Are there any 'Republicans' on Newstalkers?
There is a nihilistic strain coursing through the veins of a significant number of people on the American right. They delight in Mr. Trump's effort to annihilate truth and peddle conspiracy theories
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/21/opinion/sunday/republican-party-bannon-ethnonationalism.html
A year after President Trump's stunning electoral victory, the Republican Party is in a very strange place. It's politically dominant but increasingly unpopular, particularly among young people and nonwhites of all ages, whose level of unhappiness with Mr. Trump and his administration is toxic.
Republicans have all the power but can't seem to get much of anything done. There are huge internal fissures that are growing rather than shrinking. Just the other day, the president's former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, with whom Mr. Trump is still close, made his intentions clear: "Right now it's a season of war against the G.O.P. establishment."
When Mr. Bannon looks for targets as he prosecutes his "season of war," it is people like me he has in mind. And Mr. Bannon is right in this respect: Neither of us wants to be -- or can be -- a member of a party the other gets to define.
It would be silly to deny that Mr. Bannon has several things working in his favor. To understand this, you have to forget about the narrowly decided presidential election for a minute and turn your mind back to the battle for the Republican nomination, which was not close at all. The first thing those of us who are vocal critics of Mr. Bannon and Mr. Trump need to recognize and fully reckon with is that Mr. Trump's victory in the Republican primaries was not an aberration so much as a culmination, an apotheosis of sorts. Underlying currents and powerful passions animating the base of the party that had been building for years burst forth when Republicans nominated Mr. Trump.
As the world now knows, these feelings of powerlessness, resentment and grievance are widespread, and as a candidate Mr. Trump tapped into them perfectly. Many Republican voters have, at least for now, jettisoned traditional conservatism in favor of the Trump-Bannon brand of ethnonationalism. They have turned inward instead out outward, they have embraced white identity politics as a matter of course and they have developed a disdain for the hard, intricate work of governing.
But the reasons for the rise of Mr. Trump lie still deeper than that. There is a nihilistic strain coursing through the veins of a significant number of people on the American right. They delight in Mr. Trump's effort to annihilate truth and peddle conspiracy theories, and they draw energy and purpose from the unsettling effect he has on the nation as a whole. For them, Mr. Trump is a "fighter," and politics needs to be weaponized in order to be enjoyed. They see politics as World Wrestling Entertainment, and Mr. Trump as the best wrestler in the ring.
As a result, they are bending their will to his ways, seeing the world as he does. Take just one example that continues to startle: Russia. It wasn't long ago that Republicans were nearly unanimous in their critical outlook on Russia. But today, because of Mr. Trump's repeated praise for President Vladimir Putin, Republican attitudes toward Russia are far more favorable. A Pew Research Center poll found that the share of Republicans expressing confidence in Mr. Putin has doubled in just two years (from 17 to 34 percent).
Republicans, then, are faced with an existential question. Will Mr. Trump and his most ardent supporters succeed in their effort to reconceive the party? Can they be stopped? Certainly, if they don't encounter more spirited resistance than they have so far, they may well pull it off.
Let me explain what I mean. Some so-called establishment Republicans, alarmed by the rise of the ethnonationalist wing of the party, comfort themselves with the belief that this movement can be domesticated, absorbed into the traditional coalition with its sharp edges sanded off. According to this narrative, the Republican Party will weather this storm and emerge in a modified but recognizable form. There are bound to be tensions, but civil war can be averted.
Count me skeptical. Many of Mr. Trump's supporters, who get their news from Breitbart and Alex Jones, from conservative talk radio and Fox News, want a revolution, not accommodation. I'm acquainted with some of these individuals and I hear from them all the time. Their rage at the establishment is off the charts. They want to burn the village down. Until now all the energy has been with them, and it is laughable to think that passing tax cuts will satiate them.
That's why, for many of the lifelong Republican conservatives who never boarded the Trump train, it is particularly disappointing that the Republican leaders we know who have deep disagreements with Mr. Trump and Mr. Bannon are for the most part unwilling to make the counter-case in a forceful and comprehensive fashion. Nor are his private critics rushing to go public with their often mordant analyses of Mr. Trump's movement.
They each have their reasons, and some are more understandable than others. Still, I can't help but feel that they are badly underestimating the gravity of the moment. They are willfully ignoring the danger Trumpism and Bannonism pose to many of the principles they claim to hold dear, and they are deluding themselves into believing that a rapprochement is possible with those who are determined to destroy them.
What this points to is the need for an energetic public case for a conservative politics as an alternative to their case for a revolutionary politics; for Republicans who don't share Mr. Bannon's manias to say so and to offer an alternative, in the area of policy but also in temperament and disposition. Thankfully that's beginning to happen. In the last week, former President George W. Bush, in whose White House I served, and Senator John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, offered a philosophical alternative to Trumpism.
