The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(01-25-2020, 07:00 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(01-25-2020, 02:09 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(01-24-2020, 08:25 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: liberal culture better prepare itself for the education it's going to receive for the next decade or so as it continues to clash and finds itself at odds  with good old American values and core American principles.

The mad 45% of which you are a part approves of the job performance of a president who openly and defiantly opposes and obstructs good old American values and core American principles. He wishes to set himself up as dictator. The mad 45% considers the duly-elected congress to be illegitimate, and therefore its subpoenas can be categorically opposed across the entire government by the cult con-man figure it has imposed upon us as our president.

What you may not like is the fact that in the suburbs across America, such as the one in which you reside, polls now show that whereas their male voting population supported Trump by 4% or so, it now opposes him by about that much, and female support has dropped from marginally opposed to hugely-opposed. It may be that the suburbs you claim to be populated by good old Americans may not support the president of whose criminal conduct you approve.

Quote:Our survey makes it clear that while Trump’s record and rhetoric on immigration, border security, race relations and corruption are top issues for Trump’s base to support him, they are also reasons for a majority of suburban voters to vote for somebody else. The more he focuses on these issues in an effort to motivate his supporters, the more he will turn off the suburban voters who have already been moving away from Republicans in recent years and make up a significant portion of the electorate in these key battleground states.
https://priorities.org/memos/battlegroun...n-problem/

The Suburban Backlash Against the GOP Is Growing
Donald Trump’s strategy of revving up his rural base may not be worth the cost.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...ia/601504/

I have a hard time believing that majority of my neighbors (Democrats, Republicans and Independents) are crazy and clueless as your politicians in the House.

Maybe 'our' liberal politicians are not so crazy and clueless as you think. Maybe they -- and we liberals -- are the ones who can hit Donald Trump as easily from the Right for violation of benign and necessary traditions as they can from the Left for economic distress. The practical solutions of our Founding Fathers have often worked extremely well in preventing despotism; we throw those out (most blatantly, slavery) and add to them (women's rights, workers' rights, conservation and environmentalism, protection of the rights of ethnic minorities, handicap rights, and LGBT rights with due care and consideration. Progress has often required the expression of progress as an expression of some tradition. I need not be LGBT to recognize that LGBT rights are necessary for promoting law and order without which human rights, civil liberties, and rule of law become meaningless.     

Quote:Here's the deal, a large portion of this country doesn't vote because they don't trust the liberal Democrats anymore than they trust the Republicans these days. The liberal Democrats have been demonizing the Republicans and their policies since the 1990's while peoples jobs were streaming over seas, cheap mid level labor was streaming in from over seas, jobs were being outsourced to foreign companies over seas and cheap low level labor has been flowing in through porous borders and other ports of entry while the Democratic politicians and liberal elites have been getting richer and richer by the day.

Much of this results from such economic reality as cheap shipping. It costs less to ship a bulk cargo of items from Yokohama to Long Beach than from Long Beach to even Las Vegas, Phoenix, or Fresno. Over-water shipping has been the cheapest way to get stuff from one part of the world to another since antiquity. Truck, train, and air transport all remain far more costly than sea, lake, river, and canal transport.  It cost less for the Romans to get stuff from Seville to Tyre than from Marseilles to Lyon, and it still costs less to get stuff from Boston to Houston by sea than from Houston to Dallas by land. 

I look at the innovation of container shipping which prevents pilferage, once a huge cost of moving stuff around. A sealed container box (it fits easily onto a cargo train or an eighteen-wheel tractor-trailer) is one way to ensuring that a load of stuff attractive to thieves (liquor, clothes, cosmetics, electronics) goes unmolested from factory to seaport or from seaport to 'distribution center). Today, longshoremen no longer need transfer items from a ship to a rail car or a trailer -- and longshoremen no longer need armies of security guards watching to make sure that they do not load some whiskey or color TVs to the open trunks of their cars in the parking lot. Shipping is much cheaper now than it was for that purpose alone.

