America's Hard Rightward Tack

[Jimmy Higgins]

It seems incredible. In the Fall of 2016, things seemed quite assured that the Tea Party movement was about to be smashed. The Democrats would win the House and Senate, continue to have the Presidency, and America would finally get the far right-wing movement known as the Tea-Party to disappear.

Well, amazing what a day can do, and the opposite actually occurred. The Tea Party has its largest hold on power ever, Trump won the White House, and America is seeing a very uncomfortable shift to the Hard Right. I'm talking Hard Racist Motherfucker Right. The part of the right that fears illegal immigration. White nationalists (AKA Nazis) were marching in Virginia with flaming Tiki Torches, chanting for the blood of Jews to flow into the soil (got their wish just the other day).

Regarding Birth-right citizenship:

I heard you say that Lindsey Graham is going to put legislation forward. We have to take a look at that legislation.

Yeah, that was the Incumbent Democrat who said that.

Regarding the border:

I do not want our borders overrun. And I support the president’s efforts to make sure they’re not.

Oh, don't worry, that wasn't Sen. Joe Donnelly. That was Sen. McCaskill.

I remember between '04 and '06, the egg shells the Democrats were tiptoeing through to get to the next election. But now we seem to be at the point where we are tiptoeing around racism.

And let me be the first to say it... it isn't the Democrats' fault... that'd be America's fault, because the tiptoeing is what is keeping these people in the races. Heitkamp decided that Dr. Ford's testimony was more compelling that Kavanaugh's has killed her reelection hopes. The Tea-Party has so successfully manipulated border security and illegal immigration that we have Democrats saying some pretty dumb things. The trouble is, this is normalizing this garbage.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Well, on the bright side, I am not personally in your country.

 

[Worldtraveller]

Well, on the bright side, I am not personally in your country.

Can you offer asylum? There might be a caravan headed your way.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Well, on the bright side, I am not personally in your country.

Can you offer asylum? There might be a caravan headed your way.

FYI, they'll be carrying Dunkin Donuts, just as Trudeau warned his people they would!

 

[Worldtraveller]

Well, on the bright side, I am not personally in your country.

Can you offer asylum? There might be a caravan headed your way.

FYI, they'll be carrying Dunkin Donuts, just as Trudeau warned his people they would!

I got a pretty well supplied liquor cabinet. I could offer some incentives.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Well, on the bright side, I am not personally in your country.

Can you offer asylum? There might be a caravan headed your way.

FYI, they'll be carrying Dunkin Donuts, just as Trudeau warned his people they would!

People supporting crappy-assed, second rate doughnut shops will not be welcomed.

All refugee claimants will be issued a Tim Horton's gift card at the border and if they don't look properly grateful, they'll be kicked out and sent to some third world shithole like America.

 

[PyramidHead]

Nothing is surprising about this if you look at it through the lens of economic interests and the balance of power in our system. Nationalism and xenophobia are tools that people with a lot of money are happy to leverage in order to secure more money, or keep the money they have. A wonderful distraction from the actual injustices that occur in every facet of our society right here on American soil. Lindsay Graham does not care about any aspect of citizenship other than how it will impact his fortune or the fortunes of his wealthy donors. If the nation were predominantly Hispanic and Hispanics tended to vote Republican, and there was an influx of European white immigrants with low income and a tendency to vote Democrat, Trump would still be building his wall and Graham would still be making noise about birthright.

None of this has anything to do with racism as such, in the literal sense of having a negative opinion about a certain race of people regardless of what they do. Plenty of Republican voters are racist in that way, having been tricked by politicians into worrying about racial purity and the supposed downfall of Western culture, but that was never the real purpose of these policies. Given the opportunity, and given an economic system that rewards rampant exploitation with access to the political process, this is a predictable outcome; if it wasn't citizenship it would be voter ID laws, or union-busting, or cutting welfare services, or lobbying for looser environmental restrictions. Don't be fooled into thinking that there is some nuanced opinion about voter registration, organized labor, or the environment behind any of that. It's just money trying to make more money.

 

[Gun Nut]

People supporting crappy-assed, second rate doughnut shops will not be welcomed.

careful. Phands is gong to bitch slap you with a bigot label. I know you didn't say "ALL second rate" shops, but he doesn't seem to care about that distinction.

 

[southernhybrid]

But, isn't it just the Dems candidates that are in danger of losing their seats due to the nature of the states they are in, that are saying such crazy things? I have not heard a single Democrat in Georgia say anything like that. Everything I've heard from our Democratic candidates has been quite progressive. The hope here has been that more young and more minority voters will get out and vote. Georgia is getting close to being white minority. I think it's already over 40% non white, but North Dakota is very, very white. Maybe this is about appealing to white Democrats who are conservative. We don't have many of those in Georgia. Plus we don't have any open Senate seats in this election.

So, if you're a rightest in Georgia, this is the time for you to leave and move to North Dakota. You will fit in much better there, as we become more progressive here in our much nicer, warmer, friendlier climate. Be careful and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

People supporting crappy-assed, second rate doughnut shops will not be welcomed.

careful. Phands is gong to bitch slap you with a bigot label. I know you didn't say "ALL second rate" shops, but he doesn't seem to care about that distinction.

