Or find some GOP Senator calling for heavy tariffs against cheap Chinese steel, or some Ben Shapiro clone calling for America to GTFO of Afghanistan already, or an RNC press release urging no amnesty for DACA unless we've already deported twice as many illegals who are already residing here, to provide counterpoints in favor of re-alignment. (We're waiting...).
Remember, re-alignment means the existing GOP is supposed to bend the knee to the populist-nationalist agenda. Not necessarily because they believe in that stuff -- they emphatically do not, but out of concern for which way the political winds are blowing. To the extent that the existing party and broader Conservative Movement (TM) keeps on with their same ol' bullshit, there is no re-alignment in progress.
Here's some dork on Twitter with over 100K followers (and over 1000 likes so far on this tweet), piggy-backing on an already ridiculous tweet by the guy who used to campaign by calling for an end to birthright citizenship, and using terms like "anchor baby" rather than PC euphemisms:
President Trump just gave Hispanics a MASSIVE tax cut! They will be voting for Republicans like never before this year— Jacob Wohl (@JacobAWohl) January 2, 2018
This is the kind of thing that Trump would re-tweet these days. He re-tweeted sycophant Charlie Cuck of Turning Point USA three times in a day recently, forgetting that these types -- including Breitbart -- were bitterly opposed to him during the primaries until it was all over. They were then, and sadly still remain, hypnotized followers of the Cruz Cuck Cult.
The only good thing to come of the Trump era in the broader culture is Tucker Carlson getting his own show in primetime on Fox. And guess who would never get an interview with Trump? He'd give it instead to another sycophant like the once-great Lou Dobbs or hostile forces whose validation he desires, like Maggie Haberman at the NYT.
Contrast with the shift in tone on the Democrats' side, where they are not constantly wailing about racism, sexism, and homophobia like they were just a year ago. Now they're talking about the class divide, Republican greed, using government to provide for the people's healthcare, and so on and so forth.
There are still SJW dead-enders, but unlike the zombie Right, the Left is not continuing to run 24/7 with the message of "Bake the cake, bigot" like it's still 2013. It's the Bernie wing that's been emboldened, unlike the business-as-usual wing that has been emboldened on the GOP side.
Whatever shake-up and excitement there is going to be in American politics, will be coming from the Democrat rather than Republican party.
I'm still waiting for Obamacare to be repealed.
ReplyDeleteMore terrible news - Orrin Hatch just announced his retirement which likely means we can expect a Senator Romney. Being in Utah, Romney will be totally insulated from any Bannonite populist challenger. A Senator Romney is the best indication of business as usual in GOP.
ReplyDeleteI'm actually glad Romney will join the Senate -- it will accelerate the break-up of the GOP. Either he gets started right away taking pot-shots at Trump, and opening up the wounds from the primary season -- or he waits until 2019 when he mounts a primary challenge to the sitting President (which he will do in the first scenario too).
ReplyDeleteWe were told that "party unity" would get us at least a good amount of what we demanded as conditions for throwing our electoral support behind them, and winning the White House for their party in a way that no other GOP coalition could have done.
But it has resulted in Trump the novice with no political capital being isolated by a junta from the Pentagon, and rubber stamping the same ol' Republican bullshit from the crooked Congress.
Party unity my ass! Time to open up those wounds and amputate the gangrenous GOP from the populist-nationalist body.
Party disunity predicts a loss in a general election, and so does a strong third party challenger (Romney if he doesn't decide to challenge Trump from within the GOP primary).
Anything that kills off the GOP and gets the Democrats back in as place-savers, is what we need to buy time while we build a populist-nationalist party and vote for the Bernie-type Dems in the meantime.
That Jacob Wohl tweet is cringey. How long have the GOP been banging the "natural conservatives" drum again? And it never plays out because the Dems are the ones handing out gibs and the hispanics, aside from Cuban and Venezuelan diaspora (victims of socialist/communist leadership), will go where the gibs are much like how the constant harping on DEMS ARE THE REAL RACISTS won't bring around the blacks when the Democrats are giving them welfare and such.
