The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(05-19-2020, 09:01 PM)Kinser79 Wrote:

(05-19-2020, 10:29 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(05-19-2020, 09:07 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(05-19-2020, 12:06 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(05-18-2020, 11:59 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: The White House rarely changes possession by a Party after one term by that Party. The last two times that that happened were 1980 and 1932.  It could be that bad for Trump -- but a 270-268 defeat of Trump will be legally adequate for us to get new leadership at the apex of American power. 

1980 and 1992 you mean.

Strictly speaking, 1992 was the end of three terms of Republican Presidents in power. The elder Bush wasn't anywhere near as unlucky as Carter, let alone as counterproductive as Hoover.  It took three "Presidentiads" (Ralph Waldo Emerson coined that term) for America to tire of Reaganism. Bill Clinton fully endorsed the foreign policy of  the elder Bush; anything else would have been foolishness.

Had Hillary Clinton won the right votes in 2016 and barely gotten elected, the analogy this year would be to 1992. Of course, Hoover did not reek of corruption and Carter was beyond any doubt (and still is) a good man, American voters got impatient with both after one "Presidentiad".

Not clear that everyone is tired of Reaganism.  Part of the country keeps voting to go back to small government, reduced taxes and military preparedness.  Bush 43 was a Bush after all.  But you have to vote in someone responsible once in a while.

Lets see:  Small government....Reduced taxes....military preparedness.  Sounds like "Reaganism" is just good ole fashioned "Americanism".  Now if we could get that with side of isolationism and a sprinkle of autarky mixed in that would be prefect.  

All that said I'm going to be mining liberal salt come November 3rd I'm sure.

Reagan is the start of an era in American politics and Trump is its ignoble end. I don't know what you mean by "Americanism". Which part of America? One of my basic sources of American history, Albion's Seed (David Hackett- Fischer) recognizes that four basic waves of settlement from the British Isles (England, Wales, southern Scotland, and northern Ireland, basically) themselves  established regional areas in which certain cultures became entrenched before the American Revolution and tended to spread west. I'm not going to go into the argument, but Boston is very different from Philadelphia, and Philadelphia was long very different from  central Virginia, and all three of those were very different from the Backwoods. People tended to move west, and not south or north to find better lives for themselves. If you wonder about the Dutch and related settlers of New Amsterdam and environs, then as it turns out that the people of southeastern England were more similar in many ways to the Dutch than to people of southwest England, the Midlands, or the border country between England and Scotland. (Highland Scots generally went to Canada, and the large wave of Irish Catholics came decidedly later; in southern New England they largely took over the Puritan world as descendants of the early British settlers moved west to upstate New York, and all in all, north of a line close to what is now Interstate 80).  Swiss Mennonites (the Pennsylvania Dutch) were compatible with the Quakers on religious grounds, and they also tended to move almost due west -- but getting quickly through the alien world of Appalachia. 

So which culture is most validly American?

Descendants of early American slaves may not be a monolith -- but they carry practically no culture from Africa. They mostly got a pre-packaged culture that masters imposed upon them -- that of the peasant class of southwestern England.  I would suppose that that makes them very American. Don;t forget the people 'here' before white people settled America. Let us also not forget the large Hispanic populations that had settled in the American Southwest before 1855... and this is the population that led the later Mexican and other Latin-American immigrants in that area. 

And then there are mixtures, often incongruous to bigots.  

So which culture is more definitively American among those four cultures?   

OK, if you are aware of my musical tastes, then an Eisenach*-Prague-Vienna axis is a good approximation.  So am I un-American? I have good cause to not say that anyone not an obvious alien is any less American than I am.  I can't tell you how many ways there are to be an American. 

.................

Moving along... 

Stephen Skowronek  has a pattern of cycles in American politics that begin with the introduction of a daring  agenda that changes much at the start and eventually goes stale. What was daring and effective with Reagan (if unsettling for people connected to the older agenda then pushed aside) has been spent. 

Even soon after being elected, Trump was strongly ideological and extremely offensive. But that is the least. Trump is unimaginative, rigid, and intellectually overmatched. Carter was the last previous "disjunctive" President who played by the book and had the book playing him. Trump reads little, and he shows why there is "a book".

 

Quote:It's difficult to think of two modern political figures more different than Donald Trump and Jimmy Carter. Carter came into the White House with quiet style, downplaying the trapping of the office. His scandalous revelation was that he had "lusted in his heart," as he admitted in an interview with Playboy magazine. Revelations of the thrice-married Trump were, well, somewhat different.


But Carter remains an illuminating parallel within an important theory of the presidency: political time. Political science has been wrong about a lot this cycle, but one theory offers something about what's in store. This is the theory of political time, an idea by Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek (who, full disclosure, is one of my advisers). Skowronek posited in a 1993 book that presidents govern in cycles of political time: new political eras pioneered by presidents like Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and, most recently, Ronald Reagan.

One of the core arguments is that presidencies are just defined not by temperament or even ideology. The president's relationship to the dominant party and the health of that party's ideology and coalition influence the success and legacy of the administration.

This isn't a theory about polls, and it doesn't predict elections exactly. But it tells us quite a bit about what a Trump presidency means and what we might expect.

Trump, who was elected as a Republican, will make what the theory describes as "disjunctive" politics: the last gasp of the incumbent era. To take a step back for a moment, this casts Barack Obama — and Bill Clinton before him — as an opposition president, prone to ideological shape-shifting and serious legitimacy challenges (like impeachment), and hard-pressed to hand off the presidency to a partisan successor.

Shifting back to Trump, disjunctive presidents tend to be outsiders and technocrats. They run on promises to get things done. They are divorced from the roots of the old ideology, by time and by belief, just as Carter was from FDR and, thinking back to the 1850s, like Franklin Pierce was from Andrew Jackson. These presidents didn't have concrete political connections to the old administrations, and despite shared party labels, they weren't true believers in the ideology.

https://www.vox.com/mischiefs-of-faction...an-era-end

Trump is a political failure, and not because I dislike his agenda. 

* this fellow: