The billionaires have been looking around for someone with the credentials of a Douglas MacArthur or a Dwight Eisenhower because, just as the Republican Party of 1952 was about as useful as teets on a bull, the contemporary version is a psychiatric wreck totally unsuited and unprepared to responsibly represent anyone’s interests. Alas, no war heroes of sufficient stature are available, and the Starbucks guy seems to be auditioning less for president than for most punchable face.
There were #NeverTrumper people who were kind of getting accustomed to having one foot outside of the Party of Lincoln until they got a load of Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax and puddles began to form around their ankles. They’re beginning to fear that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposed 70 percent top marginal income tax rate is more popular than the idea of a President Michael Bloomberg.
Suddenly, Trump doesn’t look so bad. After all, he did build the Autobahn deliver on tax reform, regulatory rollbacks and undermining Obamacare. He did withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord. He is cracking down on the crazy socialists in Venezuela and Cuba. And look at all those Heritage Foundation judges!
I’ve long wondered why the billionaires have not gotten serious about building a replacement for the Republican Party. They could begin by denying the Republicans any funding. It’s not like Eisenhower Republicanism or even Teddy Roosevelt-style progressivism doesn’t maintain a degree of appeal. So, maybe the billionaires want less Roosevelt and more Taft, but there is no necessary reason why Wall Street tycoons should be tethered to Gulf Oil tycoons or the Christian fundamentalist movement. Why does a Yankee Republican want to be associated with the party of Louie Gohmert, Roy Moore, and Joe Arpaio?
But the billionaires waited too long. California set sail and Texas is probably next. The people want someone to pay for the Great Recession. They want someone to pay for our hollowed out small towns and failing farms. They want someone to pay for the fact that we have a Russian agent in the White House and the Republicans won’t do a damn thing about it. They’re losing interest in the old arguments about why they can’t have nice things.
It’s not like this tiger can’t be tamed. Eisenhower delayed a postwar reckoning for a decade, mainly by golfing everyone to sleep. But you can’t fix something with nothing. The billionaires sat and watched while our military was sent on impossible missions that produced no national heroes. They sat and watched while Fox News and hate radio spurred a sleeping electorate into a foaming froth of reckless and aggressive stupidity. They did nothing while the hateful right-wing throngs alienated the entire suburban professional class to the point that they reconciled with the people in the cities they had fled.
So, now, at this late date the billionaires need to build a new party, but they can’t do it with intellectuals. They can’t do it with professionals. They can’t do it with the underclass or with the know-nothing Republican base.
At least Bloomberg understands the problem well enough to understand that to win back the suburbs the billionaires have to care about gun shootings in schools. But they also have to care about climate change and the environment. They have to care about people’s retirement security. They need to spend on roads and railways. Somehow, they let the Democrats take on the entire responsibility for representing the Yankee Republican while they were still shouldering the job of representing labor and the cities.
The #NeverTrumpers are going to pay a price for their errors for a change. It’s exactly what the people want.
Eisenhower also maintained the New Deal, lauched the interstate highway system, enforced school desegregation in Little Rock, shut down the British and French in Sinai, and embraced a form of detente with the Soviet Union, so there’s that.
Eisenhower also had no party affiliation until he was drafted, reluctantly, by the GOP in 1952 to run for President. He was never an ideological (back then “Taft”) Republican. And as a war hero, he was not beholden to any GOP faction.
You make it seem like `Yankee Republicans’ are/were some sort of neutral observers of things like Reagan going to the Neshoba County Fair to start his campaign, or that they did not belong, and still belong, to country clubs that had racial barriers.
Am I supposed to believe that the Koch brothers, or Adelson, or the Ricketts give millions and millions to republicans every cycle in spite of the racial animosity those politicians have shown for the last 70 years?
No. Just no. That’s like asking me to believe that Collins votes for anti abortion judges because they are friendly to her. No, she votes for them because she believes women should not have jurisdiction over their own bodies.
Those `Yankee Republicans’ give millions because their vision of the future is a republican boot on a brown/black face…forever. Tax cuts are the gravy, not the main dish.
Any `new party’ would just be a rebranding, because the press gets too bad. Just like the `tea party’ was a rebranding. Funny how that worked out…they rebranded from bush to something where the dog whistles came from a bull horn.
They will never change what they are.
.
Am I supposed to believe that the Koch brothers, or Adelson, or the Ricketts give millions and millions to republicans every cycle in spite of the racial animosity those politicians have shown for the last 70 years?
One of the Ricketts clan was caught just recently sending racist and hateful emails. The rich and powerful are way more racist then the proles.
And that one owns the Chicago Cubs.
Another is a Governor.
.
