The Partisan Divide on Issues

[Bob Butler 54]

(02-05-2020, 05:43 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Yes, yes, yes, the Republicans are the bad guys and the Democrats are the good guys and that's the way it's been and will always be in your opinion. One can assume that your partisan view will never change. Lets see, the Democrats have completely lost the support of half the country right now.Plus, there is a portion of the country that no longer identifies with the Democratic party and see's it as being no better than the Republican party. Do you understand this? Do you understand the negative impact that reality is going to eventually have on the liberal/Democratic side down the road? I assume that you have way more wealth than the typical welfare recipient. Is that a problem for you or me? It's not a problem for me or us for that matter. I assume that you have way more wealth than the illegal immigrant or the poor refuge does or the illegal immigrants kid or their American born kid too. Is that my problem or more your problem these days too. Why is Trump doing what some conservative Democrat should have been doing instead of a liberal Democrat who was elected to do the opposite and maintain the elitist status quo and why are liberal Democrats so pissed that we are rejecting them and basically slitting their throats politically.

Well, once the Republicans of Lincoln’s time were the party of industrial development and the abolitionists.  The Democrats were the party of slavers and the agricultural land owners.  At that point, the Whiggish arrow of progress was clearly pointing in the direction of the Republicans.  So, no, the Republican position has been in flux for as long as there were Republicans.  They went all the way from abolitionists to the Southern Strategy, from isolationists to the party of military strength, from what is good for General Motors is good for America, to refusing General Motors a loan.  Both parties changed significantly over the years.

Perhaps the Machine Democrats of the north were a major step in the evolution of the parties.  As I said, Tammany Hall used to send people to meet the immigrants, to tell them where they could find a place to live, where they could find a job, and tell them who to vote for.   The Democrats thus began representing the common laborer, the Republicans the establishment factory owners.  

The New Deal was another such milestone.  The war on poverty was another.  The civi rights efforts of the 1950s and 1960s was another.

If you asked me if by LBJ’s time the Democrats had held the Congress so long that it began to become inefficient and corrupt, you would find me agreeing.  If when the jobs were being shipped overseas someone pointed out that the robber barons were donating to both Republicans and Democrats, and the politicians who agreed on how wonderful globalism was are still viewed with skepticism and suspicion, I would agree with you.  It is not that one side was always good, the other always bad.

But today the elite and racist elements have created a Fox Fiction, a way of selling the middle of the country that government for the elites and racists is best.  A lot of people from the middle of the country buy into the propaganda, do not let themselves see what is going on.

I don’t see this as lasting indefinitely.  Every time the Republicans get in power they ruin the economy.  (It's the economy, stupid.  The Great Recession.)  They persistently attack things like benefits, jobs, labor unions and voting rights which give the working man a chance.  The elite / racist elements are obvious enough to be seen.

But if you buy into the Fox alternate reality, if you do not look for the obvious links, you fall into their trap.  If you lie as long and as much as Trump, folks will become very skeptical of what you say.  It has not happened enough yet.

One of the more interesting parts of the impeachment inquiry was the glimpse into the myth of the deep state.  You got to see some of the establishment pros of the Ukraine experts, and of the politicians common in the administration.  If you are familiar with the testimony, you found the established pros of the deep state were heroic, loyal to US policy, and responded to subpoena.  It was the politicians who were corrupt, in the loop, trying to work a ‘drug deal’, and part of the cover up.  This, the constant lies, the ‘OK Boomer’ meme, leave me hopeful the the moderates and independents that have driven the see saw might abandon the Fox vision and a new progressive era will result.

That does not imply that I am rooting for a corrupt or inefficient government.  Keep an eye towards that.  It has always happened before, and I expect it will happen again if you leave any group in power for too long.

But you have to know a difference between a government for the racists and elitists and a government for the people.  You have to let go of the false reality.