12-13-2020, 12:38 PM
(12-13-2020, 04:34 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Who cares? The Republican base has already moved on. It won't be long and Democrats will be Democrats and everyone else around them will be more Republican. Back in 2016 during the Republican primaries, did you see any candidates trying to buy their way in with us? As far as I can see, the liberal side has no principles at this point. I'm telling you whatever integrity it had left it lost. The ingredient that holds the Democratic party together is the almighty tax dollar. I wasn't born yesterday. Unfortunately, Biden is the last chance and if I'm right about his condition which I assume was mainly hid from the Democratic electorate. History will record this 3t/4T cluster fuck with the faces of 4 US Presidents who were in office over the coarse of the next four years or possibly five if Harris turns out to be completely incompetent.
Republicans are going to need something other than the Trump agenda with which to win elections. The Democratic Party has morphed significantly from what it was in the 1970's (which should not be surprising, as getting crushed in three consecutive Presidential elections will cause a Party to change its agenda and appeal so that it can win, let it become a tiny and largely-irrelevant one that dies off. The Democratic Party could survive between the Civil War and the Great Depression largely as a regional party with outlier support among people that the GOP Establishment treated badly "up north", like largely-Catholic blue-collar workers who shared a disdain for Corporate America with Southern agrarians (whom high tariffs cost rural folk of any kind dearly).
Trump is a man with no principle other than his ego, and much of the GOP seems to believe that we all have no purpose in life except to serve the power, indulgence, and gain (PIG) of economic elites. We liberals seem to believe in learning, social and economic equity, the reality of diversity, rational thought, and a respect for legal tradition.
Meanwhile, as the core of the Crisis of 2020 comes to an end with mass vaccination against SARS-2, the tendency will be for the political focus to go from Boomers to X. Start by recognizing that Barack Obama was an above-average President, and that your only valid criticism of him if you are a conservative is that he was not a conservative on economics or reproductive rights. The PIG agenda is likely to result in mass poverty, wars for profit that go badly, and social unrest. Conservatism is not a suicide pact.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.