09-09-2018, 03:03 PM
(09-09-2018, 10:28 AM)David Horn Wrote:(09-08-2018, 02:12 PM)sbarrera Wrote: I think the McCain funeral made it clear the new dividing line is between pro-Trump and anti-Trump. So we saw a gathering of anti-Trumpers mourning a comrade, but also in a sense mourning the end of an era.
There was an op-ed before the election by Andrew Sullivan where he stated that the if Trump won the election, then both the Democratic and Republican parties would be destroyed. That is what happened, so it's no surprise to see unity across party lines - those lines really aren't there any more.
The Dems are moving back toward a focus on economics, and about time too! The GOP is just fractured, and will be until Trump is gone. Then? I can't even guess. I do think the Dems will be shedding politicians like old, scaly skin, and the new arrivals will be notably different. Whether they can win anything is another question entirely, but the post-Goldwater changes to the GOP didn't produce instant results either.
2020 will either be a sea change election, or it will usher in an even more intense focus on purging the Democrats and opposing the GOP. The newly extreme SCOTUS might actually help this process along, though we older folks may not see any benefits.
I have a different prediction. I expect a strong Third Party candidacy to challenge Trump from the Right-center This can attack his foreign policy and his insane tariffs and trade war as well as his objectionable personal and economic life. Plenty of conservatives would love to destroy his legacy and develop a different one.Note well that the Reagan era is going off into the rear-view mirror and under the horizon, so to speak.
Considering that Democrats will be picking up some seats in places now as much as R+7 in Cook PVI, it would be reasonable to expect those seats to be more conservative than the average for the Democrats as a whole. I doubt that Democrats can hold onto many of those for long. They might or might not keep a House majority into the mid-2020s, depending on the fickleness of the electorate.
I can already imagine how Democrats can gerrymander their way into Congressional majorities that they do not deserve. They can have districts that extend from core cities as far as seems safe into or past the suburbs. From a city like Columbus, Ohio (Indianapolis would work similarly) such districts might look conical -- perhaps with four cone-shaped districts that meet or nearly meet in downtown Columbus, outside of which is rural area), OK. in Michigan I would like to see Lansing and East Lansing connected... and majority-minority parts of Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, and perhaps Battle Creek.
Most of us have noticed a tendency for suburban voters to drift D from R, reflecting in part that much of Suburbia is becoming legitimately urban. It could also be that the anti-intellectual appeals that Republicans have been using to appeal to Fundamentalist/Evangelical Protestants is turning off much of the educated, white middle class. Such happened in California, New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Illinois a couple of decades ago, and it has been slow to affect such states as Texas, Georgia, Indiana, and Arizona. When this trend hits in the states that have been slow to take this trend among middle-class white voters, then the GOP is in really-bad shape.
Will the GOP survive? It could survive the FDR era, and I can't see any Democrat being as strong a leader as FDR. It will be useful for people unable to compete with Democratic machines and be around as a default should Democratic officials do such inexcusable things as take bribes or sell offices. Will conservatism survive? Of course -- because many people still believe in the free market and corporate power. Will the Trump agenda survive?
No. It has badly discredited itself. Americans are learning the hard way about a political demagogue who is also a pathological liar.
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.