The Partisan Divide on Issues

[Classic-Xer]

(12-05-2019, 05:41 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(12-05-2019, 01:12 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(12-04-2019, 10:49 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Go into mourning, knowing that the United States has become an Evil Empire, a plutocratic equivalent of the Soviet Union in the Brezhnev era.  But that is if things go as you expect. I realize that people who know you who happen to be liberals know enough to avoid discussing politics with you, so you might be clueless about how Americans think.

Here are the facts. The only ones in Trump's favor are, first, that Donald Trump can win an essentially-binary election with a mere 45% of the popular vote (that is how the Electoral College now works), which means  that  Donald Trump could get a smaller share of the popular vote than someone who won only 111 electoral votes (Dukakis, 45.62%  of the popular vote in 1988) and get re-elected. Second, the Master Class that seeks to maximize profits through monopoly pricing and Third World wages, can open the spigots for political campaigns as it did in 2010  and 2014. Third, America is not in a recession or  a war going badly.

On the other hand, the perception that Donald Trump is an obnoxious, abrasive, cruel man remains. It sickens me that he got nominated for president and then elected after he was exposed as saying  "I grab  'em by their p---ies" and after mocking a reporter on the autistic spectrum. Grabbing women by their crotches without their consent is "criminal sexual conduct" in Michigan, and rape should there be penetration. I'm not going to compare the offense that ridicule of people for handicaps  is to ethnic slurs, but I will say this about religious slurs: I am on the autistic spectrum and I often have been attacked for being Jewish on the Web... both hurt. (I fit three Jewish stereotypes  very well). 

Demographic change does not help Donald Trump or the GOP. Figuring that the electorate is mostly aged 25 to 85 and the over-55 part of the electorate is about 5% more Republican than Democratic and that the Millennial generation  is about 20% more Democratic than Republican, about 1.67% of the electorate turns over due to death and debility. That is about a 1.67%  shift from R to D in the popular vote. The GOP has nothing to offer young adults except crony capitalism that yields below-average opportunities for young adults in return for greater inequality of economic result.

Approval numbers for Donald Trump have been poor, and disapproval numbers have been even more ominous. Eleven months the 2020 election, Trump is losing every state that he lost in 2020 with approval numbers in the thirties and disapproval numbers in the high fifties and higher. Trump is being crushed in all giant cities and is losing many of the suburbs that used to go R as late as 2004. This should be little surprise, as Suburbia has a majority of adults with college educations.  Trump still wins under-educated white people, but that will not be enough in 2020.

The current President is monstrously corrupt, and he is not getting away with it. OK, the Senate might quash an impeachment, but the damage to his credibility is not going away. The negative ads practically write themselves. Certain deeds, including bribery and extortion are so vile that the attempts to commit them are themselves crimes.  (See also murder, rape, robbery, kidnapping, espionage, theft, and arson).

I see a catastrophic failure of this President by historical measures, and I thus see him losing.

I know a bunch of old diehard Democrats who recently passed away. I know of two older fellow Republican voters who passed away recently. I assume that you believe that those associated with the demographic changes are either to dumb, to poor, to timid or sensitive, to afraid or to untrusting of white people, to racially motivated and oriented, to highly educated or educated to much in liberal values and liberal beliefs, to familiar with the way the liberal system specifically caters to them and their needs, to reliant on their big government related checks, to reliant upon their welfare benefits, to cozy with their plush liberal oriented jobs and so forth to even consider voting Republican these days or in the future. Do I seem to care about what liberals think/believe these days? The liberals who know me, who now avoid discussing and possibly getting into a serious political argument with me,  learned that being conceded and being thoughtless and getting personal with me in front of others turned out to be a major mistake that ended up damaging them way more than it damaged me.

You ramble even more than I do. So point by point:

1. (knowing that to is a preposition expressing direction or the particle signaling the infinitive and that too is an adverb expressing excess... as in one takes Interstate 80 to get to Iowa from Greater New York, but that if you have reached Nebraska, then you have gone too far  (the exception is Carter Lake, Iowa, a community cut off by an oxbow of the Missouri River and now accessible more  from Omaha, Nebraska than from any part of Iowa)... You did get two correctly as the number 2. 

Practically all Asian-American groups are better educated and richer than white people as a whole. The black bourgeoisie and the growing Hispanic middle class are both above average in income. Among these the only groups among them that vote largely-Republican are descendants of the early refugees from Castro's Cuba... to be middle-class in income in America is inconsistent with stupidity. With an anti-intellectualism that goes beyond the old target of wayward professors like Timothy Leary in his day and Ward Churchill or Rachel Dolezal in more recent times to such people as accountants, schoolteachers, and engineers who are big parts of the middle class. The Hard Right hates education other than training for specific tasks because genuine education might make people think. People with genuine educations are much less likely to fall for demagoguery and propaganda than are people barely literate. Tyrants such as Stalin, Mao, and Saddam promoted basic literacy so that people could read propaganda, instruction manuals, and warning signs. In contrast such tyrants as Hitler, Castro, and Pinochet, who had literate populations in place debased formal education into mere 'basic literacy' so that people would be unable to think their way into dissent. When the United States liberated Germany the Army had custody over over German POWs it found that the younger German troops were far below American standards of education at the time and needed basic education as well as deprogramming from National-Satanist ideology. Graduates of German universities were well regarded if they graduated at any time other than the Nazi era; in the Nazi era the universities were diploma mills.    

