Traditional Americans are white. That’s Pat Buchanan’s term. Sarah Palin preferred to use ‘Real Americans.’ That’s probably because until 1920 it was traditional in this country to deny women the right to vote. Whatever, we get it. There are a lot of white people in this country who don’t like to see people of color immigrating here, legally or otherwise. A half-black president freaks them out. Even if they’ve always been dirt poor at least they had a leg-up in their citizenry rights and knew they had the darkies outnumbered. They feel like they’re losing their country. They can’t send their kids to public schools or colleges without them being taught about tectonic plates, evolution, and comparative religion. It’s a bummer.
The question is, why would a major American political party tie themselves to this bitter and shrinking demographic?
Stupidity.
There’s really no other word for it.
It’s the College Republicans who began to take over the GOP in the late 1980s. They were never the brightest bulbs in the box, and were good only in the cynical politics of personal destruction. They made a perfect match with the Southern Rednecks, and together they managed to take over the party from the country club set. Electoral success from 1980 through 2004 (except for the unexpected Clinton interregnum) kept the Big Money on board until now.
They were always a cult, but a useful one until they took over the party.
Their problem was, just like the Young Americans for Freedom (the conservadolts of the late 60s/early 70s), no one invited them to parties since they were so clearly uncool and bogus. As such, they became bitter and hateful. That attitude continues until the present time.
Thomas Kuhn might have the answer, though Occam’s razor points towards stupidity.
Five or so years ago they had it on highest republican authority that they could create their own reality – they wanted to and still want to believe that they can. and they controlled 3 branches of gov (well 4 if one counts the dick cheney) and had the illusion of success in their delusion of making their own reality. now it’s too late. the shock of “real reality” would be too much for them, so they live with the delusion that they can rebuild a voting bloc.
Yup, stupidity pretty much covers it. The majority of Americans view politics as a sport, and they stand by their team. (Especially when they’ve got Sean and Glenn and Rush cheerleading, which is a pretty great image if you think of them in traditional girls’ cheerleading outfits.)
Simple answer: It always worked before. Kinda recalls a popular definition of insanity doesn’t it?
Mmm but they think only white people should be registered to vote and they challenge anyone who aint or make sure their neighborhoods dont have working voting machines
They cannot but tie themselves to themselves – they’re not targeting a specific demographic, they’re talking to themselves…
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COLUMBIA, S.C. — Two South Carolina Republican officials have apologized for defending U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint by likening him to Jews who “take care of the pennies.”
Bamberg County GOP Chairman Edwin Merwin and Orangeburg County GOP Chairman James Ulmer wrote the Orangeburg Times and Democrat to defend DeMint, also a Republican, after a Democratic politician said he didn’t help direct enough funds to local projects.
“There is a saying that the Jews who are wealthy got that way not by watching dollars, but instead by taking care of the pennies and the dollars taking care of themselves,” according to the piece published Sunday in The Times and Democrat of Orangeburg. “By not using earmarks to fund projects for South Carolina and instead using actual bills, DeMint is watching our nation’s pennies and trying to preserve our country’s wealth and our economy’s viability to give all an opportunity to succeed.”
In a statement released late Monday, Merwin said he meant “absolutely nothing derogatory by the reference to a great and honorable people.” Ulmer echoed this sentiment in his apology, and stressed he has “always abhorred in the past, and shall continue to do so in the future, antisemitism in any form whatsoever.”
DeMint called the comment thoughtless and hurtful, and one of South Carolina’s two Jewish legislators, Democratic state Sen. Joel Lourie, said he was outraged. He called on the chairmen to be removed.
“The words of these key Republican leaders are disgusting, unconscionable and represent prejudice in its purest form,” said Lourie, D-Columbia.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."SC GOP is breaking new pathways towards self-implosion (self implosion is an intensified form of implosion)
It was true in the 1850s, it’s still true today:
South Carolina: Too Small for an independent country, too large for an insane asylum.
still the same, after 150 years….
Denial. They operate under the delusion that it can be turned around.
First of all there is no Democracy in America, and there is only one major political party, the Democratic Party! Those are the facts. These rest is media bull shit and magic tricks. The problem with the Democratic Party is that there are SO MANY people in it with diverse views on particular issue, that the party is fractured most of the time. Forget the party labels. When this country was a vibrant English colony, there were the same recognizable groups as back in the motherland across the sea, namely the financially secure and the poor. Today we have essentially the same two groups in 21st century America. Whatever party the rich merchantile class are members in, the working class poor are not in.
The men who wrote the American Constitution were not mechanics, carpenters, masons, tavern operators, mule skinners, coopers, or silversmiths. They were well-to-do members of the new American upper class, and the Constitution was written from their perspective. The working class poor were only addressed as an embarassing afterthought in an amendment known as the Bill of Rights. Simple logic tells one that no working class person had the finiacial assets to be able to provide the time required to participate in the drafting the constitution; never mind the level of education required to even participate in the process as a peer. This is the reason why the founding fathers understood their creation to be a REPUBLIC, not a DEMOCRACY.
Whereas the Republican Party has for many years been a welcoming home to the rich captains of industry, it was much more than an entity dedicated to influencing political policy. The Party functioned mainly as an exclusive club for the exchange of business agreements and business planning on the national level. During these years the small town hardware store owners made up the publicly visible periphery of the party. These were the guys in the staw boaters waving the banners and flags at all of the national conventions. However, over the years the hardware store owners died off, only to be replaced by segregationists and liberatarians. The rich captains of industry have died off, and have been replaced by corporate raiders and global marketeers. Since the focus of the new American Corporate leadership is on foriegn operations their involvement with the Republican Party is no longer on an exclusive club-like basis. Rather their only interest is on political issues central to their own business interests.
