Why is it that the Republican party seems to consist solely of the top 5% of America's wealth holders and the lower third of the IQ spectrum with no one in between?
Who are Republicans?
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Beginnings of an answer
The Class War Before Palin
By David Brooks
Published: October 9, 2008
from: http://www.nytimes.com/
Modern conservatism began as a movement of dissident intellectuals. Richard Weaver wrote a book called, “Ideas Have Consequences.” Russell Kirk placed Edmund Burke in an American context. William F. Buckley famously said he’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. But he didn’t believe those were the only two options. His entire life was a celebration of urbane values, sophistication and the rigorous and constant application of intellect.
Driven by a need to engage elite opinion, conservatives tried to build an intellectual counterestablishment with think tanks and magazines. They disdained the ideas of the liberal professoriate, but they did not disdain the idea of a cultivated mind.
Ronald Reagan was no intellectual, but he had an earnest faith in ideas and he spent decades working through them. He was rooted in the Midwest, but he also loved Hollywood. And for a time, it seemed the Republican Party would be a broad coalition — small-town values with coastal reach.
In 1976, in a close election, Gerald Ford won the entire West Coast along with northeastern states like New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont and Maine. In 1984, Reagan won every state but Minnesota.
But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.
Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.
What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.
Republicans developed their own leadership style. If Democratic leaders prized deliberation and self-examination, then Republicans would govern from the gut.
George W. Bush restrained some of the populist excesses of his party — the anti-immigration fervor, the isolationism — but stylistically he fit right in. As Fred Barnes wrote in his book, “Rebel-in-Chief,” Bush “reflects the political views and cultural tastes of the vast majority of Americans who don’t live along the East or West Coast. He’s not a sophisticate and doesn’t spend his discretionary time with sophisticates. As First Lady Laura Bush once said, she and the president didn’t come to Washington to make new friends. And they haven’t.”
The political effects of this trend have been obvious. Republicans have alienated the highly educated regions — Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham. The West Coast and the Northeast are mostly gone.
The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.
Conservatives are as rare in elite universities and the mainstream media as they were 30 years ago. The smartest young Americans are now educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment.
This year could have changed things. The G.O.P. had three urbane presidential candidates. But the class-warfare clichés took control. Rudy Giuliani disdained cosmopolitans at the Republican convention. Mitt Romney gave a speech attacking “eastern elites.” (Mitt Romney!) John McCain picked Sarah Palin.
Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the “normal Joe Sixpack American” and the coastal elite.
She is another step in the Republican change of personality. Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all — men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch.
And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.
By David Brooks
Published: October 9, 2008
from: http://www.nytimes.com/
Modern conservatism began as a movement of dissident intellectuals. Richard Weaver wrote a book called, “Ideas Have Consequences.” Russell Kirk placed Edmund Burke in an American context. William F. Buckley famously said he’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. But he didn’t believe those were the only two options. His entire life was a celebration of urbane values, sophistication and the rigorous and constant application of intellect.
Driven by a need to engage elite opinion, conservatives tried to build an intellectual counterestablishment with think tanks and magazines. They disdained the ideas of the liberal professoriate, but they did not disdain the idea of a cultivated mind.
Ronald Reagan was no intellectual, but he had an earnest faith in ideas and he spent decades working through them. He was rooted in the Midwest, but he also loved Hollywood. And for a time, it seemed the Republican Party would be a broad coalition — small-town values with coastal reach.
In 1976, in a close election, Gerald Ford won the entire West Coast along with northeastern states like New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont and Maine. In 1984, Reagan won every state but Minnesota.
But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.
Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.
What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.
Republicans developed their own leadership style. If Democratic leaders prized deliberation and self-examination, then Republicans would govern from the gut.
George W. Bush restrained some of the populist excesses of his party — the anti-immigration fervor, the isolationism — but stylistically he fit right in. As Fred Barnes wrote in his book, “Rebel-in-Chief,” Bush “reflects the political views and cultural tastes of the vast majority of Americans who don’t live along the East or West Coast. He’s not a sophisticate and doesn’t spend his discretionary time with sophisticates. As First Lady Laura Bush once said, she and the president didn’t come to Washington to make new friends. And they haven’t.”
The political effects of this trend have been obvious. Republicans have alienated the highly educated regions — Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham. The West Coast and the Northeast are mostly gone.
The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.
Conservatives are as rare in elite universities and the mainstream media as they were 30 years ago. The smartest young Americans are now educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment.
This year could have changed things. The G.O.P. had three urbane presidential candidates. But the class-warfare clichés took control. Rudy Giuliani disdained cosmopolitans at the Republican convention. Mitt Romney gave a speech attacking “eastern elites.” (Mitt Romney!) John McCain picked Sarah Palin.
Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the “normal Joe Sixpack American” and the coastal elite.
She is another step in the Republican change of personality. Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all — men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch.
And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.
originally, i agreed with them about less taxes, smaller government
but they were taken over by zealots
but they were taken over by zealots
what has scared me about Republicans of late is the venom they have shown at McCain's town hall meetings ... the meetings have shown a level of hostility that makes me worried about Republican sanity and Obama's well being.
pk
pk
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So you're saying that Republicans are con artists, and that's how they were getting elected... now that the Democrats are in the lead, they're the ones doing the conning?Maxima said:
Maxima said:
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that, if given the choice, 45% of voters would choose their district’s Democratic candidate, while 37% would choose the Republican candidate.