It’s been interesting to watch from my perch how the white professional Republican reconciled to Reagan and then kept going and going and going until they were nodding along to Sean Hannity.
So, yes, there has been an infection or infestation.
But the truth is that I live in the Philly Burbs, historically the most rock-ribbed Republican anti-urban place in the Mid-Atlantic. And it’s Democratic now. The children broke from their parents, and racial attitudes and sexual mores played the biggest part in that. Anti-environmentalism, too, is increasingly a big factor.
Geeze, Booman.
No `white professional republican’ ever `reconciled’ to Reagan. They pulled the lever with massive enthusiasm, and continued to do the same for every republican as long as they lived.
Fine on the Burbs, but your diary is not about children breaking with their racists parents, it’s about the financiers of the Republican Party, and how they have been led down a primrose path, almost like it was/is against their will.
They ARE the `leaders’. The present Republican Party is what THEY built. THEY support, and finance, the disenfranchisement of millions. THEY want the voting rights act repealed, gutted.
.
No, the Mid-Atlantic white professional Republican voted for Ford over Reagan, Bush or Anderson over Reagan, Bush over Buchanan, etc.
Arlen Specter, Tom Ridge, Tom Kean, Christie Whitman, George Pataki, William Roth, etc.
They saw Reagan as a troglodyte and a joke until he became the nominee, and never saw him as a serious person like Nixon or Eisenhower. Although, after he got shot, people started to show more respect.
But, just as Poppy had to turn into Reagan to win the nomination in ’88, the average professional Republican in the Mid-Atlantic became more conservative throughout the 1980’s.
In 1992, many of the rest left the party after Buchanan’s challenge freaked them out. Those who stayed became part of the Gingrich Revolution, which is what really killed the old GOP for good.
I am in agreement with your initial post, Boomnan. The plebes are beginning to seek the scalps of the aristocracy. The thing that mystifies me though is that the the vast majority of Republican “intellectuals,” though expert in their specialties, read, believe and spout the same Fox bullshit as the Neanderthals with confederate flags flying on their “rolling coal” pick up trucks.
I’ve worked as a lawyer at top national law firms where partners have a copy of The f’n NY Post prominently displayed on their desks and waxed philosophical about Obama not meeting the qualifications to be President because of the nationality of his father. They buy into the same nonsensical bullshit the tea partiers did. The Never-Trumpers are a small group indeed. Limited, mostly, to the WA POST editorial page.
Exactly. I would give this a 10 if I could.
The emails Phil mentioned in his post above were the typical racist bs that gets handed around by right wingers. Ricketts e-mail list isn’t people living under a bridge, eating sparrows off a coat hanger. It includes the richest people in America.
They are all perfectly fine with Trumps opinions on race. What they object to is Trump maybe, possibly, costing them power and influence.
.
He is an “elegant” aristocrat. that’s what they hate. They know he’s a lying game show freak. they will turn and support someone like Pence, who is a religious fanatic, but pliant. they may be wrong. Their counterparts in post-WW I Germany saw Hitler as a pliant clown too.
“is not” not “is” in the first sentence.
Here’s what you’re missing.
The billionaires (east coast variety, anyway) have never cared about the obsessions of The Lost Cause or the concerns of flyover country. Their first base is the managerial class they employ, which used to be sizable enough to win the occasional presidential race although after 1933, only in rare instances control of Congress.
What changed in the 1970’s is that the figured out that they could make common cause with southern bigots and religious nuts while appealing to the grievances of a downwardly mobile labor movement.
That was a marriage of convenience.
The prejudices of billionaires in kind of beside the point, although obviously their first base was based on white flight from the major urban centers of the Northeast and industrial Midwest.
Still, they were cosmopolitan. They wanted cheap labor even if they wished it didn’t have to be Catholic, so they welcomed immigration. They tended to be at least open to environmental concerns although they obviously resisted regulations. They wanted an educated work force, so they supported public education. They understood they need for a social safety net, even if they wanted to limit and control it. They built NATO and the United Nations. They supported a major presence in Europe and the Far East.
They were still bastard Republicans and imperialistic reactionaries, but they weren’t indifferent to basic reality or a bunch of religious nuts.
What’s changed is that their alliance with Neo-confederates and bible thumpers has turned off their managerial class. They’re losing the suburbs badly now, especially after the latest SALT nonsense in the tax bill. So, they’re stuck with people who don’t share their values at all and who won’t advance their interests, especially on important trade and international issues.
They want a new party and the Democrats of Clinton-Gore-Obama-Clinton would be acceptable to them, at least on a short-term trial. But they’re not going to get that party now, and so they’re freaking out.
Then why didn’t they support Clinton when they had the chance?
