Rob Christenson has this mostly correct.
[Rep. Renee] Ellmers [R-NC] has a voting record to the right of Michele Bachmann. And she is under fire for being ideologically impure. This is why we have gridlock.
Most of the problem is that gerrymandered districts are uncompetitive districts, and that is only an amplification of an already existing geographical segregation that creates strong Republican districts even in states where Democrats draw the lines.
But strong unaccountable Republican districts wouldn’t be that big of a problem if the base of the party wasn’t making such unreasonable demands. There are, after all, strong Democratic districts. For example, in Philadelphia, Rep. Chaka Fattah won 89% of the vote, Rep. Bob Brady got 85%, and Rep. Allyson Schwartz got 69%. But you don’t see any of them worrying about a primary from their left.
The root cause of our country’s political problems is that the base of the Republican Party has gone stark-raving mad. Period.
I don’t know if “have gone” stark raving mad is the issue. My thinking is that the crazies were always there, it’s just that the coalition is shrinking and their relative power within it has grown quite a lot.
As wvng points out below the proportion of crazies in the populace doesn’t vary much over time. It’s the political and social power that they hold that varies — along with political affiliation that either dilutes or strengthens their power. Once upon a time, more crazies were within the Democratic Party, but their power in national politics was mostly limited to the deep south. Not that they didn’t do significant damage — federal inaction on Jim Crow laws for example. With FDR, they began shifting to the GOP. A process that took decades but was mostly complete by 1980. They’re just noisier and more strident today because 1) the ACA is the first federal social welfare program that was expanded instead of being contracted since 1980* and 2) their overlords are riling them up because their wishlist of gutting Social Security and Medicare remains stalled.
*The expansion of Medicare drug coverage under GWB was a ransom paid to PHarma and seniors to re-elect GWB and it worked.
When you look at the progression of gay rights issues, this makes a lot of sense. Years of anti-gay ballot measures, people getting beaten up, etc, followed by years of pro-gay ballot measures and decisions. People are still getting beaten up, but the momentum has shifted.
Same thing going on with marijuana, imho.
And the conservative movement as a whole is in death rattle mode and will cause a lot of damage in the process. But they’re doing this because momentum is shifting. The younger generation is just entirely different, and they know it.
The root cause of our country’s political problems is that the base of the Republican Party has gone stark-raving mad. Period.
Financed by the same elite assholes that David Gregory hangs out with at the country club.
I kinda disagree with this statement: “The root cause of our country’s political problems is that the base of the Republican Party has gone stark-raving mad. Period.”
I would suggest that the real problem is that right wing media has empowered the already stark-raving mad, and considerably expanded their ranks. Without right wing media pushing them on, without Fox actively encouraging tea bagger stupidity (as they did with the WWII Memorial “protest”), they would still be isolated.
” But you don’t see any of them worrying about a primary from their left.”
Maybe they should. I was never on-board with pro matting Pelosi despite her not being in line with her district because she is effective. But plenty others out there are worthy of primarying.
There are also plenty of people on the left who make unreasonable (depending on your point of view) demands. No one in power listens. The right-wing fruitcakes have been given a place at the table — that’s the problem. Who is funding the tea party movement? Follow the money and you’ll find the problem.
The fact that a sizable minority of the republican party is nuts is a big problem, but the core problem is that our system of government is set up to allow that minority to essentially break the government.
Christensen is a GOP shill. You need to know that.
I’m not buying this. Not all of the people who voted for her were true believers; in fact, few were.
Charlie Cook’s “PVI is destiny” madness is one of the things that keeps handicapping the response of the Democratic Party. If people know what Ellmers has been doing, they likely will vote against her.
The base of the Republican Party are 10 billionaires and high multi-millionaires. Everything else is astro-turf. And unlike Democrats and especially progressives, these guys have to money now to penetrate to the school board level with deceptive ads. And if the Supreme Court rules as expected this year, these billionaires will be able to control who runs for dog catcher in the GOP.
The root cause of our country’s political problems is that multiple billions of dollars of money is going into right-wing propaganda on Fox, radio talkers, spot issue ads, training courses for “opinion leaders”, organizing preachers and churches, and publishing fictions as “thinktank” studies, which are parroted mindlessly by the commercial media. Cut off that media blizzard and wait six months.