In the short term, there may well be a cost to challenging the ethnonationalist wing of the Republican Party. But while the leaders of this wing are politically formidable, they are hardly invincible. Their record at backing successful insurgents is not very impressive, with Roy Moore in Alabama being a rare exception. In fact, according to some reports, Mr. Bannon is now backing candidates supported by the "establishment" he declared war on, probably in part so that he can claim victories to make himself appear more powerful than he is, and in part because his bench is thin. And whatever else we say about him, President Trump is hardly a model for most Republicans running for office.
Beyond that, though, there's really no choice about challenging the blood-and-soil nationalists. If they were to triumph -- if the tribalistic, angry, anti-government wing of the party turns out to be the vanguard rather than an ugly and unfortunate parenthesis -- then the Republican Party would collapse intellectually and morally, and a lot of lifelong Republicans would head for the exits.
It may yet happen. A lot, frankly, depends on whether Mr. Trump is viewed as a success or a failure. If it's the former, his approach to politics will be imitated and become still harder to dislodge. If it's the latter, it will largely be rejected and create the space for a fundamentally different approach.
For now, though, and at the risk of sounding hopelessly out of step with the times, let me venture a guess. Much of America, including some large number of Republicans waiting to be mobilized, is thirsting for leaders of courage and purpose who, in a fractious and intemperate age, believe -- and can help others believe -- that one of the high callings of politics is to heal our wounds rather than to inflict new ones, to appeal to our best instincts rather than our worst. Or, as Robert Kennedy said, in a line he attributed to the ancient Greeks, to "tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world."
For many of us, Mr. Trump, Mr. Bannon and Mr. Moore represent the politics of dissolution and dehumanization, of resentment and enmity, of half-truths and anti-truths. Republicans who do not want their party to be defined by them need to understand they can't avoid this fight. They have to decide how they want to wage it and how they are going to win it. I'm not sure if it's a winning one, but I'm certain it's an ennobling one. And that should be enough.
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Are there any "Republicans" on Newstalkers, as opposed to Trumpers?
I don't recall seeing any evidence of that since the election.
Yet he calls himself a republican.......
Yeah, I know, silly.....
What gives a liberal the right to define what the opposition is?
The answer is a simple one.....
NOTHING!
The day has come to correct the great Ronald Reagan's biggest mistake, kicking all the liberals out of the republican party...
And if it took electing an imbecile to the highest office in the land to do it, SO BE IT!
Trumps greatest asset and the thing that makes him the best candidate for the job at this point in our history??
He isn't a politician!
Unless anyone missed it, the American people are tired of being lied to and manipulated by the professional politicians.
The republicans screwed the peoples choice, the Democrats have screwed the peoples choice. BOTH parties are the same.....
You have self declared republicans like the author of this piece spouting crap right out of the liberal playbook...
The political pendulum is swinging back the other way, towards the center now...
That is obama's legacy, awakening the American people to the dangerous course the nation was on...
In that respect, YES, one could call him a patriot.....
As opposed to being lied to and manipulated by a professional con man?
What gives a liberal the right to define what the opposition is?
Peter Wehner
American politics and conservative thought.
"Peter Wehner is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. He is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who has served in the last three Republican administrations. In 2001, he was named deputy director of speechwriting for President George W. Bush. He later served as director of the Office of Strategic Initiatives, where he reached out to prominent thinkers and advised the White House on a range of domestic and international issues. A senior adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, he has been affiliated with several leading research organizations.
Mr. Wehner is a frequent commentator on television and radio and has written widely on political, cultural, religious and national security issues. He is the author (with Arthur C. Brooks) of “Wealth and Justice: The Morality of Democratic Capitalism” and (with Michael Gerson) of “City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era.” The Washington Monthly has called him one of the most influential reform-minded conservatives , and in Forbes, the political consultant Mary Matalin featured him on a short list of conservatism’s leading “educators and practitioners of first principles.”"
Right, I'm supposed to accept the establishments view of him.
All you have done is prove the point all the more.
YOU from the left, consider him a conservative, we the conservatives consider him a leftist....
All your doing is proving just how far leftist you actually are.... (and why your side shouldn't be in charge of the public toilet much less the government of the most powerful nation on the planet)
Unless anyone missed it, the American people are tired of being lied to
Oh, the irony. Actually, you are hungry to be lied to.
I don't dispute this, but every time I see this analysis offered, it is never with the concession that Trump voters might actually have a legitimate reason to have been pissed off. Their feelings are always characterized as racist, ignorant, or irrational. When reporters, politicians, and pundits classify millions of people in this way, why should the people listen to anything else they have to say about the state of our nation?