Dude, while this is a small meager web board, we do pride ourselves on our humor, so please, try harder the next time you are attempting humor.

 

[Elixir]

Confucius say hard starboard tack often lead to quick port jibe.

We'll see what happens on Tuesday.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

It seems incredible. In the Fall of 2016, things seemed quite assured that the Tea Party movement was about to be smashed.

Tea Party?

You make a lot of interesting points, but trying to tie it to a movement that was defunct years ago undercuts those points.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

The Tea Party has its largest hold on power ever, Trump won the White House, and America is seeing a very uncomfortable shift to the Hard Right. I'm talking Hard Racist Motherfucker Right.

That's just not true. What we're seeing is the last gasp of white supremacy squealing like the stuck pig that it is. It is dying and growing smaller--which is why it is screaming so loudly and to such horrific extremes (i.e., mass murder)--to the point of around 15-20% of all Americans.

To accomplish it they had to dig so deep into the bowels that there's nothing left, but the country--as a whole--was and still remains Democrat (leaning). I know I keep singing this song, but Clinton WON. She lost the presidency on a technicality, but she won the popular vote, which measures precisely this question.

When you factor in what we now know about all of the election fraud tactics and the preferences of the registered voters-who-did-not-vote, then the referendum on political leanings in the country as a whole was a landslide (55% for Clinton to 46% for Trump).

And if we can overcome the massive amount of election fraud tactics that are still being employed in the midterms, we will see that same (and more) political leaning re-assert itself.

There is a significant difference between where a group stands politically and who manages to govern it temporarily, particularly when that smaller group had to resort to drastic measures to do it, because they don't have the numbers without such measures.

And let me be the first to say it... it isn't the Democrats' fault... that'd be America's fault, because the tiptoeing is what is keeping these people in the races. Heitkamp decided that Dr. Ford's testimony was more compelling that Kavanaugh's has killed her reelection hopes. The Tea-Party has so successfully manipulated border security and illegal immigration that we have Democrats saying some pretty dumb things. The trouble is, this is normalizing this garbage.

True. Which is why I keep singing the song.

Unfortunately, Dems are the bullied kids grown up and Repugs are the bullies grown up. The bullied always outnumber the bullies, but because we're the bullied, the bullies do everything in their power to keep us from understanding that and using it to our advantage.

Then what usually happens is a breaking point, where the bullied are finally pushed too far. That is the exact moment we find ourselves in now and we're already seeing it asserting itself in the polls.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

How is this the last ditch of the white sumpremo? Their guy is the President. The Tea Party has 30ish seats in the House.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

How is this the last ditch of the white sumpremo?

Pew has some insights (from The Generation Gap in American Politics):

More than four-in-ten Millennial registered voters (44%) describe themselves as independents, compared with 39% of Gen Xers and smaller proportions of Boomers (32%) and Silents (27%).

However, a majority of Millennials (59%) affiliate with the Democratic Party (35%) or lean Democratic (24%). Just 32% identify as Republicans or lean toward the GOP.

Partisan identification is more evenly divided among older generations of voters. Nearly half of Gen Xers (48%) identify as Democrats or lean Democratic, while 43% identify as Republicans or lean Republican. Among Boomers, roughly equal shares identify with or lean toward both parties (48% Democrats, 46% Republicans).

The Silent Generation is the only generation in which, on balance, more registered voters identify as or lean Republican (52%) than identify with or lean Democratic (43%).

And from the NYT:

Deaths now outnumber births among white people in more than half the states in the country, demographers have found, signaling what could be a faster-than-expected transition to a future in which whites are no longer a majority of the American population.

The Census Bureau has projected that whites could drop below 50 percent of the population around 2045, a relatively slow-moving change that has been years in the making. But a new report this week found that whites are dying faster than they are being born now in 26 states, up from 17 just two years earlier, and demographers say that shift might come even sooner.

“It’s happening a lot faster than we thought,” said Rogelio Sáenz, a demographer at the University of Texas at San Antonio and a co-author of the report. It examines the period from 1999 to 2016 using data from the National Center for Health Statistics, the federal agency that tracks births and deaths. He said he was so surprised at the finding that at first he thought it was a mistake.

The pattern first started nearly two decades ago in a handful of states with aging white populations like Pennsylvania and West Virginia. But fertility rates dropped drastically after the Great Recession and mortality rates for whites who are not of Hispanic origin have been rising, driven partly by drug overdoses. That has put demographic change on a faster track. The list of states where white deaths outnumber births now includes North Carolina and Ohio.
...
What does it mean for the political map? Some experts say that rapid demographic change became a potent issue in the 2016 presidential race — and helped drive white voters to support Donald J. Trump.

And then there is this from WaPo:

President Trump's proposal to cut legal immigration rates would delay the date that white Americans become a minority of the population by as few as one or as many as five additional years, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.

