. You can't fix fake news but you can fix restrictive voting laws. We forget how many elections are decided at the margins (especially at local levels). And states have to start citizens united the same way Republicans treat abortion and just pass laws to restrict election spending even if it guarantees legal challenges. Republicans have been chipping away at Roe v Wade for decades now and Democrats have to start doing the same.
Hopefully soon the party will split into the sane conservative party and the nut jobs faction, but I am not holding my breath.
All political parties change over time -- otherwise they stop winning elections. Right now, Trump is helping them win. The GOP has been, in my lifetime at least, rather egalitarian when it comes to making nice with whomever they need to stay in power. If you want a principled political party, you can always vote Democrat Socialist Green Libertarian for the Pirate Party. Russia is not a geo-political adversary of the US. At best, it's a partner to China in the reconfiguration vs US hegemony argument. Wanting to stop trading in petrodollars and ending US immunity to international law does not make them an existential threat to anyone -- but that's where all this anti-Russian **** started. That it's been sold to the proles as "hacking our election" is but a side note in a much more important discussion, IMHO. Republicans are more concerned about the threat from Islamist terror. I happen to agree with them but the War Machine has done a great job of scaring the living **** out of people, many of which are still convinced that one is either "with them or with the terrorists." Democrats then label these indoctrinated people Islamophobes and racists. Our nation's discredited Neo-cons have been wanting to rattle the sabre at Russia since the 90s, and September 11th 2001 was a huge setback in this enterprise, and while the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan gave them ample opportunity to demonstrate the validity of their freedom-bringing, it doesn't build arsenals like the Cold War. Since 2016 however, they are now suddenly the darlings of the Democratic establishment. The War Machine is happy with Cold War 2.0, and now the air is filled with invective and fear-mongering about Russia. Strangely though, no one is calling those indoctrinated with an irrational hared of Russians racists or EasternOrthodoxphobes. Not so long ago Obama ripped Romney for going 1980s on us. Here we are a few years later, and the Democratic establishment is beating Donald Trump to the 1950s. For all things being published about Russia, Iran, China, North Korea, Turkey, or the Middle East in general, none of those countries care what kind of p*rn I watch or what I buy on amazon or "project power" in 134 countries with contributions from my taxes. Democrats used to question unchecked American exceptionalism, and the expansion of its surveillance state and expanding military. As much as they say Trump is a dangerous autocrat, they had no problem expanding his extra-Constitutional power. Republicans were never the party of morality. They are the party that has to pivot to accommodate extremist Christians in order to have a mandate in the same way the Democratic party has to with the fringe of identity politics. Evangelicals love Trump because no president has ever done more for them as a group.They are probably grateful his debauchery doesn't extend to pedophilia. The extensive history of Republicans who have been caught buggering underage boys that were recipients of the largesse of the Amen Corner should be proof that what the politicians they buy do in their personal lives matter little to them. No party does that when they are the opposition. Deficit hawks are nowhere to be seen once they are in power. Don't bother them: there are arms to buy or tax cuts to pass. Everyone should be concerned about living in an surveillance state. But you are talking about the so-called Nunes memo, which the FBI and many ranking Democrats would have had us believe was a huge threat to national security, and Sean Hannity and his ilk promised us proof of a massive abuse of power by our government "on a scale never before seen", which would have to pretty big considering what the public learned from Snowden in 2013. What a disappointment to find out the memo was a poor summary of a CNN story from last April. The fact that in all this bickering about FISA to gain political points, very few people stopped and said, "Shouldn't we be more concerned that we have a ****ing secret court?" When was the last time you heard anyone having a conversation about politics that had anything to do with ideas? Our leaders are bigly opposed to any serious conversations about de-escalating conflict, about America's inevitable decline, about an ever-increasing defense budget, about the death of privacy, about the death of journalism and dumbing down of culture, wealth inequality, or the poor state of US infrastructure, education, public health, or environment. When I get to participate in conversations about ideas, it's usually when I am abroad. And do you know why? Because we no longer have a culture for healthy discourse. I can't blame Republicans for that.
https://www.splcenter.org/20180205/alt-right-killing-people When supporters say their members aren't violent as the left
Yes, parties do change. It's just that their change has happened over a period of about 15 years. It started kind of slowly and then has sped up a lot recently. The Nunes memo might well be a threat to national security. There is no reason to believe it wasn't. I rarely talk politics outside of this board. When I do it is usually with people who are willing and happy to discuss ideas. But the reason I don't talk about it more is because things are like you say that ideas are rarely discussed and ideas based on actual facts are discussed even less frequently.