ReplyDeleteWe were the canaries in the coal mine: read and monitored by Lefty Machiavellian types, but unknown to the Rightist ones.
ReplyDeleteThey were/are much more hungry to claw their way back to the top.
Wow, speaking of opening up wounds from the GOP primary and after... what a news day.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if 2020 will see a three-way primary between Trump (populism), Bannon (conservatism), and Romney (corporatism). Parentheses indicating their comparative advantage in a GOP contest.
And who's to say that both of the losers of the nomination would not run on their own third party ticket?
The implosion of the GOP accelerates!
Given the manner in which Trump has governed vs. the way Bannon's been speaking as of late, wouldn't it make more sense for Trump to represent conservatism and Bannon populism in that scenario?
ReplyDeleteNo, a hypothetical Pres Bannon would be subject to the same institutional forces we've been talking about since the April coup unveiled how politics really works.
ReplyDeleteMaybe he would resist more than Trump has, but he wouldn't get anything accomplished either. No institutional support for distinctly populist or nationalist policies within the GOP ecosystem.
He would only get through the things where there's overlap with the Establishment -- conservative justices, Israel boosterism, triggering liberal snowflakes on culture war red meat, etc.
I'm talking about what their branding would be in a contest for Republican primary votes.
ConTree House was right.....Bannon is a shallow opportunist who lucked into Trump, and now he's back to his roots. He started out as a Cruzbot true con, felt the winds blow in a different direction when he realized how popular non-ideologue Trump is (was?), finagled his way into the Trump White House, was eventually booted from the regime for a variety of reasons, and is now bitterly sniping at Trump's confidantes instead of focusing his ire on the correct targets (The Pentagon, the Chamber of Commerce, et al).
ReplyDeleteBannon's insistence on culture war BS, and favoring candidates who support such, betray how tone deaf and delusional he must be. Bannon thought this would be the last shot at creating a conservative utopia, and thus is understandably ticked off that the Trump presidency for which Bannon takes credit isn't turning out the way Bannon envisioned and hoped to sheperd.
FYI, Trump's platform was largely in place before Bannon entered the picture. And it's Bannon who's overplayed a weak hand (culture war), which Trump intuitively knew to be irrelevant and only made token mentions of. Trump backed a bland but electable candidate in the Alabama election, while Bannon became a surrogate of goofball Roy Moore.
While Bannon isn't all bad (after all, he seems to at least be somewhat on the right track WRT foreign policy, more so than the Pentagon dolts running the show now), he still is desperately ideological (e.g., elitist) rather than looking out for all of us by being more pragmatic.
Just for the record, I know the Treehouse is not to be trusted and is a lap dog for for some of the people and agencies we love to hate. But I do get their distaste for Bannon; Bannon is not the answer.
ReplyDelete"That Jacob Wohl tweet is cringey. How long have the GOP been banging the "natural conservatives" drum again? And it never plays out because the Dems are the ones handing out gibs and the hispanics, aside from Cuban and Venezuelan diaspora (victims of socialist/communist leadership),"
ReplyDeleteOdd as it may seem, there's a nasty intersection of conservative bigotry and CoC cheap labor at work here. The GOP by the 1970's became fed up with the cold, gray, and heavily developed Northeastern quadrant of America, primarily for two reasons:
1) Unions, unions, unions.....How dare workers expect decent wages, working conditions, benefits, and the right to strike? They all can go to hell, what did they ever do to support the "free market"? And as for jobs leaving to the South, the West, and eventually points further, well, what did these workers expect to happen after they bitched so much and dissed management?
2) American Dream sentiment just doesn't play as well in already developed areas. The South and West were mostly undeveloped prior to WW2; after WW2, growth exploded in the "new" parts of America and the GOP assumed it's current natalist, anti-labor, anti-regulation, anti-zoning, blah blah blah identity.