The plan, released by the White House last month, would scale back a program that allows people residing in the United States to sponsor family members living abroad for green cards, and would eliminate the “diversity visa program” that benefits immigrants in countries with historically low levels of migration to the United States. Together, the changes would disproportionately affect immigrants from Latin America and Africa.

In short, the writing is on the wall (pun intended), they know it and that's what ALL of this has been about (for deplorables) from the beginning. Here's something else of note recently from the Brookings Institute:

Many analysts suggest that if current voting patterns remain the same as in recent elections, the projected rise of communities of color—Hispanics, blacks, Asians, and others—will favor Democrats as the Republican-leaning white share of the electorate shrinks. However, the aging of the population and the continued substan-tial [sic] political clout of whites without college educations played a key role in electing Republican Donald Trump. Because the demography of these latter groups differs across states in ways that tend to benefit Republicans, this report finds that quite a few future scenarios could mimic the result of the 2016 election—a Democratic win in the popular vote with a Republican win in the Electoral College.

I post that to show how desperate is their situation. The best they can come up with is to hinge everything on dying white males without college degrees in rural areas and the hope that, as with white guys getting older in previous generations, minorities will also grow more "conservative" as they age. The problem with that, of course, is that the GOP is no longer the "fiscal conservative" party it once was that drove such conversion.

Their guy is the President.

Not from the popular vote and only because of a combination of unprecedented and unique conditions that resulted in a less than 1% shift. Iow, under conditions that could not possibly be replicated.

The Tea Party has 30ish seats in the House.

Which will likely (hopefully) flip to Dem control tomorrow.

 

[Worldtraveller]

I hope you're right Koy, but I'm pessimistic.

 

[PyramidHead]

You can't make sense of this without mentioning how the economy, and the system it is based on, has utterly failed to deliver for the majority of people who call themselves Tea Party Republicans, and the rich people who pocketed all the profits from steadily escalating productivity has utterly succeeded in convincing their constituents that brown people and women having abortions are the reason they are so poor.

People don't grow more conservative as they enter their senior years, it's just that the poor don't make it to that age as much as the well-off.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

You can't make sense of this without mentioning how the economy, and the system it is based on, has utterly failed to deliver for the majority of people who call themselves Tea Party Republicans

You mean older, upper middle class white guys? It has very clearly not "utterly failed to deliver" for any of them, let alone the majority. That they may have been convinced this is the case by right wing sources such as the Koch brothers (i.e., those with a particular agenda intnet on essentially forming a cult to do their political bidding) is a different matter.

Iow, you'd have to define what "utterly failed" entails from their perspective.

People don't grow more conservative as they enter their senior years

Empirical evidence argues differently.

it's just that the poor don't make it to that age as much as the well-off.

It's not a question of "the poor."

 

[PyramidHead]

You mean older, upper middle class white guys? It has very clearly not "utterly failed to deliver" for any of them, let alone the majority. That they may have been convinced this is the case by right wing sources such as the Koch brothers (i.e., those with a particular agenda intnet on essentially forming a cult to do their political bidding) is a different matter.

Iow, you'd have to define what "utterly failed" entails from their perspective.



Empirical evidence argues differently.

it's just that the poor don't make it to that age as much as the well-off.

It's not a question of "the poor."

I guess I'm not talking about a specific party here, but the general population of working-class Republicans who are convinced that they themselves are just temporarily inconvenienced potential millionaires whose fortunes have been stymied by big government spending, immigration, and other factors not related to the basic mechanism of our economic system.

As for conservatism among older people, I'm saying their age and conservatism are both effects of some third thing. Rich people tend to live longer, and rich people tend to be conservative. It's not that the "wisdom of age" comes in and makes these people gradually realize the errors of their wild youth, it's that people who can't afford to go to the doctor (and would enthusiastically vote for somebody who would make it free to do so) have shorter lifespans as a result.

 

[Elixir]

You mean older, upper middle class white guys? It has very clearly not "utterly failed to deliver" for any of them, let alone the majority. That they may have been convinced this is the case by right wing sources such as the Koch brothers (i.e., those with a particular agenda intnet on essentially forming a cult to do their political bidding) is a different matter.

Iow, you'd have to define what "utterly failed" entails from their perspective.



Empirical evidence argues differently.

it's just that the poor don't make it to that age as much as the well-off.

It's not a question of "the poor."

I guess I'm not talking about a specific party here, but the general population of working-class Republicans who are convinced that they themselves are just temporarily inconvenienced potential millionaires whose fortunes have been stymied by big government spending, immigration, and other factors not related to the basic mechanism of our economic system.

Well, it's definitely true that they could all be richer than Trump, if only they had had the wisdom to inherit $400+ million dollars and leave it in an index fund. Maybe that inheritance check will come if they continue to vote Republican.
The other possibility is that they have been convinced that in fact they are a lot wealthier now, having received that increase on their paychecks (avg iirc $13/wk) due to the tax giveaway to the super rich. But they haven't yet noticed how their 401Ks are doing or the increases in their cost of living (e.g. Gas cost up 40% since Trump), nor will they notice the pending costs increases due to the trade wars we are "winning". We just got 40% cost increases from some of our overseas vendors, and more are coming.