The result of this leadership shift has left the Republican Party adrift with nothing but confusing contradictory political policy. Each of the new peripheral residents of the Party is trying to make their own ideology the OFFICIAL policy of the Party. So we have in some instances the Republican/Liberatarians screaming for fiscal conservatism. On the other hand we have the dixiecrat southerner racialists seeking to make the Party policy one which “just say NO” to anything that might in the least significant way benefit our African American President Obama. This is the current problem of the Republican Party at the moment.
What scares me is that the establishment is now seeking to control the Democratic Party, whereas they controlled the Republican one for years. We could be next. Don’t gloat.
perhaps we could label it the kerik syndrome:
coupled with an overwhelming case of cognitive dissonance, it pretty well describes the totality of todays’ gop elite.
Patrick J BuchKKanan is one of the main reasons why I no longer watch MSNBC, sorry Rachel & Keith. I know it’s their own network and MSNBC signs their paychecks, but everytime I see Pat’ racist behind on MSNBC’s screen, and no one taking a stand against him (Tweety invites him on specifically so he can spout his racist drivel) I’m very happy ignoring MSNBC all together. How can you rant and rave about Bill O or Hannity, or Beck or FoxNews in general (Keith & Rachel) and never seem to mention this snake in their own mix? It’s ridiculous and hyocritical. So MSNBC, ain’t on in my house.
Because they only think in the short term.
Iraq = “we’ll topple the government and then hope for best”
Healthcare = “just use the emergency room for now”
Immigration = “build the wall”
Infrastructure = “can’t afford it”
Lost the election = “hope Obama fails”
The question is, why would a major American political party tie themselves to this bitter and shrinking demographic?
Because they’re easy to manipulate & they’re great cover for the main constituency.
I may be white and born in America but, I don’t think Pat Buchanan would consider me a ‘traditional American’ either.
My mother is from France.
I’m one of those evil french!!! So, I expect I am up there with the rest of list of ‘undesirables’ that Buchanan and the rest of his KKK buddies have on a list.
this, I think, is not a bad place to post a copy of something I just posted over at the European Tribune; it brings out some threads of my recent reading and some of the thoughts that reading inspired:
“Cracking at the seams” ?
A broadly-shared idea of some common ideas within a sense of identity among Americans used to produce at least the impression that such an identity, whatever it was, whatever it meant, was real and something people could take for granted. Since that time, the unifying sense of identity has suffered under the intense strains of bewildering technological change which took no account of it and often undermined it. Today, a national identity not only seems to have vanished, it has become a challenge just to imagine what it must have been like when it existed.
Today, Americans are deeply divided in their self-images and their beliefs about who they are (that is, their senses of identity), and who they should be and become; bound up in all that are the deep divisions over practical courses of action in dealing with the various pressing social and political problems of the day. The markers which once served to provide generations of Americans with a shared idea of their place, their direction and their rate of progress (or regress) have largely disappeared and now little remains of a very generally valid and unifying experience of childhood and the passage from it to adulthood. Looking around themselves today, Americans have little idea of how much and in what aspect their own experiences are known and understood and shared by their fellow citizens. In its place has grown up a marked tendency to treat others as having a suspect claim on being real Americans. It’s difficult to say which was the larger influence on a growing and self-reinforcing development of these trends, the political, which fed into social habits, or, conversely, social habits which in turn brought on political trends which in their turn completed a self-reinforcing “loop” of cause-and-effect. Whatever the case, a parting of the ways seems as well established within the social realm as in the political and these then tend to blur into one, making it difficult to see where social ills end and political ills begin.
Part of what has seemed to crack under the strain for one side of the divided American identity is the abiding acceptance of what historian Richard Hofstadter described in the citation above, a culture which “has been intensely nationalistic and for the most part isolationist; it has been fiercely individualistic and capitalistic,” is now no longer so uniformly so. What’s badly lacking, I believe, is a working sense of identity–supple enough to embrace a people who now are more diverse in origin, experience and self-conception than has been true of the society which lived up through the end of the first World War. An old fashioned nationalistic identity, fierce and xenophobic in character and held rather defiantly against “the rest of the world” beyond the borders of the U.S. has been reduced to the property of only roughly half —and the most politically reactionary and conservative half, at that–of the American public. For the rest, there is deep doubt and unanswered questions about how to define their identity and about how to understand what that identity consists of specifically. This reigning confusion has brought voids into relief and made room for people who always thought of themselves as thoroughly progressive and staunch defenders of civil liberties to openly hesitate over a former categorical opposition to violations of those rights, as for example, when they begin to think that there may be circumstances in which torture must be considered and perhaps even countenanced.
Somehow, some new and practically-useful sense of American identity which would foster and encourage freedom and openness, rather than the growing National Security State, which is a kind of short-hand for its opposite, must be fashioned and made effective. But our social institutions are ill-equipped for this task and much about them—such as the atomized television and internet culture of mass media—work more against the formation of such a new and unifying identity than in favor of it. In any case, whatever it is, it must come about “organically” rather than by some “canned” and forced process which resembles a Madison Avenue advertising campaign. It cannot be imposed, it has to be felt sincerely. Thus, what’s needed has to come about through a truly free and consensual set social processes. We can describe what we lack and what we need but we can’t consciously engineer it in more than an indirect manner which proposes ideas which are found to be seductive in their appeal.