The American people aren’t hopeless idiots:
By 59-29 percent, more Americans say Republicans’ disagreement in selecting a House speaker is a sign of dysfunction rather than reflecting healthy debate within the party, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
My only question is, what would a healthy debate look like?
I think the real question is whether we will see a healthy debate from Republicans again in our lifetimes.
Probably. The electoral woes that the Republican Party is currently facing aren’t as bad as the Democratic Party post-1972 or them post-1936. In those cases, the parties were threatening to outright collapse (and the GOP all but did from 36-52, saved by a timely Roosevelt Recession and the second Red Scare) rather than just be relegated to a regional party that seesaws for elections.
The GOP hasn’t hit rock bottom yet.
Can you imagine how smart we’d be with a media that believed it was tasked with reporting truth instead of recording truth-claims?
For the GOP it would be trying to explain why the FBI should not be investigating them as Domestic Terrorists in front of a judge.
The question is, “Will people decide that this dysfunction is reason enough to NOT vote for Republican candidates”?
If history is any indication, I am not optimistic.
As for what a healthy debate would look like, I think it would probably start with a significant number of Republicans publicly acknowledging that their decisions HAVE to be based, first and foremost, on facts which are supported by evidence. Until a sizable number of them get their feet grounded back in the real world, their internal debates will be nothing more than base appeasing feeding frenzies targeted at completely imaginary enemies. You don’t call those kinds of actions a debate, you call it a mass delusion. And that is what we have had now for a number of years. I’m just not sure they have it in them to break the fever on their own.
Does the GOP establishment even want to do that deep down? Their raison d’etre is to comfort rich people and their organizations — but the only way to get that done in a democracy is to economically blackmail and/or cajole another voting segment into doing so. If the GOP did suddenly embrace empiricism and rationalism to solve its problems of the base believing in delusional shit, then there’d be no way to advance its primary agenda.
Until the GOP gets decisively defeated, i.e. they handily lose a midterm election with Democrats in the white house or they face Sanders with a Congressional majority in both houses, I bet that the overclass would prefer a strategy of ‘dig their heels in and pray for the best’. It’s not an awful strategy, especially if what I think happens and HRC doesn’t win the House and gets her ass kicked in 2018.
Well, no, I don’t believe that they want to do it. That was simply a mind exercise on my part. The Republican Party simply cannot exist within the world of rational thought and empiricism. Modern conservatism, as we are witnessing now, is simply a reactionary reptilian brain-based movement. It has no core ideology, save for strengthening and perpetuating the oligarchy through any necessary means.
Some semblance of this movement will always be with us. The fact that we are depending on the electorate to vote it into some sort of irrelevance, if even for a short time, makes me genuinely pessimistic that I will live long enough to see that day.
Or they could decide, like the Dems did, that their outer wing has nowhere else to go anyway. So why not go where the money is?
I’m with you. It doesn’t matter what they do; how stupid, ignorant or crazy their candidates are; or how much their policy positions diverge from what people say they want; the Republicans still win elections.
I wish I could conclude the American people are not hopeless idiots from this tender little morsel of news. Unfortunately it means nothing of the sort. Just that Americans have very low opinions of politicians and, when there’s a dispute over anything involving politics and they have no frickin clue what’s going on, assume the worst.
As a contractor for the Feds. I had an argument with some idiot, making twice my salary, he thought a 60 vote majority in the senate was the rule “since the birth of the Republic”. I nearly had a stroke providing support for a lot of truly stupid, uninformed jerks. Guess Fox never mentioned they filibustered Obama 500 times. Fox Spews and Rupert Murdoch have dumbed down people who used to just be uninterested. God help us all. Disinformation is affecting the thinking of many people.
I note that the 29% who think this is a serious debate is very close the the 27% Alan Keyes/crazification factor.
Trumps last poll: 25%…seems he is nearing his ceiling…
Anybody catch the Monday night football score? Just askin.
○ Harper’s Gone! Congrats to Canadians!
No, they are hopeless idiots. Occasionally when they get a 50-50 question they come down strongly on the correct side, but that’s almost by random.