Quantum Windbag
Gold Member
- May 9, 2010
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[MENTION=46449]Delta4Embassy[/MENTION]
An example of a liberal racist bigot asshole so that you can grow up and admit you don't have all the answers.
An example of a liberal racist bigot asshole so that you can grow up and admit you don't have all the answers.
The rise of the conservative and the neo-liberal libertarian is an interesting development in American political and cultural history. It took off after the New Deal but only in the background for many years even decades. A fascinating book on the topic is quoted below.
"The rise of conservative politics in postwar America is one of the great puzzles of American political history. For much of the period that followed the end of World War II, conservative ideas about the primacy of the free market, and the dangers of too-powerful labor unions, government regulation, and an activist, interventionist state seemed to have been thoroughly rejected by most intellectual and political elites. Scholars and politicians alike dismissed those who adhered to such faiths as a "radical right," for whom to quote the Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter politics "becomes an arena into which the wildest fancies are projected, the most paranoid suspicions, the most absurd superstitions, the most bizarre apocalyptic fantasies." How, then, did such ideas move from their marginal position in the middle years of the twentieth century to become the reigning politics of the country by the century's end?" Kim Phillips-Fein ('Invisible Hands')
The blending of religion and so called free market capitalism is another aspect of this change. Religion today is not about people and community, it is about isolated single issues and fundamentalism mixed with a victim blame ingredient. The fact there are no jobs isn't mentioned, instead the unemployed is responsible for a situation much more complicated than any care to acknowledge.
"Yet, more recently, as William Connolly and others have demonstrated, Christian religion and capitalist economics have again been fused tightly in the extreme conservative movement that has captured the Republican Party. This, I believe, is the main reason that so much of their economic reasoning appears irrational and in direct violation of mainstream economics. It disregards almost all available evidence regarding the efficacy of their specific, or more appropriately, often unspecific, economic policy proposals." The Contemporary Condition: The Church of Capitalism: Why Right-Wing Economics is Once Again not Rational
Add to this the power of money in America and you have today. What are there, something like ten thousand lobbyists in Washington, add campaign finance, add corporate union destruction and the shift of manufacturing and you have a permanent underclass. Money talks in America, actually money controls the nation today and lots of it comes from some pretty ideologically driven people who values are not about the nation.
"It was 1993, during congressional debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement. I was having lunch with a staffer for one of the rare Republican congressmen who opposed the policy of so-called free trade. To this day, I remember something my colleague said: The rich elites of this country have far more in common with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Tokyo than with their fellow American citizens. That was only the beginning of the period when the realities of outsourced manufacturing, financialization of the economy, and growing income disparity started to seep into the public consciousness, so at the time it seemed like a striking and novel statement." Mike Lofgren Revolt of the Rich | The American Conservative
"Television and radio, though, had a homogenizing effect on the right, and the tension between class (with a high tone) and ideology (rabble rousing) worked itself out, with the millionaires learning how to sound angry and enjoy it, and the grassroots getting trained to accept anger as a substitute for policy results. The populist New Right and Buchananite right lost their manpower to Roger Ailes, while the elite right gave up the fight for realism and broadmindedness." Daniel McCarthy
How Conservatism Lost Its Mind | The American Conservative
A bit short and cynical but.... http://www.usmessageboard.com/politics/50872-use-this-handy-parable-to-understand-politics.html
Understanding the conservative: http://www.usmessageboard.com/politics/219584-the-american-conservative-continuing-series.html See links in post too.
My constant question to conservatives: http://www.usmessageboard.com/politics/226033-dear-liberals-i-want-a-divorce-27.html#post5366011
this piece starts with an observation that is changing as the gop fights the gop: http://www.usmessageboard.com/polit...es-of-midcans-insights-into-contemporary.html
And still more:
http://www.usmessageboard.com/clean...states-if-conservatives-left.html#post7276058
http://www.usmessageboard.com/clean...ates-if-conservatives-left-2.html#post7279256
"But you say you are conservative - eminently conservative - while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by "our fathers who framed the Government under which we live;" while you with one accord reject, and scout, and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new. True, you disagree among yourselves as to what that substitute shall be. You are divided on new propositions and plans, but you are unanimous in rejecting and denouncing the old policy of the fathers. Some of you are for reviving the foreign slave trade; some for a Congressional Slave-Code for the Territories; some for Congress forbidding the Territories to prohibit Slavery within their limits; some for maintaining Slavery in the Territories through the judiciary; some for the "gur-reat pur-rinciple" that "if one man would enslave another, no third man should object," fantastically called "Popular Sovereignty;" but never a man among you is in favor of federal prohibition of slavery in federal territories, according to the practice of "our fathers who framed the Government under which we live." Not one of all your various plans can show a precedent or an advocate in the century within which our Government originated. Consider, then, whether your claim of conservatism for yourselves, and your charge or destructiveness against us, are based on the most clear and stable foundations." Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln's Cooper Union Address