Regular people are sick of being called racists or even Nazis, particularly for supporting things even the Left used to support - like securing the border (see Bill Clinton's State of the Union Address ) or standing up for the flag, or destroying monopolies (look at the state of big pharma and hospitals in this country).
The Right is sick of the Left lying about them . When Trump announced his candidacy and talked about illegal immigration, he pointed out that some people here illegally from Mexico and other countries are criminals. The Left turned this true statement into "Trump says Mexicans are Rapists." Worse, everyone who supported him allegedly thought the same thing. That set the tone for the rest of the campaign and where we are today.
Meanwhile, the Left readily validates and glamorizes every conceivable beef its constituency puts forth with no critical analysis whatsoever. Thus, we are bombarded with claims of systemic racism whether there is real evidence for it or not - usually not. The media spends a week criticizing the president for being insensitive to a grieving widow while making a call of condolence. A congresswoman can declare that being called an "empty barrel" is racist even though the whole world knows that's not a thing. When people object to football players kneeling for the national anthem, it couldn't possibly be honest patriotism, it must be racism. And on and on . . .
Great post
"Regular people" were marching with swastikas and confederate flags chanting "Jews will not replace us". "Regular people" are claiming global warming is a hoax even though 97% of climate scientists agree man is having an effect on our worsening climate. "Regular people" ignore the fact that 70% of manufacturing jobs were lost to automation and instead blame immigration. "Regular people" believed the lie of millions of illegals voting when there is zero actual evidence of it. "Regular people" voted for a man who admitted to grabbing women by the genitals and had 13 accusers come forward to claim he had assault them. "Regular people" bought into the smear campaign that we know a foreign adversary perpetrated during a national election. "Regular people" claim to have more in common with Russians than with their fellow American citizens simply because those other citizens happen to be gay, black or of another faith. "Regular people" continually give the President a pass for insulting our allies while never saying a negative word against the country that intentionally hacked both primary political parties then released only damaging emails of the party they didn't want to win. "Regular people" have bought into the myriad of conspiracy theories about liberals and progressives while ignoring the dozens of meetings and connections the Trump campaign had with a foreign adversary. "Regular people" have chosen to demonize the educated as "elitists" while refusing to get re-trained for the jobs of the future and complaining about being out of work and that liberals and progressives don't care about "regular peoples" problems. "Regular people" lie about liberals and progressives being the "free stuff" crowd when the facts show conservatives and "regular people" are using the entitlement programs just as often. "Regular people" believe the lie that something called "clean coal" actually exists simply because they might benefit financially from allowing dirty coal to continue to operate. "Regular people" would rather punch a problem in the face than spend the time to learn about it, get educated and then actually work to fix it. "Regular people" claim America is a Christian nation and claim to want religious freedom but when it comes down to it they really only want religious freedom for their brand of religion. Personally, I'm tired of regular people, I want America to be full of exceptional people who do exceptional things and push exceptional ideas of modernization, integration, education, cooperation and illumination.
A handful of assholes condemned by most of us and given airtime by a news media that lives for ratings. Only partisan bigotry would assign those few to the millions who actually hate them.
First of all, consensus is not science; it's politics. A million people can say a wrong thing. It's still wrong. Having said that, most people I have heard or talked to don't take much issue with the idea that the climate changes or even that people can impact it. The debate is over how much and what, if anything, should be done about it. But the Left loves to spread this lie that conservatives are stupid, in denial, or some other such nonsense. Question: What would you like us to do about it? Destroy all cars? Stop using electricity?
Follow my link to Bill Clinton above and you'll see he blamed immigrants for taking our jobs, too. And I don't know of any good conservative source who thinks automation has nothing to do with job loss, as you imply.
How many people, I wonder. Anyway, you don't know it's a lie until you investigate and collect data. That's real science. Strangely, the Left would rather resist investigation and declare it a lie with no evidence either way.
Are you talking about Bill Clinton now? Isn't it interesting how those women popped up right before the election and have since gone . . . who knows where?
There's no evidence that the American people bought into anything the Russians did. No evidence even a single person changed their vote. Climate change may be the only issue where the Left actually looks at the data. On everything else, they just declare it to be true or not and never mind the evidence.
That's interesting. I hadn't heard the Republicans had been hacked. In fact, the news reports I have seen indicate they weren't. Apparently they had better security. Also, we don't know for certain that the Democratic thing was a hack and not a leak. Not that I care. Actually Trump criticized Russia 4 days before he was inaugurated , but the press hates reporting that because it wrecks the narrative. Also widely underreported is the strategy Trump has implemented in Syria, with our troops opposing Russian and Syrian forces in support of rebels there and in a very successful effort to crush ISIS.
