Trump understood it and said it: No one reads the National Review. They are losers.
But I read it. I want to see the opinions that float around the Republican think tank-donor-
RNC establishment. The group is small in size but is hugely influential because they pay the bills for campaigns. Their lobbyists attend the fundraising events for incumbents, and sometimes they write the draft legislation. They testify at hearings. They fund "grass roots" organizations that supply citizen input on policy. They are the permanent institution underlying the coming and going of elected officials.
In defeat they are the safety net for politicians by keeping a Jobs Bank for out of work Republican officeholders and campaign people, a comfortable form of welfare for the comfortable. Lose an election, no problem. You stay visible as a "Senior Fellow" for some organization like the Cato Institute or the American Enterprise Institute or the American Heritage Foundation, so you have a platform to legitimize your writing a book and being on a panel on a cable news show. It is job security--for the orthodox only.
The National Review hates Trump, and it dedicated a whole issue to stopping him. He isn't orthodox and he is redefining what is heresy or acceptable. National Review is going crazy with frustration over Trump for having exposed the gap between Republican voters and Republican orthodoxy.
***Republican orthodoxy is small government conservative, favoring cuts in safety net programs including Social Security and Medicare, but voters actually like benefits, and Trump agrees with voters.
***Republican orthodoxy is neo-con involvement in regime change and engagement, but the voters actually are pretty skeptical that we don't do more harm than good to America when we meddle, and Trump is with the voters.
***Republican orthodoxy for elites is that free trade and immigration is good, but voters resent immigrants. This is Trump's signature position.
***Republican orthodoxy is that constitutionally limited and checked power is best, but voters actually like the idea of a strong president who can get things done. That is Trump.
***Republican orthodoxy and practice has been for the party to be a party of obstruction, saying no to Obama on everything, especially health care, and to avoid actually making positive consensus proposals for replacing it, but voters want to know what Republicans are for, not just what they are against. Trump projects he will get things done.
So Trump has captured that spirit of generalized frustration of the Republican primary electorate. Here is how a current National Review article summarizes that spirit of resentment. The purpose of the article is to attack Trump, but the article is most useful in its long list of irritations. I count 21 points of resentment:
So far Trump’s supporters have put up with his hypocrisies, self-contradictions, and unhinged statements — as if all that is felt to be a small price for hearing him pulverize Washington careerists, media flunkies, hypocritical grandees, and Republican sellouts.
Americans are sick and tired of Black Lives Matter careerists and abject racists calling them racists, of wealthy apartheid liberals lecturing them about their white-privileged middle-class status, of crony green capitalists with huge carbon footprints, of hypocritical multimillionaire Malibu scolds, of the media hectoring the 52 percent who pay income taxes and canonizing the 48 percent who do not, of illegal aliens laying down to them a set of ultimatums while praising the country they were glad to leave and ankle-biting the one they want to stay in, of elites worrying more about the feelings of Islamic radicals than the terrorism that jihadists commit, and of our elected representatives borrowing more money for more government programs that make things far worse for everybody except those who run them.
If it is a choice between Washington Republicans’ sober and judicious tinkering and tsk-tsking on the one hand, and raw unadulterated anger on the other, the so-called base will choose the latter every time. The furious and fed-up may not like Trump’s cruelty, but the array of targets that he crudely lashes back at — John McCain, Megyn Kelly, Jeb Bush, the Pope, Vicente Fox — in their various ways themselves often are unpopular. When Vicente Fox cusses at Trump, when the Pope slyly questions his Christianity, when Megyn Kelly flirtatiously winks to her audience, when New York Times columnist Ross Douthat jokes about a possible Trump assassination, when the Chinese say they don’t welcome the idea of a Trump presidency, when a few screwball British members of Parliament dream of denying Trump entry into Britain — all of them only win Trump even more acclaim from hoi polloi.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/432098/donald-trump-how-fight-him
But I read it. I want to see the opinions that float around the Republican think tank-donor-
RNC establishment. The group is small in size but is hugely influential because they pay the bills for campaigns. Their lobbyists attend the fundraising events for incumbents, and sometimes they write the draft legislation. They testify at hearings. They fund "grass roots" organizations that supply citizen input on policy. They are the permanent institution underlying the coming and going of elected officials. In defeat they are the safety net for politicians by keeping a Jobs Bank for out of work Republican officeholders and campaign people, a comfortable form of welfare for the comfortable. Lose an election, no problem. You stay visible as a "Senior Fellow" for some organization like the Cato Institute or the American Enterprise Institute or the American Heritage Foundation, so you have a platform to legitimize your writing a book and being on a panel on a cable news show. It is job security--for the orthodox only.
