And there’s a lot of historical precedent for that - Franco, Mussolini, He Who Must Not be Named, the Ayatollah Khomeini and Tony Abbott, for starters.
[edit - to deconfuse @mindysan, by HWMNbN I was referring to the pre-1945 German politician whose invocation causes people to misquote Godwin’s Law.]
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I think that theory has merit. Last year, Dr. Nerdlove wrote about how the misogyny in gaming was going through an “extinction burst.” Since then, we’ve seen regressives of all stripes lose on various fronts: Marriage Equality, reform of Military rules that discriminate against LGBT, Affordable Care Act, the Confederate Flag, Immigration Reform.
Under the crucible of a national election, Trump seems to be uniting all these haters of social justice. In some ways, “Make America Great Again” is serving as a dog-whistle for “Don’t You Miss The Good Old Days?”
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???
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I think the actual quotation is taken way out of context. Here is what Erickson said:
The Republican Party created Donald Trump, because they made a lot of promises to their base and never kept them.
At this point, most of the people I encounter on radio and on the internet, they’re not really people who at the end of the day want to vote for Donald Trump. But they sure do like that he’s burning down the Republican Party that never listened to them to begin with.
He doesn’t mean “created” as it “was carefully crafted”, i.e., conspiracy. He means “created” as is “spawned from.” He’s saying that because the Republican party disillusioned so many people who have supported it, Donald Trump is able to swoop in as a front runner (albeit a kind of fictional front runner) based on support from party members who no longer believe in the party. He’s saying the Republican party is to blame for Trump’s heretofore unknown lack of decency, not that they programmed it into him.
Trump gave out Lindsey Graham’s personal phone number so that people could make harassing phone calls. That’s not proposing right-wing policies that make Jeb Bush look sane. That’s a burn-the-world-and-fuck-everyone move. People are talking about a connection between Trump and gamergate above: he fucking doxxed a fellow republican!
What would happen if he was running for president? Would he be posting on twitter about when and where Bernie Sanders’ grand kids were getting out of school? Would the presidency start being about who lived through the campaign, who wasn’t intimidated out by threats to their families?
Donald Trump is treating Republican presidential hopefuls like women on the internet. There is no way the Republican masterminds sanctioned that.
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North Korea, right? From what I gather, South Korea is eons further ahead in connectivity than the US.
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Fucking Florida. Again.
He exists as a candidate because today’s republicans have become what the base sees as pc wimps who make elections promises, never kept. The base sees their party as rino’s, watering down conservatism for compromise with progressive values. Congres afraid to use the power of the purse (oh noooo, not a wittle government shutdown, noooo.) So yes, I agree with the author.
You do know that the government shutdown would have adversely affected a lot of people who actually, you know, need to work to eat and survive, right?
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Also while government employees coudln’t work or get paid or anything… congress had exempted themselves, so they got pay and everything even during the shutdown.
What burns me about ‘oh nooo just a wittle bitty shutdown’ is they used terrorist tactics to try getting their way and nobody in power has said anything about treason charges or brought up the idea of siccing DHS on them. Yea using fear and intimidation to get your way. I’d say using threat of fucking with the nation’s credit rating not to mention everyone in government the shutdown directly affected plus those it indirectly affected as hostages to get their way.
That is not how government works. That is how a tiny minority lever what power they have so they can get more power. If it’d worked they’d go ‘hey this is a valid tactic to use’ and every time a law pops up that someone doesn’t like EMBARGO! WHO. RUN. BARTER TOWN?
This is not the government I was raised to believe we have. This is more like cybrpunk post world annihilation tinpot horseshit hollywood would cook up.
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You rang?
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“Mobilizing reactionaries” is the main point of having a Tea Party and rabid-right-wing candidates, because they’ll contribute more money and votes than they’ll drive away from the party, and they can do all the negative attack campaigning and general-purpose slander (like Birther racism) while letting the Republican corporatist machine wing candidates deny all responsibility for it. The big problem with it is that sometimes (as with the Tea Party), they don’t understand that their job is to get the machine candidates elected, not to actually be allowed to make any decisions about policy.*
Another problem is that means that you do have to do some work to make sure that they will eventually vote for the party nominee, so most of the 2012 GOP primary circus, from Trump’s opening clown act to dancing bears like Perry and Cain, was to keep the Tea Partiers busy and engaged for a year while convincing them that they weren’t going to be able to actually get one of their own elected, and that they were going to have to vote for Romney.
(*Another use for the Tea Party was taking the deficit hawks, who might actually have been able to influence policy after Bush’s profligate borrow-and-spend years, and shove them off in the corner with the crazy people so they couldn’t cause any trouble either.)
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I reckon you have some land down near the GA-FL border you’re hoping to turn into beachfront property.