Which Clinton?
They liked Poppy. The #NeverTrumpers supported Hillary or cast a third party vote for Johnson.
From what I see day-to-day in this NY suburb with a large number of folks in finance is that more of them are actually devolving into the racist, anti-immigrant and anti-environment biases of their know-nothing compatriots than are seeking a more moderate alternative, unfortunately. Surely there are those “never trumpers” in the latter set that you describe, but I don’t think they could fill up the country club bar.
Where I saw the change when I was canvassing was with successful immigrant populations that used to be / still are Republicans but cannot abide with its current form, which takes aim at everyone not white (most were Asian or South Asian), and so they are voting Dem for their first times, primarily as a protest vote against the seething idiocy and racism of the current Republican Party.
I don’t observe this as much among the old guard white Republicans… If they are internally disgusted by what has happened to their party they are still outwardly “go team red.”
Regardless of past behavior or beliefs, Fox News (and NY Post, WSJ and the ubiquitous Right Wing AM talk show) is a hell of a drug, even for those who should have learned critical thinking skills along with their advanced degrees.
I’m glad to hear the Philly burbs seem to be more enlightened.
Look at the news today. Some reporter posted on Twitter that they asked a bunch of Wall Street types who they would vote for in a Warren-Trump 2020 general election matchup. I bet you can guess what the overwhelming response was.
Found it!! Hate giving clicks to Vox but that is who published it:
I agree that Yankee Republicans are mostly racist (though mostly casual racists). But I think the evidence is very clear that their fundamental motivation for supporting the GOP is deregulation and tax cuts. That has been the case for 100 years, at least. They’re all aspiring oligarchs.
The billionaires might be better off with a parliamentary system where they could possibly build a near-permanent center-right coalition centered around a Likud-like party.
That’s one reason some election experts I respect oppose proportional representation. Leads to center left/center right permanent governments, usually favoring the right.
They already have that. It’s called the United States Senate. It’s permanently Republican unless we change the constitution, & it has a stranglehold on the presidency as laws & constitution are currently interpreted.
It reminds me of Jesus and the parable of the rich man:
“Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
This doesn’t mean if you’re rich you can’t get into Heaven. Just means that the nature of great wealth is such that the value system of a wealthy person comes to be screwed up by their greed and all their schemes to increase their piles; that the likelihood of their loot being ill-gotten gains coming at the expense of others due to their lack of any real empathy, and that the love of that money is likely greater in such a man than anything else that would have them do “right” by those they made it off of.
So they sat back and waited because they were content with their tax cuts. Republicans cut their taxes, and democrats did little if anything to reduce their hoards or even prevent them from growing at the expense of others. They were content to sit back and watch the GOP go to hell, as long as they got their tax cuts, while they were far removed from the Fox-bred racist lunatics that helped them politically to keep and grow it. This goes for the “good ones” like Bloomberg et al, and the billionaire democratic donors democratic leadership worked hard to not offend by shafting their own people with incrementalism. They paid lip service to democratic issues – income inequality, climate change, LGBTQ, etc as long as democrats let nothing get in the way of them continuing to take theirs off the top to the detriment of everyone else. Now they’re behind the eight ball as more on the right are starting to see through the hate and those on the left are waking up from the “we’re fighting for you” centrist con games to realize the problem is these people need to pay taxes like everyone else.
I’m with you on the parable. As a divorce attorney, I see how many often twists people. Particularly when they have more than they can ever possibly spend. If one is at all thoughtful, that’s a responsibility that can twist one in knots. What to do with it? Enable a bunch of kids, perhaps including those not yet born, to become parasitic while making it perhaps harder for them to create their own success and their own sense of meaning? Focus on some non-human entity, perhaps a business one has built, and hinge one’s hopes and identity on its immortality? Spend it before death? Find worthy causes to fund? Put one’s head in the sand and pretend death is optional?
I’ve seen people choose each of those options. What’s clear to me is that with money goes responsibility, whether one wants it or not. If one doesn’t choose wisely, his/her heart will close. There’s no way around it. One cannot watch others suffer while having the means to do something and choosing to do nothing without hardening the heart. One can try to stave it off by making up reasons and stories, but a deeper part of oneself knows the truth.
Trump is a perfect example. Anyone want his life? I think most everyone can see how miserable he is, despite his wealth.
“One cannot watch others suffer while having the means to do something and choosing to do nothing without hardening the heart. One can try to stave it off by making up reasons and stories, but a deeper part of oneself knows the truth.”
Thanks for fleshing that out; this really gets to the heart of it, no pun intended.
