01-16-2017, 07:16 AM
(This post was last modified: 01-16-2017, 07:25 AM by Eric the Green.)
(01-15-2017, 11:15 AM)Warren Dew Wrote:(01-15-2017, 10:50 AM)David Horn Wrote:(01-14-2017, 09:00 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Reagan appeared to get pretty chummy with Gorbachev back in the day. It didn't hurt Reagan back then. Keep in mind, we were still a Cold War society back then. We watched the Berlin Wall come down and watched later on as the Soviet Union fell apart. Your advice would be more suitable for someone like Obama. Obama came in with the maximum already sitting in place and could only loose seats. Trump still has room to grow if he plays his cards right. How many Democrats played it safe and voted for Clinton instead of taking a chance on voting for Trump? I'd say a sizable portion stuck with Hilary that is available to support Trump.
Trump has a huge unfavorablity score for an entering President, and a big chunk of it is due to the people who are still saying WTF. I don't see that getting better, since he doesn't seem to get better. I don't see a wave of voters flocking to Trump who haven't done so already.
He may still win a second term, and he may get to derail the post-war social compact, but people like Warren and you will not like if it happens.
Obama already destroyed the postwar social compact. Returning to Reagan's America is not really an option any more.
Obama made a few changes, but most were blocked by the Republicans. There's no "social compact" that he destroyed. He tried to unify America, but the Republicans would not agree.
Obama said he wanted to "restore" the social compact. That meant a country in which the people care about each other, and have a sense of their responsibility to the nation and society, not just to themselves. This was the post-war social compact, created during the previous 4T.
Republicans and libertarians insist that peoples' only responsibility is to themselves, and that self-reliance is the only virtue. They are dead wrong.
The bosses must be regulated and taxed. They cannot be trusted to do the right thing, in the name of "freedom" as the Republicans insist.
Yet, Republicans insist that free enterprise and work requires a prod, and that workers cannot be trusted: that there must be a monetary incentive or penalty before people will be willing to provide what society needs. That prod is the penalty of homelessness and starvation if you don't get or have money.
I don't see that's any different from the prod on the bosses that they must pay some taxes and obey regulations of be penalized, so that they serve society and not just themselves.
Conservatives today can't see these facts.