Well, considering that your great champion called half of Trump's supporter's "deplorable" I'd say their sense of apathy and disrespect from the Left is justified.
Oh for Pete's sake. Don't you know?
Barack Obama Supports Developing Clean Coal Technology
Well, according to some surveys, 75% of Americans still claim to be Christian . How serious they are is an open question. But historically, Americans have been mostly Christian. The people who settled Massachusetts, known as The Pilgrims were Calvinist christians who even had religious leaders. American history is marked by multiple powerful and influential revivalist movements . These movements ended up having a direct impact on public policy. Multiple colonies were founded based on religious charters and the revolution itself was justified on religious moral grounds. So, while the Constitution isn't based on the Bible specifically (the Bible, after all, is not intended as a treatise on good government), when people say America is a Christian nation - meaning, the people who founded that nation and comprise it now - it kind of is true.
From Religion and the Founding of the American Republic :
This opinion piece certainly has the labeling technique down pat ... if one is going to label "white identity" politics, and even use the word tribalism in reference to conservatism - is not digging very deep in the tribalism and identity politics that has been taking place in America that has nothing to do with the current President.
Things have gotten so far out of hand that governors are declaring a state of emergency because the "white nationalist" is coming ... I still do not know when this great nation became ruled by victims. but it is a sad day when the fear of violence dominates ...
How much of what is happening has to to with which political aisle one sits (?) it appears that identity politics is something that many are unable to shed, everything must be labeled/group'd together. Bannonism, why is Bannon being quoted - even interviewed him on 60 Minutes .. I am told that he is 'news' Pfft .. ignore him and soon the only platform he will have is Breitbart ... if there is a negative comment to be made about the current president the media will even quote Scaramucci. Republicans in Congress that make negative comments directed at the President are suddenly 'hero' like characters to the left..........
There are not enough of us plain ole run of the mill Americans! The tribalism of ... African American, Asian American .. Muslim American / American Muslims .. the list goes on [NBC even has separate article categories labeled for the tribes to follow] - is the Black Lives Matter movement not tribalistic black identity politics? Tribalistic LGBTQ identity politics a thing yet? (it is not my intent to sound snarky .. yet I am aware that it is coming off that way)
I resent the labeling. I am a Montana born plain ole American conservative conservationist [that is a label I can live with] Seems to me the more labeling that is done, the deeper the divide, lessening chances of bi-partisan negotiations and compromise ... as Americans 'we' need to agree to disagree, then continue to work together!
I am going to put Soap Box back in the stable -
from the dictionary:
I'm annoyed that the politcal parties have divied up economic theories and are determined to only use their selected theory regardless of the economic environment. (Kind of a "give a kid an hammer and all the world is a nail").
There are compromises that could be made in tax reform that could actually benefit the country.
Completely agree .. none of the important issues can work without bipartisanship participation in the passing of these bills - Health insurance, tax reform, immigration/border security ... gonna take a group effort to make these things 'functionable' [had to look it up, but is sort of a real word]
I have never belonged to either party, started independent and am no party now. It makes it easier look directly at the issues instead of blindly accepting a party line. My problem with republicans now is that they are so extreme I can't stand them. It isn't hard to see crazy by either party and it is clear where it is coming from today.
Back in my old hood, there was quite a few fence sitters .. the view was nice, and 'we' saw things from both side. Of course the fence leans from time to time - depends on the subject.
I saw Chuck Schumer on MTP this morning - a bipartisan proposal is being brought before Congress ... is it not time to discuss, and get input? .............Schumer thinks it should be passed as written - did not sound like a compromise was an option.
There are all kinds of crazee ... both sides of the aisle seem to represent crazee quite well!
I'll bet you didn't know the ACA was not only written with republican input, that some of that input was included in the bill. Still they voted against it. Some dems and repubs just sat down together and pieced something together to help stabilize the ACA, and now you want to throw it out and make them eat it because Trump changed his mind again?
Who are you commenting to (?) certainly is not me ..................... never have I said anything of the sort!
My comment on Chuck Schumer was regarding bipartisanship and compromise - run with it anyway that you choose, but please to not insult my intelligence nor put words in my mouth in order to cause an argument ............................... This is not the droid you are looking for !!!
I don't know if that was the right comment (to answer) or not, I'm still trying to figure NT out and often get lost in the comments.
As someone who left the GOP in 1970 because of the control by the Rockefeller Socialist Establishment, I find real hope in the election of Trump. Either the Establishment will be purged or it should go the way of the Whigs and let a Conservative party rise to replace it. We need an alternative to two statist parties.