Most of the people that I know support Donald Trump have limited education and -- worse -- no curiosity.  People who have great respect for formal education at the least for professional development learn other things, such as that there is music other than 'country', and that there are other ways to see the world than what their parents told them.  

2. There are stupid people, and they are going to become poor quickly if they are not poor already. Such people must be watched for for their own sake so that they not be exploited, so that they not neglect something necessary for survival, and so that they not be duped into doing something horribly wrong. The right environment for such people is often a sheltered workshop in which they get to make contributions to their society for modest rewards. People who care for them can ensure that they get some delights that do them little harm... once a year to the amusement park or a sporting event, occasional movies, nights out for dinner and a movie.  

3. Timid? Some of us are cautious. People with disabilities -- even the least troublesome item on the DMS-IV (Asperger's syndrome, which I have) -- know that things can go very badly, but especially for themselves. Sensitive? Damned right! We ought to be sensitive about hearing a racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, or anti-handicap smear; we are all in the same world, and the gain from cruelty or bigotry is not worth the harm to the victims.       

4. I know lots of white people, and I can warn people who are not unambiguously white that there are some vile racists among white people. Some people do not merit trust even among their own groups (think of the contempt that many Italian-Americans have for the Mafia, most German-Americans have of neo-Nazis, and most Hispanics have of MS-13)... and while there are white racists who would treat me well so long as they don't figure that I be Jewish (they often figure that out -- wrongly), I would not introduce such people to anyone who is not unambiguously a white gentile.      

5. THE BIG ONE -- we used to have a large part of the electorate that truly believed in small-scale government that provided few services and expected people to take care of themselves. Liberals promoted the welfare state as a means of helping people better at creating prosperity than in getting their fair share or people that capitalism left out. As such, liberals got6 associated with Big Government. In recent years the Right has found that Big Government can support lucrative-but-destructive crony capitalism both by providing such goodies as wars for profit, suppression of labor unions, public-private partnerships (the taxpayer takes the risk, but a profiteer gets monopoly profit arising from guaranteed profit and exemption from competition), and enforcement of monopoly constraints. Everyone is for Big Government so long as it is the sort of big government that he wants. Otherwise he is $crewed.  

We may have some economic disaster in which government must retrench either due to more pressing concerns (such as an apocalyptic war) or hyperinflation at some time. Add to this, crony capitalism ordinarily proves averse to innovation and modernization when such offers competition or efficiency that hurts its cost-plus model in which it can get away with bloating the costs of doing business.  Perhaps we will need to alter the culture to foster small-scale entrepreneurialism when the dinosaurs die of their own corruption, incompetence, unresponsiveness, and even criminality. That's how life was in early New England: own the business (even if it is only a tradesman's outfit) or starve. 

6. The Republican Party is the Tea Party... and Donald Trump is its Presidential expression. Such may not portend survival. America was better before the Tea Party gave a populist veneer to a plutocratic agenda. We have a Hard Right, a large center-Left, a tiny Hard Left, and regrettably a tiny (and seemingly irrelevant) center-Right. The center-Right has usually been associated with people with savings, life-insurance policies, and small portfolios of stocks and bonds. It has been for reasonably-stable prices but an economy vibrant enough to protect savings from being devoured in economic downturns. It is also wise enough to recognize speculative booms for the impending disasters that they are. 

Maybe the Democratic Party will attract the center-right for the lack of a home... and will start cultivating it. Maybe it will eventually break from the Democratic Party as the Republican Party that we now know goes as politically bankrupt as it is now morally bankrupt. Extremists are hostile to stability, but the center-Right is the most reliable supporter of solid conservatism -- the sort that stands for something worthy of protection from radical assaults of both the Left and the Right.

Dude, the center right is your biggest problem and the center right has always been the blues biggest problem politically.  Now, if you want to be foolish and continue to believe that Hard right is larger and more powerful than all of us that's up to you and by all means continue worrying about the return religious inquisitions and heretics being burned alive or the fear of someone like Hitler taking power and so forth because we are to dumb and not educated enough or as book smart as you guys to be able to recognize the obvious signs and so forth. That's fine with me. I read a sign the other day that read, "In America, we don't redistribute wealth, we earn it".