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Gore didn’t pull enough Nader voters away to make up for the Democratic votes that were lost when Florida purged the voting rolls of people who mostly weren’t actual felons, had police and sheriffs intimidating voters in black districts, and other forms of Republican voter fraud. (There was a lot of statistical work done after the fact that also showed that the probable irregularities in counting weren’t in the districts with close vote counts, but in the areas where Republicans had solid majorities so it didn’t look so suspicious that those majorities were extra-strong.)
So… tons of people had their names purged from the voting rolls and it’s still Nader’s fault?
Not yet?
Not saying it’s Nader’s fault. I’m saying Gore didn’t do a good enough job of being a candidate to convince those people to vote for the Democrats.
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Fair enough… that whole Nader is the blame line from dems is getting kind of old…
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I just don’t think that the people in charge are actually smart or powerful enough to do all this. The Tea Party isn’t some useful fringe of the Republican party, controlled and crafted, it is the moment when the cultists realize their con-artist leader isn’t a true believer and off him to continue the cult on their own.
The Republicans had this idea that they could get fanatics to vote for them and that they never had to actually do what the fanatics wanted because it’s not like they’d ever vote democrat. That is not turning out to be true, and establishment Republicans are losing seats to real crazies*, forcing house Republicans to work with house Democrats to pass legislation despite having “control” of the house. The corporatists have lost control of a large section of the Republican party to true anti-government obstructionists who have principles (ones I find crazy, but principles nonetheless).
Obviously the plan to get people out to vote for Romney didn’t work. The plan to keep establishment candidates in their carefully gerrymandered seats forever is breaking down. And now, like Erickson said, there are plenty of Republicans who just want to watch the party burn. I don’t think the Tea Party was the plan, I think it is the logical result of a very bad plan that did not involve the serfs actually wanting their masters to do anything for them.
(*crazies = people who care about something I don’t agree with more than they care about money)
Having looked at lots of analysis of lots of elections won by “vote splitting” by the other side, I’m convinced that there is basically no such thing as “vote splitting.” The concept only works if people actually think along the left-right spectrum that supposedly defines politics. I’m sure some people do, but I think that people who vote for third candidates mostly don’t. Apparently Nader was pulling almost as much support from the Republicans as the Democrats.
Also, why blame Nader when you could blame Barbie - I recall seeing at the time that writes-ins for her presidency were more than the difference between Gore and Bush in Florida.
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perhaps, but if he continues to defy gravity as he has when he insulted john mccain and by extension every p.o.w. ever or as he has when he suggested that a fox talking head asked him tough questions because she was on her period, then it becomes less unlikely.
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I’m wondering what Trump’s motivations really are, and whether he knows what he’s doing.
One of the things I point out about Fox News, from time to time, is that they’re not nearly as stupid as they pretend to be. There was a Daily Show segment on Gretchen Carlson, who plays dumb but who has impressive academic credentials. (The link seems to be down right now.) Stewart doesn’t really draw out the implications of this; he merely says that Fox must not respect its viewers. As far as I know, he never returned to the subject, and went back to mocking Fox’s stupidity.
Megyn Kelly represents something of the flip side of this. From time to time, when I’ve watched Fox News, I’ve noticed that their female personalities will occasionally react sharply to sexist remarks by their male counterparts. Of course, it’s only the sort of denigration of women’s abilities that would inhibit professional careers they object to, not the sort of structural sexism that affects working class and poor women. Anyway, I’d wondered for a moment if this indicated some actual rebelliousness within Fox News. But, no, there are after all a lot of women on the air on Fox News, and from the few glimpses I’ve seen behind the scenes of Murdoch’s empire – I’m thinking of Rebekah Brooks, for instance – they’re not averse to powerful individual women.
So, I think the sort of scenes like the one I described earlier, in which one Fox personality says something baldly offensive and another limits it, suggests that Fox deliberately plays to multiple audiences. They’re playing both to reactionary populism, and to relatively conventional elite conservatism. The former is the same group that Stone likely has in mind when he says that the GOP hasn’t kept its promises.
Like any major party in a bourgeois republic, the GOP serves the interests of the ruling class, but requires votes from a lot of people whose interests it does not serve. Fox News has come to play a role in that, turning out conservative and reactionary voters, rousing the latter while constraining their expectations – which the more committed reactionaries realize, and resent – as in the expressions “RINO”, or the more virulent “cuckservative”.
So that’s what I have in mind when I say that Trump is calling the bluff of Fox News, by attacking Megyn Kelly. He’s directly appealing to reactionaries, who’d like to overcome the limitations of conventional conservatives.
I expect Trump is clever enough to realize at least that much. But I have to wonder what he really hopes to accomplish. He is, after all, already part of the ruling class, so breaking reactionary populism from conventional conservatism is potentially a threat to him as well.
So the question I’m left with is whether this is just a maneuver, in which Trump hopes to gain a little more power before dropping yet another vanity presidential campaign, or does Trump seriously hope to position himself as the charismatic leader of a reactionary movement?
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