(05-04-2020, 10:30 AM)David Horn Wrote:(05-03-2020, 01:26 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Yep. The Tea Party is back. A few thousand today. A few more thousand tomorrow, a few hundred thousand more after that and so on. Who do they represent? The 10 million unemployed people who are going to need another trillion advance of free money to keep themselves, their business's and local economies afloat or pretty loose everything and watch as an entire area goes broke. So, how do you hurt/punish liberal elitists who live in Ivory Towers who don't know what it's like to held accountable or severely hurt/punished these days? What do all the elite purples and reds within the entire country do to punish them/teach them a hard lesson about life/growing and RESPECT? Do you think Queen Nancy has ever met a real grown up? I'm not talking about her mega rich hubby who tosses money at her to shut her up and pays off her credit cards every month and buys her diamond rings and pulled the strings to get her in office and paved the way for her to be the Speaker of the House today. I'm talking about a real grown up with no emotional ties to her, her hubby, her party, her ideology or religion, her personal wealth and so forth. What would Nancy be without them? I know what I am without them and Nancy would figure that out really quick. You seem like an elitist to me. An elitist without an Ivory Tower but still an elitist of sort. Me, I'm just a purple elite who happens to be a natural leader who prefers to remain private and prefers a life of solitude. I don't know, what do you think, do you think that I could be an elitist liberal wrecking machine who intervenes and basically destroys radical liberal forums that promote hate speech and racism and Marxist revolution?
Buried in this comment is a huge dose of irony. Yes, the Tea Party is back, expecting miracles and certainly no taxes. We'll see how the return-to-work gig works out. I suspect that past is prologue, so the Great Return to Work will become the Great Second Wave of COVID. What will you say them? Should we just work and die?
The who and what do you chose to bitch about? Nancy Pelosi and Marxism. Well, the future of the country may come down to spending like drunken sailors (let's let the 'sailors' drink this time -- the 'Admirals' already got more than their share already), and maybe -- just maybe -- there will be an economy to restart in a year or so.
The Tea Party never had much appeal to youth. It is aging in place, and the actuarial reality behind any aging constituency or market is that it must recruit younger constituents or customers or offer a new set of old people the need for the same cause or item of commerce. Funeral homes obviously do not get repeat customers. Nursing homes depend upon replacing those who die in them with new patients. I remember when nursing homes were full of people born in the 1890's. Today their typical new inmate was born in the 1930's or 1940's. People in my age group -- people born in the 1950's -- are next. Considering how miserable life looks in them, I would rather have one fatal coronary or stroke and be done with it.
Now let's look at the once-impressive department stores that became anchors of shopping centers. GI's and the Silent went to Sears, JC Penney, Montgomery-Ward or some regional chain (Dillard's, Goldwater's, Sanger-Harris, Belk's, Marshall-Field, Hudson's, Bullock's, May, etc.) and the kids went off to boutique stores that sold books or records -- when "CD" either meant "Civil Defense" or "certificate of deposit" because the compact disc had yet to be developed. Or, of course, to merchants that had the youth-pleasing clothes. "X", brought in a grandfather's Lincoln, often went to the food court with a "Hamilton" and spent a "Lincoln" in the video arcades. The clientele for the big department stores died off without replenishment. Macy's bought out Marshall-Field to get its customers after Marshall-Field had bought out Hudson's. Back in the 1980's. I remember seeing a demographic about the giant department store: that its average customer was then 59. Fifty-nine. In the mid-1980's that was the GI-Silent cusp. A hint about that demographic: that was roughly Doris Day and Paul Newman. That age group was good customers. "59" is not such desirable customers as it was in the 1980's, and it quit going to the big department stores except for "vulture sales".
Trump is the pure expression of the ideology of the Tea Party -- but that is an aging constituency. It has no youth appeal. Figure that about 1.5% of the electorate, predominantly over age 55, dies off in a normal year.The new voters, as shown in 2018, are almost entirely under 40. The voters dying off are on the whole about 5% more Republican than Democratic; the younger voters supplanting them are now about 20% more Democratic than Republican. The Tea Party is not replenishing itself with young toilers who see themselves overworked and underpaid, who are more concerned with their paychecks than with taxes, and who see Tea Party politics as cranky at best. Just from 2016 the population shift from the Silent, Boomers, and early-wave X to the Millennial generation in the electorate is enough to ensure that Trump loses Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin... and his re-election bid. That would be enough to turn a Republican majority in the House into a Democratic majority in the House, except that such already happened in 2018 for other reasons. Initials of that cause are D, J, and T.
But wait -- it gets worse. The Tea Party still went out to vote as strongly as ever, at least among those still able to vote (that is, still living). It still believes, and it is not losing supporters except to death and debility. It is not replacing itself in the electorate. It has no youth appeal. It is not rational enough to appeal to the Millennial generation.
The Tea Party never left. It has simply aged in place, and it could be getting increasingly irrelevant as time passes. It cannot appeal to people who distrust heirs, financiers, landlords, and executives to look out for the interests of people heavily in hock for student loans so that they can hold jobs in call centers and paying exorbitant rent to live near the call centers instead of working in some food-processing plant that seems a revival of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.
Something makes 2020 an abnormal year. We have the sort of plague, an often-lethal respiratory infection, that we thought that people were exempt from in advanced industrial societies. It seems to have a death rate of about 5%, and it spreads by exploiting what most of us have been doing without a perception of danger. Business travel, commuting by mass conveyance, congregating in groups, attending religious services, going out to dinner and a movie, or simply being out on a bustling street can give us a disease about as deadly as combat. For Vietnam veterans, COVID-19 is now a more dangerous enemy than the NVA or the Vietcong ever were.
COVID-19 is killing off the elderly and the near-old. Except when I saw four Rottweiler-sized dogs charging a door angrily while the door latch began to look too flimsy to keep those four dogs from attacking me as if they were one tiger (four 100-pound dogs make one 400-pound tiger if those dogs confuse a Census enumerator with a burglar, and thus meat) I have never been so scared in my life. I wasn't "AIDS material", as I was neither a druggie (one good thing about Asperger's -- you cannot enjoy drug highs) nor the sort who slept with anything that moves -- but we are all COVID-19 material. But at least the prospect of being killed by a bear or Big Cat was over once I was in my car and driving away. I can't drive away from COVID-19. If I should contract COVID-19 and drive, then I can really hurt people by spreading the disease around.
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.