Not only do many of these billionaires choose to do nothing, they appear almost gleeful in their political demands for policies in the form of tax cuts and deregulation schemes that take public resources from the needy to lavish more money on to the already tremendous piles of money they could not spend in several lifetimes. No amount of money appears ever enough to sate their greed.
A neighbor of mine has stage 4 pancreatic cancer. He’s 38 years old, with a wife and four kids. His family is having a fundraiser at a local bar to raise money, since he cannot work now. This is a common story all across this country unfortunately, and it is because, unlike most other nations that would not allow a fellow citizen to be facing financial ruin like that, we’re a nation where it’s become more important to keep giving public wealth to those who already have more money than they can spend in several lifetimes. The level of absurdity of the fact that we accept these situations as normal is one thing; the immorality of it is almost immeasurable. Yet, not only do these billionaires sleep well at night, they appear to have no qualms asking, no demanding, each Congress for more.
This is why their taxes need to be increased, because they are irresponsible with their money. Sure, a lot of `em engage in these philanthropy schemes, most of which is for the purpose of more write offs and breaks, without which they would not be “giving.” AOC is right; so is Warren.
I don’t get it: if one is a multi-billionaire, what is the significance of getting a tax cut to add tens of millions more to your pile, if what you already have can’t be spent in several lifetimes? It makes no sense at all. But that’s where it comes back to the parable and the hardening of hearts.
It is depressing what this nation has become and accepts as normal. We shout for the world to hear, “we’re the greatest country in the world” at the same time situations like my neighbor’s play out day in and day out.
The billionaires are now effectively on the out side of the government the paid for. Two more years like the last 2 and what’s left to rebrand?
If California’s the bellwether, we should expect to eventually see a useless rump of a Republican party opposed by a large tent Democratic party that wins most everything of value. Within that large tent, the real drama will unfold between progressives and centrists. It’s going to take a few brutal elections for something like that to unfold. Perhaps Trump will be the catalyst.
What’s happened in CA is absolutely unbelievable. The enclaves of conservatives have all become marginalized. I don’t even know what to make of it.
.
I don’t think California is a good bellweather in that respect. It is far more ethnically diverse and far more urbanized than the country as a whole will be for half a century or so. We might be able to lock them out of the trifecta somewhat sooner, but I doubt any sooner than the 2030 redistricting.
. . . transferring smoothly to, say, MS, ID, or OK.
Yes, Booman!!!
It is exactly what the people want.
Thank you!!!
AG
Billionaires have a Party. It’s the Clinton Democratic Party.
Weird that they don’t see it that way, huh?
Lot of truth in that.
Yes. Socially liberal billionaires are very upset about the rising hum of economic justice within the D ranks. That’s why Howard Shultz is self-immolating himself on the national stage and why Bloomberg is apparently joining the field. Their hold on the D party appears to be diminishing, and they know that if only 1 of the parties continues to serve their interests, there will be a point in time where they can no longer control the agenda.
There will be massive corporate donations to Dems during this cycle to bring enough Ds under the thumbs of the donor class. This is one of the reasons why the filibuster should be abolished.
. . . (Well, except I posited a giant whiteboard, whereas it appears he’s even older-school than that, preferring scraps of paper plus tape.)
We need to be careful. In Brazil, the one percenters simply threw in their lot with Bolsanaro. Would any of us be surprised to see them do the same with 45? Or Pence?
I don’t mean to sound complacent, but Brazil is a VERY different country from the U.S. Trump IS the American equivalent to Bolsanaro. But they are operating on very different terrain.
” they also have to care about climate change ”
Really ? One of the most frustrating parts of the ‘climate change’ question – besides that ridiculous assertion that ‘the science is settled ‘ – oops, sorry. ‘97% of scientists believe’…..nahhh. Wait for it. That “we know future weather will make Earth uninhabitable”.
It’s bad enough Palin mocked that years ago. It has to be offensive that a scientific question is to be decided on the basis of partisan politics. Which makes it a political policy ( coincidentally, what the IPCC says it provides ) flogged incessantly.
The Church of Global Warming has one hell of a tariff available. Penance will pass belief.
I keep hearing that argument is funded by the oil lobby. I want my friggin’ check.
Bert Rutan on Climate Change
https:/rps3.com/Pages/Burt_Rutan_on_Climate_Change.htm
We Owe Civilization to Fossil Fuels
https:http://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/12/the_moral_case_2.html
Isolating contribution of CO2 on Atmospheric Temperature
https:co2islife.wordpress.com/2018/02/14/isolating-the-contribution-of-co2-on-atmospheric-co2
I have lots more. Collecting articles for over 9 years will do that.
BTW oldephartte(intraining) = opit
oldephartte.blogspot.ca oldephartte.livejournal.com