Comrade Meerpol wrote, "To truly break from Trumpism, the traditional Republicans have to be willing to truly purge the Cruz-Hawley folks AND all those Representatives --- they have to be WILLING to have three candidates even if the TRUMPISTS win Republican primaries ---"
The only sitting Republican I heard speak with consistency and principle over the last 2 months is Mitt Romney. Romney is clearly trying to position himself as the leader of some yet-to-be-born Republican Renaissance Party that would supplant the Trumpists and isolate them in some third party somewhere. My view is that Romney and Collins and Murkowski and the other “moderate” Republicans have this equation 100% backwards. Trump has disgraced himself with just about everybody in the world -- except the Republican base. He still rules. In fact, his distance from the White House might lead more to a robust mythology rather than a fade out. Exiled or defeated leaders can wield enormous power from the outside as they are not subject to the daily business of government that belittle them. That frenzied pro-Trump base was not created by Donald Trump. It was whipped up first and slowly simmered with Nixon’s overtly racist Southern Strategy back 50 years ago. Ronald Reagan spent 8 years fortifying and solidifying that base and inculcating it with a nasty ideology that criminalized the poor and glorified fat cats roving around in yellow power ties and spiffy suspenders. While Bush I nearly put that base to sleep with his unremarkable regime, his son, #43, got them all whipped up again. He could teach the masses real patriotism by immersing us in two endless and totally SNAFU wars, scare the snot out of the population with his color-coded terror warnings, implement a surveillance state, and yet keep that base happy by pretending to be just like one of them. It’s really Gingrich, Reagan and Bush 43 that softened up the Republican base for Trump, slowly transforming the old line conservative movement into a vengeful, hate-filled, xenophobic unprincipled gang of bewildered losers -- never figuring out that it was their own leaders who were making their lives so economically precarious. Enter Donald Trump whose eyes widened at the rich opportunity left him by his Republican predecessors and by the growing alienation of a significant portion of the working class that felt abandoned and betrayed by the Democrats (because they were). Here resides the current existential crisis of the Republicans. Their leader, and that leader is Donald Trump, has a total, solid lock on that base that took 35 years to build before he came on stage. And no matter that Trump and Trumpism are now toxic to a general election electorate (nothing new here with Republicans losing popular vote in seven of the eight last presidential elections). He’s still The Boss. The bet of the Republican “moderates” and the wish of many liberals is that Trump, once out of office, will fade away. I would not rule that out but for the moment I’m not buying it. It’s the “moderates” who have no future. No immediate future. Just exactly who is their voting base? There isn’t one. These are the guys who are going to wind up marginalized and it’s the Trumpists -- maybe without Trump -- who are going to be running the Republican Party for the time being. (Note: that base has become so radicalized that Friday morning there were tweets from some of the alt-right types, slamming Trump for his quasi-concession speech Thursday). Something tells me those kind of folks are not going to be future Romney voters. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#5352): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/5352 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/79546883/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