I think the country and the way people think has changed dramatically since 2001. I left in 2004 and was gone a decade. It was really jarring when I came back, the most noticeable being the increased militarization in airports and the glorification of the military in everyday life. That and the way young people speak, with Kardashian-esque vocal fry and that thing where every sentence sounds like a question. Or how craft beer became ubiquitous (and the Czech, British, and German beers I like are hard to find). You can take a subway from downtown LA to Santa Monica. It's been about four years and I still feel like a stranger in my own country. I really don't think Republicans are the only thing that's changed I wouldn't say the Nunes memo was meaningless, but it was not at all what anyone talking about promised it would be -- and not a bit of it was new information. I can't talk about politics either because Americans get righteously offended if you don't agree with them 100%. They seem so stressed when I don't conform to a tribal stereotype that it makes me uncomfortable talking to them. I also find that at least in Texas, my rural, right-leaning friends and relatives (well, at least the ones that aren't super-religious) tend to be more tolerant of opinions that aren't like theirs, and more likely to ask questions about why I think the way I do, rather than to pigeonhole me and be dismissive or assault me with strawman arguments. And while I'm making no claim that their political opinions were better informed, they valued me enough to care more about who I was and how I saw things more than who I voted for.
Yes, I think that's part of the problem. People that know folks from the different political opinions don't attach all the negative stereotypes to them and are willing to accept. But most people think of only racist Republicans or SJW liberals who are sore losers about the election etc. But both sides do their best to dehumanize their political opponents so that any resemblance to real people is forsaken.
What is weird is how hypocrtical the religious right is.....they are some of the worst racists around. They crucify a man for getting a blow job in the whitehouse, but are ok with a deviant sexual predator and child molester in there now. Bizzare.... DD
Carter was at the tail end of a decade worth of actual Presidential fiascoes, he was a little earnest and Congress defying and deposing two GOP presidents gave them a lot of impunity, but a lot of bad policy choices probably going back to Eisenhower all came to a head at the same time. Not an actual thing, the sooner we stop framing global events and America's role like this the better. The Soviet Union embargoed itself from the most prosperous expansion in history and then watched non-European countries both leapfrog it economically and develop stronger cultural ties with their own neighbors, that along with their bizarre Afghanistan campaign, and whatever extant paranoia comes from a genocidal line of succession, fractured their internal leadership and they imploded. I would rather give Reagan credit for avoiding large, protracted foreign occupations that guaranteed 1000+ preventable American deaths and near-trillion dollar annual military spends.
Carter has been a great humanitarian, worthy of his Nobel Peace Prize award. but, as the POTUS, to say that he was ineffective would be overly generous. The problem, as i understand it, was that he couldn't delegate, needing to be the subject matter expert on everything. "paralysis by analysis" would apply to his presidency. the US won the cold war against the Soviets by out-spending it, leading to its collapse US has always had a huge middle class that can support HUGE defense spending; middle class in the Soviet Union was non-existent . Reagan stepped on the gas to accentuate that economic advantage; thus, this star-war initiative. the Soviets, running of of $$$, could not keep up and, as a result, the evil empire collapsed. Reagan's predecessors (from Truman to Carter) had been jabbing and weaving to set up his KO punch
It have a lot to do with Gorbachev, Soviet Union could have scaled back defense budget and kept on running for decades.
by the same token, Reagan knew that Gorby would not scale back; that's why the Great Communicator stepped on the gas to accelerate Defense Spending.
Every word of this is true, especially the part about William F. Buckley. Which is sad, actually. I would add AM talk radio though. Especially all the local hacks who are just trying to get an audience by being provocative. As for me, I've been moving further and further away from the GOP ever since all the tea party nonsense started. Trump getting the nomination was the last straw for me. I'm out. I still can't believe this guy is actually the POTUS. I literally can't believe it. I just can't support anyone who is actually cool with that. I can't even take them seriously. Donald Trump. Is the President. I've been perpetually shaking my head since last November. No hyperbole.
I'm with @pouhe on this. Americans want to make everything about them. Reagan might have amped the pressure Soviet leaders were feeling, but the unsustainable economic structure would happen anyway, Gorbachev would happen anyway, perestroika would happen anyway. It was Gorbachev's intention to fix the longstanding structural problems that did in the Soviet Union, not spending.
The Republican party really has changed over time, right now their platform is similar to the DNC platform in the 90's. The party is slowly moving to the left over time.