The GOP believes that encouraging large lot single family home ownership, small businesses, a DIY mentality etc. will turn more people into Republicans. Their impatience and disgust towards the old factory and mining belt regions of America, where white "ethnics" built literal and political Dem machines (Irish in the northeast and the urban Midwest, Teutons all over PA and the Midwest, Scots-Irish of Appalachia, etc.) led the GOP to favor importing immigrants who would provide cheap labor and theoretically vote GOP. Note that Texas and California, both of which were heavily Republican when they still were pretty white (e.g., before the 90's), were ground zero for Mexican and SE Asian immigration in the 70's-90's.
Right now Leftist globalists, NGOs, etc. are busy dumping immigrants all over America for various nefarious reasons. But we should never forget that the GOP actually was very enthusiastic about the immigrant hordes who by the 90's had transformed large stretches of the Western and Southern US . This is something that most "conservatives" are clueless about these days. Prominent Republicans heralding the arrivals of border jumpers and boat people in the 70's and 80's is something that's been memory holed due to the trend of directing resentment towards Lefty ID politics. Well, it's none other than the cheap labor contingent and Right wing bigotry towards the labor movement who sponsored the very entry of the diverse hordes in the first place!
I've just about given up on Stefen Molyneaux for his repeating musty canards about the labor movement (yep, ok, I guess it's the union's fault for chasing good jobs out of America).
I cross posted this elsewhere, but the new Michael Wolff book on the Trump White House will be interesting and get a good deal of interest, if the New York Magazine adapted article is any guide:
ReplyDeletehttp://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/01/michael-wolff-fire-and-fury-book-donald-trump.html
It does touch on much of what has been covered here, and is as good explanation as any of how the Trump Administration became a generic Republican administration.
I think the quotes from Bannon are likely legit but there's a ton of obvious BS there like Trump not investing any money into his campaign or the entire narrative that Trump was basically doing this as a joke to raise his profile and start Trump TV or whatever.
ReplyDeleteWhat's with the hostility towards social conservatives? Sterile leftism is why immigrants are let in to replace the West.
ReplyDeleteWrong: the GOP is the cheap-labor party whose patrons control labor-intensive sectors of the economy like agriculture, leisure / hospitality, small stores, and armed forces.
ReplyDeleteThey're the ones bringing in Mexican strawberry pickers, and Salvadorean meatpackers, by the truckload. Agribusiness is Republican, not Democrat.
Those truckloads of Central Americans ain't heading up to steal jobs in Democrat sectors like Silicon Valley, Wall Street, or Hollywood.
Aside from that, it's the elites who employ immigrants for groundskeeping, babysitting, cooking, etc. And the rich vote Republican.
Demographic replacement is the fault of the GOP, rather than social conservative voters, but the social cons have voted for the GOP that replaces Americans with cheap immigrants.
Social con voters are more likely to be wealthy, since that's the stratum that cares about the culture war. Tea Party sympathizers were wealthier than average. So it's no skin off their back if cheap foreigners flood in due to the party they voted for.
It would be cuckold behavior if trailer park whites voted in droves for the GOP that replaces them -- but it's the safe well-to-do social cons who are such kneejerk GOP-ers. It's callousness toward their lower-status countrymen that leads the social cons to favor for the cheap labor / open borders party.
Dave Chappelle showing the re-alignment on the Dem side -- in a new stand-up bit, he says he met with poor white Trump supporters, sympathized with their plight, and took their vote to be economic rather than racial in nature.
ReplyDeleteHe could've attacked them as racists, xenophobes, etc. -- but denies that, and says they were voting for what they thought were their best economic interests.
Then he tries to disillusion them by saying that the economic policies so far are going to benefit the rich rather than the poor ("he's fighting for me," Chappelle says).
Again, the attempt to turn them away from voting GOP again, or for voting Trump again, is based on a populist economic appeal -- not threatening to call them racists forever until they vote Democrat.
Sadly, the more that Trump himself keeps jizzing his jeans over the stock market, rather than calling out the stagnating real wage trend that continued through 2017, the more that poor whites are going to feel a sting when they hear messages like the one in Chappelle's stand-up routine.
Chappelle favored Bernie over Crooked Hillary. Like I said, look out for the Bernie wing -- they're gradually taking over the Dems, and they actually give a damn about reaching out to the other side, rather than just "troll the cons" all day long.