General Politics Discussion [ARCHIVED] • Page 266

I've heard this proposition and I don't think I understand it. What about the GOP's current platform is inconsistent with that of 2012? Other than moving towards actual populism on trade and moving towards a less disguised xenophobia with regard to immigration, it seems pretty much the same level of exploitative, nonsensical fear-mongering. The only philosophical change I can discern is that Trump does not pretend to give any care to the concept of "small government," but let's be real: that was never-fucking-ever a staple of the party.

I actually think the party, if it survives this cycle, is primed for a fresh new direction that is much more substantive than that of 2008-2016. I mean, the Donald scare has to set some of them on the path of being serious adults instead of fear-mongering information deniers, right?

 

Obama Has Now Commuted More Sentences Than The Past 9 Presidents Combined

This raises the number of sentences shortened by Obama to 562, which passes the number of commutations made by the past nine presidents combined. Of those, 197 were life sentences.

“All of the individuals receiving commutation today, incarcerated under outdated and unduly harsh sentencing laws, embody the President’s belief that ‘America is a nation of second chances,'” wrote Neil Eggleston, White House counsel, in a blog post following the announcement.

 

(McCain was able to get 40%.)

 

God his old tweets are a gold mine.

 

Asshole.

 

Yeah. So that's where we now are ... literally calling political opponents the devil, having your crowd cheer to lock them up, torture her, and now saying she's the founder of ISIS. Trump 2016.

 

Spending trillions on infrastructure AND cutting taxes "bigly" .... ok Trump.

 

Nobody tell the Republicans it was Reagan's funding of the Syrian rebels as a means of getting at Russia that led to the development of ISIS as we know it today

 

This whole don't get mad at me because I mocked a man with a disability by spouting he abides by the ADA on his buildings is next level stupid.

 

PS: In 2007, the U.S. Department of Justice found that Trump’s Taj Mahal hotel was not in compliance with a handful of mandatory ADA standards. In 2011, the hotel finally settled with the DOJ.

 

I hope he says that at every stop.

 

His secret state plan is kinda my favorite sub plot.

 

Those poor reporters are all going to have aneurysms

 

Someone should ask Trump to name all 50 states. Could he do it?

 

I'm giggling at my desk those tweets haha, keep 'em coming, Jason

 

There was an understanding, for example, within the business community that immigration had to be reformed. It didn't particularly care if one had a militarized border or not. Using that as an example, one understands there was a structural grounding that hemmed in the fascistic elements of Republican Party, even if it remained well within the right-wing. This was what we understood as consensus and it included both parties. What the 2008 crisis did, along with many other developments, is it vitiated a representative link that had already been degrading over the past forty years of neoliberal restructuring. In particular, the people most harmed in the republican constituency were working-class folks, but more importantly, upper-middle class folks who found themselves suddenly in the process of being proletarianized. The reactionary framework built by Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan, in the wake of a previous crisis, didn't cease to exist; rather, it became a pole of attraction that, through the Tea Party, then Trump as its representative, was enhanced. The elites that built the consensus, who built republican majorities, became irrelevant or part of the problem. With them eliminated as a countervailing tendency, there was no structuring framework to convey and acclimate people to that neoliberal tendency, so one has a candidate that is completely divorced from that particular ideology in many ways, who is a Keynesian, but is also small government, and actually would like to reenact the trail of tears with undocumented workers. We refer to this as populism of the reactionary variety and it certainly has a strength to it, particularly due to all of muck and rage, particularly directed towards minorities who are seen to have been the winners of the socioeconomic changes we have gone through. However, that strength has come at the cost of the splintering of the many ruling class interests that held republicans together. Right now, we are seeing the battle of those elites and fractions of the working/middle class, which has no other outcome, in my mind, but a fundamental realignment of those forces. This, as with the secular decline of the major parties in general, was overdetermined. That is to say, what we are experiencing with the collapse of this party is a condensation of a number of contradictory and sociopolitical developments. What I said above is just a sketch of how I tend to see what happened within the Republican Party. The same will occur with democrats I expect. Bernie wasn't the person to do it this time.