The money men are the ones making the demands and then creating the media to sell the voting base and GOTV workers. They are the ones financing all the chintzy emails that that get sent around to everybody’s uncle and old friends. Those aren’t spontaneous creations by some nitwit; they are part of an ad campaign. All of the birther stuff; well financed ad campaigns. Cottage industries serving billionaires. Democrats have no infrastructure like that system for fleecing the rubes.
Don’t get sucked in by the shills who write to make it look like legitimate politics.
Given the statements that Ellmers, Meadows, and other NC GOP members of Congress have made, Democrats have the material to win at least three and maybe more districts with the right candidate. And one way might be a “who are they working for?” campaign theme.
Taking Christensen’s analysis at face value is really bad.
I’m loving the CA redistricting system – which emphasizes competitiveness – more and more every day.
The Republican Party IS the Tea Party. Check out this graph from the article I referenced:
http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/polar_house_means.jpg
The root cause of our country’s political problems is that the base of the Republican Party has gone stark-raving mad. Period.
Aside from the entire industrial world having gone stork white, stark-raving mad also, your analysis is spot-on.
Yes, they’re stark-raving mad.
But not in their minds!
In their circle of relatives and friends, who also listen to Rush and watch FUX Noise, their stark-raving mad opinions are reinforced – and that’s if they weren’t planted there in the first place.
It’s a perpetual motion machine of TEH STOOOOOOOOOOOPID!!!!!
Booman Tribune ~ A Progressive Community
But there shouldn’t be a period there, because that is where it gets interesting. We can argue about how many crazies there are at any on time, or the degree to which their craziness is amplified and mainstreamed by the plutocrats. But what actually makes them crazy?
American Capitalism has created a system of systemic insecurity. Unless you are wealthy you are in fear of losing your job, your benefits, your healthcare, your health, and the respect of your family and community which you derive from being a provider. Your status is perceived as being relative to your peers and other communities.
The rise of knowledge based capitalism has created an underclass of relatively unqualified, insecure, unappreciated workers and unemployed. This is nothing new to minorities who are used to being at the bottom of the pile.
But the rise of a black and Hispanic middle class and moved relatively unskilled working class whites further down the pecking order, and they don’t like it one little bit. So they try to sabotage the educational system and other “entitlements” which they perceive as enabling the rise of minorities against them (as they see it) or more objectively, relative to them. Their kids can’t get good jobs because better educated minorities are getting them.
So the answer is to try to destroy the political system they see as enabling this – be it public education, public healthcare, anything which they see as benefiting minorities. It doesn’t even have to be an affirmative action program because even a program which helps all equally puts them at a disadvantage to abler or better educated minorities.
President Obama is the very embodiment of this problem. It doesn’t matter that he is abler or better educated than most of his white competitors, he represents a defeat for racial solidarity within the white tribe. And those librul whites who have sided with him are the most hated of all, for they are traitors to their race.
So there is nothing irrational about less able whites feeling betrayed by their white establishment and hating on Obama. His success symbolizes their failure and their fall from grace. They hate the education, the science, the religion and the government programs that got him there, and they would rather tear it all down than see him succeed.
Fascist movements the world over – be they white South African Apartheid supporters, German working class ravaged by unemployment and hyperinflation and needing someone (the Jews) to scapegoat for their misfortune, or Spanish landed elites worried by the rise of industrial workers – have responded with extreme xenophobia and violence whenever their prior status and place in the pecking order was challenged.
And these fearful and insecure people are easy meat ripe for manipulation by the plutocrats of their time. But as the German elite found out to their cost in the 1930’s, you may think you control the little Hitlers of the world, but in the end they can devour you.
The US plutocrats who thought they could control the Tea Party to their own benefit may be in for a nasty surprise: Once weaponized, they can bring the whole house down on everyone.
They are the folks who thirty years ago were called middle managers and small business owners. And their wives. And that is who the Tea Party types of my acquaintance are. The small contractors hammered by the housing crash, the independent tire store owner hammered by large chains, the guys who lost their management jobs when their large corporations sliced four layers from the chain of command.
And in the South, a lot of times better educated minorities are better educated because they still go to the public school instead of the church academy.