 |
| "Last Chance" means STOPPING Trump |
The National Review hates Trump, and it dedicated a whole issue to stopping him. He isn't orthodox and he is redefining what is heresy or acceptable. National Review is going crazy with frustration over Trump for having exposed the gap between Republican voters and Republican orthodoxy.
***Republican orthodoxy is small government conservative, favoring cuts in safety net programs including Social Security and Medicare, but voters actually like benefits, and Trump agrees with voters.
***Republican orthodoxy is neo-con involvement in regime change and engagement, but the voters actually are pretty skeptical that we don't do more harm than good to America when we meddle, and Trump is with the voters.
***Republican orthodoxy for elites is that free trade and immigration is good, but voters resent immigrants. This is Trump's signature position.
***Republican orthodoxy is that constitutionally limited and checked power is best, but voters actually like the idea of a strong president who can get things done. That is Trump.
***Republican orthodoxy and practice has been for the party to be a party of obstruction, saying no to Obama on everything, especially health care, and to avoid actually making positive consensus proposals for replacing it, but voters want to know what Republicans are for, not just what they are against. Trump projects he will get things done.
So Trump has captured that spirit of generalized frustration of the Republican primary electorate. Here is how a current National Review article summarizes that spirit of resentment. The purpose of the article is to attack Trump, but the article is most useful in its long list of irritations. I count 21 points of resentment:
So far Trump’s supporters have put up with his hypocrisies, self-contradictions, and unhinged statements — as if all that is felt to be a small price for hearing him pulverize Washington careerists, media flunkies, hypocritical grandees, and Republican sellouts.
Americans are sick and tired of Black Lives Matter careerists and abject racists calling them racists, of wealthy apartheid liberals lecturing them about their white-privileged middle-class status, of crony green capitalists with huge carbon footprints, of hypocritical multimillionaire Malibu scolds, of the media hectoring the 52 percent who pay income taxes and canonizing the 48 percent who do not, of illegal aliens laying down to them a set of ultimatums while praising the country they were glad to leave and ankle-biting the one they want to stay in, of elites worrying more about the feelings of Islamic radicals than the terrorism that jihadists commit, and of our elected representatives borrowing more money for more government programs that make things far worse for everybody except those who run them.
If it is a choice between Washington Republicans’ sober and judicious tinkering and tsk-tsking on the one hand, and raw unadulterated anger on the other, the so-called base will choose the latter every time. The furious and fed-up may not like Trump’s cruelty, but the array of targets that he crudely lashes back at — John McCain, Megyn Kelly, Jeb Bush, the Pope, Vicente Fox — in their various ways themselves often are unpopular. When Vicente Fox cusses at Trump, when the Pope slyly questions his Christianity, when Megyn Kelly flirtatiously winks to her audience, when New York Times columnist Ross Douthat jokes about a possible Trump assassination, when the Chinese say they don’t welcome the idea of a Trump presidency, when a few screwball British members of Parliament dream of denying Trump entry into Britain — all of them only win Trump even more acclaim from hoi polloi.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/432098/donald-trump-how-fight-him
2 comments:
A group of middle-aged whites in the U.S. is dying at a startling rate: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/a-group-of-middle-aged-american-whites-is-dying-at-a-startling-rate/2015/11/02/47a63098-8172-11e5-8ba6-cec48b74b2a7_story.html
Politics as it hits the fan. The idea that there is wealth to spread around, promoted by candidate Obama in 2008, is turning into the gradually realized horror that not only is the wealth of the nation in the hands of sociopathic risk takers (Thomas Picketty), the economy has changed out from under us (holding the Spotted Owl hostage for unsustainable harvests), endless war has eaten up allocations for education and other social goods. The consequences are Malthusian.
Peter this is a good first draft for "Who killed the republican party". (hint it was suicide)
As Sheryl points out this suicide is being paralleled by actual sucides amongst middle aged white males. That's their only way out after being sold a bill of goods by republicans.
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