Nobody made any political choice to allow that; it made eminent sense for such entities as Matsushita as a manufacturer and Wal*Mart as a retailer. I remember seeing a spoof about longshoremen living very well in MAD Magazine: one question on how one could tell whether one was a longshoreman was "How many color TV's do you own (this was in the 1960's, when color televisions were still fiendishly expensive. "Six" or more suggested a longshoreman. "None" -- one is not a longshoreman. Nobody said that the longshoreman bought them.  No longshoreman could own those on his pay. The people who really could buy them were upscale people who had little use for television unless 'for the maid'. Today the longshoreman must buy his own TV's, liquor, clothes, etc, and not take a little grab from the dock. 
 
One consequence was that it was no longer necessary to make much of our industrial production here. By 1985 was cheaper to get stuff from China to a place like Chicago (which really is a water port -- lake and river) than from Philadelphia or Atlanta. Lower wages in the Third World became first-world wages as countries such as Japan and South Korea 'lost' their 'Third World' characteristics.  

Some of the other decisions, like the HB-1A visa were political decisions (it would be better for America to bring over high-performing engineers from India and pay them well, and bring their families over -- or, for a real improvement in America, invite such people to our gene pool!) to ensure that people got underpaid. Cheap labor at any level is an economic temptation and a human disaster. Just think of slavery. But plenty of people are making out well on cheap labor, and it isn't only Democrats.   

 

Quote:...you (liberals) are digging your own graves and don't even seem to realize it or understand who is to blame these days. I'm not speaking to you, your going to stick with the party that pays or provides because that's the kind of voter you are in my opinion. I see it in your opinions, positions,  your writings and your reactions. It's obvious to me. You see most liberal posters flap their gums and don't pay pay much attention to what's coming out their mouths. We are here to establish positions, make valid points that stick  and  win arguments with pseudo intellectuals and quasi socialists.

 
We are very careful about what we write. We prefer to not be misunderstood. Now take Sarah Palin in her day and Donald Trump
now -- please!* Those conservatives exude bosh from their mouths or from a computer keyboard. Obama at least circulated a press release among his trusted advisors for editing out grammatical errors and ambiguities before releasing them. He ended up spending less time having to explain what he really meant, which is one good way to save time. 

You are not winning your point. Economic reality shows the Hard Right... quite wrong. I suppose that is better than "dead wrong", a consequence of something so stupid as confusing a solution of hydrochloric acid with vodka. 

Quote:Now, if you want to keep the dunce cap on and continue believing or hoping that we will change and continue to ignore  that liberal politics are hurting your state   that's fine. I don't live in you're God forsaken state or a God forsake liberal  city that's turning into a banana republic.  Read this, maybe you'll figure out why liberal cities and liberal state are having so many problems these days. Minnesota still has a decent sized population of more conservative Democrats that keep the Democratic party pretty well centered here. In short, we don't have as many liberal Democrats living outside the urban center.

There are good parts of every state and bad parts of every state. I have taken trips from Silicon Valley to Yosemite National Park and recognized that the Central Valley is not a good place to live. It is hard to believe that Traverse City and Detroit are in the same state -- but they are. From what I hear, Huntsville, Alabama is a far nicer place in which to live than Hartford, Connecticut even if Connecticut is supposedly the best state in which to live and by the same criteria Alabama is one of the worst. 

I expect many people who have voted for the likes of Reagan and Trump to recognize the folly of so voting in due time -- like November of this year. Such people will still be conservatives, but some will steadily go away from a Party that vilifies learning, trivializes the environment, and exploits ethnic and religious resentments without addressing poverty. Republicans from Reagan to Trump have seen poverty as an appropriate tool of enforcing compliance with the plutocracy for which they stand.  

 * deliberate allusion to the late comedian Henny Youngman -- going into a monologue he would drift into "take my wife -- please!"