That congress was ineffectual is not being contested, but that voters would prefer an ineffective Democratic congress to a (effective or ineffective) Republican one, is strange, don't you think?
Exactly. How did the Republicans go from having Abraham Lincoln sign the Emancipation Proclamation to being the most racist?bond_james_bond said:
In David Cross' words:
Republicans have some awesome racists... great sexists... Homophobes? A#1. Crazy, crazy homophobes. And look, listen I'm not saying that all Republicans are racist, sexist, homophobes... just the people they choose to elect into office to represent them are. That's all.
Cases in point: Strom Thurmond, Trent Lott, Rick Santorum...
Agrippa said:
I agree. Also, what strikes me as very hypocritical is how homophobic they appear to be, yet everytime a politician gets outed for being a homosexual, it's always a Republican. Even the chairman of the GOP party a few years ago (Ken Melman) is a homosexual. Yet, nothing would stop him from publicly stating that two men shouldn't have the right to get married, etc...that if Kerry got elected, you'd have gays getting married all over the country, etc. Melman later got outed as being a homosexual & eventually stepped down as the party's chairman. I don't have a clue if it was because everyone in Washington (and the press) now knew about his sexual preference.
Care to elaborate? Last I checked, Democrats didn't 'swiftboat', don't lie about their military service, don't get their family members to call elections for them, don't expunge voters from lists, do let people of all colours vote, etc.Maxima said:They are both doing the conning. Democrats are now better.
Agrippa said:
I agree 100% with you. Republicans in general are now a bunch of corrupted evil sob's. A lot of the blame goes to Lee Atwater, who's dirty political tactics have since been refined by the likes of that fat bastard, Karl Rove.
Doc Holliday said:
How could I forget him? Republicans broke into the Watergate hotel. Republicans destroy evidence before it can be examined. Republicans use non-official email addresses in order for there not to be any records of their wrong doings. Republicans twist the Constitution and interpret the law as they see fit.
Who's doing the conning? Seriously?
Yeah! What's up with that? I'm not surprised when it's a tele-evangelist, but politicians... come on.Doc Holliday said:
As an aside, I love how Nick Savage, appaled by Rick Santorum's discourse on homosexuality, challenged his readers to come up with a definition for the word 'santorum'. After a vote, the winning definition was chosen to be:
santorum (san-TOR-um) n.
The word is in current usage (however often one speaks of 'the frothy mix...'). 1. The frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.
2. Senator Rick Santorum.
2. Senator Rick Santorum.
If you Google 'santorum' the first link will be http://www.spreadingsantorum.com/ Didn't know of Robert Byrd. Indeed, pretty sick. Though I don't want to know what the Republican candidates that have run against him look like...Maxima said:
Al Sharpton, on the other hand, didn't get elected to office.
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No, of course not. Democrats aren't perfect, nor do I believe anything 'religiously'.Maxima said:If saying "both parties are evils" is wrong because you religiously believe that only the Republicans are evils then may I say "Good for you". Life is a bliss. Keep it up.
I was responding to your allegation that
Democrats would have to go through a dozen terms before they could even catch up to the Republicans, let alone surpass them, like you claim.
Anything in the article that you would like to dispute? Did you even read the article? The source is irrelevant if the facts/arguments are correct.thegreatwalooo said:
Agrippa said:
There is nothing in the article that I would like to dispute. Yes, I read the article and I read the NY Times every day. In my opinion I feel that the source of an article is relevant. It is an Op Ed piece, I was only giving my opinion.
I'm Canadian, I don't know much about American politics per se. I'm just trying to understand Who Republicans are, how they went from a respectable party that, as stated earlier, stood for smaller government to what they are now (i.e. bigger government enacting laws against gay marriage, rather than repealing laws against (heterosexual and homosexual) sodomy--smaller government).Maxima said:Sorry, I was wrong. I thought you know more about Democrats than Republicans.
Btw, you've heard of George Wallace, haven't you?
I recognized the name George Wallace, but didn't know 'all about him' before reading his Wikipedia entry. You're using him as an example anachronistically. He said what he said in 1962 when the norm was segregation. Let alone that he's from Alabama. Besides, he went back on his position in the 1970s. Likewise with Byrd it seems; he later repudiated his involvement with the KKK. The names I mentioned earlier are contemporary Republicans.
So your opinion is that the NY Times is as biased as Hannity is, but yet the article is factual?thegreatwalooo said:
What's your point then?If he's incumbent for 49 years, would he even have any democratic opponents? You'll have to fill me in on this, again, I'm Canadian.Maxima said:
Evidently, but this isn't a presidential nomination, and he has been doing this for 49 years (and again, went back on his involvement with the KKK) Does anyone bother challenging him? Nor have you shown that his fellow rivals are better or worse than him, you've only stated that he might have competitors.Maxima said:If you have not noticed it yet...even an incumbent first term President still has to win the primary of his own party before being elected as the official candidate of his party...unless there is nobody from his own party who is willing to contest his candidacy.
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