US Elections 2020

[MrFanti]

Republican Party that has been the stand out aspect of the party politics since 2016. and also agree the Republicans should ask themselves of their so-called leader is he one of them.

Trump is about as Republican as Sanders is Democrat.

Both Sanders and Trump are products of establishment Democrats being pissed and establishment Republicans being pissed. But make no mistake, Trump is as much Republican as Sanders is Democrat.

[Stavros]

Trump is about as Republican as Sanders is Democrat.
Both Sanders and Trump are products of establishment Democrats being pissed and establishment Republicans being pissed. But make no mistake, Trump is as much Republican as Sanders is Democrat.

Two things that exist in the US system that puzzle me: how a political party can accept as nominee to lead it, someone with no proven record of being 'a member' -because you don't have membership rolls like we do in Europe. Indeed, if a person could only be elected to represent a party through annual membership fees and a party card, the President today would be someone else. Sanders has no more right to claim the Democrat ticket than does Angela Davis, yet both could try, just as Alex Jones or James Woods could seek the leadership of the Republican Party.

Marjorie Taylor Green is a QAnon supporter, whatever that means, but presumably believes the US is run by a cabal of paedophiles and cannibals, and Jews of course, yet she has the full-throated endorsement of a man who, as far as we know, is neither a peadophile nor a cannibal....that it was even possible for this woman to become the Republican Party candidate tells you something about the cockeyed, out-of-date nonsense that is 'party politics' in the USA.

The second puzzing question is, what, today, is a Republican? Just as we ought to be having a debate in the UK to answer the question, 'What is a Conservatve?' -it used to be a pragmatic party of stability, but is now a radical party of change- what happened to that American party that was once associated with sound money and fiscal responsibility? Thus

"The problem in the long run has been that the Republican Party is no longer the party of Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Dwight Eisenhower, but the one of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Donald Trump.
Starting with Nixon, most Republican presidents have found that cutting taxes wins votes but that cutting popular government programs has the opposite effect. Therefore, these modern presidents have slashed taxes while cranking the spending spigot, benefiting them by increasing their political fortunes but harming the increasingly debt-ridden country."
https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/...responsibility

The simple fact is that the Republican Party is now the party of daft money and fiscal chaos. It was Dick Cheney who said 'Deficits don't matter'. As for the 45th President who seems to me to have been living in debt for most of his business life, his claim he would 'wipe out' the National Debt' in 8 years is exposed as the hooey it always was:

"Trump has a cavalier attitude about the nation’s debt load. During the campaign, he said the nation could "borrow knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal.”13
He added, “The United States will never default because you can print the money." "
https://www.thebalance.com/trump-pla...l-debt-4114401
(This link also confirms the point made in The Hill article, that tax cuts and spending cuts contradict each other)

Instead of being asked about their fideity to party policy favourites like payroll taxes and medicaid, maybe the candidates should be asked:
-What sort of cannibal are you? Legs or breast?
-How do you like your American economy: roasted or fried?

Yes, the Obama Presidency added to the debt, but then it had to spend its way out of the fiscal chaos it inherited from George W. Bush.

But hey, who is going to bother debating the debt in this election? Cowardice hides from the truth everywhere, sort of an inversion of Millicent Fawcett's declaration when campaging for the right of women to vote- Courage calls to Courage Everywhere-

When the Centenary of the 19th Amendment falls in three days time, who will have the courage to stand up in the USA and tell the truth? About the most intense and open threat to voting since 1776, the most threatening debt since 1607...

[filghy2]

The second puzzing question is, what, today, is a Republican?

I think the answer is that the Republican party is now essentially a tribalist party rather than being conservative in a philosophical sense. The purpose of gaining political power is not to advance some coherent notion of what makes a better society for most of its members, but to advance the interests of the tribe at the expense of those who are not part of the tribe. The tribe is an overlapping coalition of white nationalists (or at least people concerned with white status), wealthy capitalists, evangelical Christians and gun fans whose interests are mostly aligned.

This change preceded Trump, but he has taken it further and been more overt about it. That is why 90% of Republicans support him regardless of what he says or does and regardless of whether he ignores principles the party claimed to stand for previously. Principles like fiscal responsibility matter only when they serve the tribal interest (opposing spending on those outside the tribe) but otherwise they can be ignored (tax cuts or spending that benefits the tribe). The same goes for other supposed principles like states rights and limited executive power. No doubt these principles will be conveniently rediscovered during the next Democrat administration.

[Stavros]

All good points, filghy2, to which one can add the remarks by Robert Reich which appeared in the Observer yesterday-

"The Democratic party is basically a governing party, organized around developing and implementing public policies. The Republican party has become an attack party, organized around developing and implementing political vitriol. Democrats legislate. Republicans fulminate.
[Lee] Atwater, trained in the southern swamp of the modern Republican party, once noted: “Republicans in the south could not win elections by talking about issues. You had to make the case that the other guy, the other candidate, is a bad guy.” Over time, the GOP’s core competence came to be vilification."
https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...ublicans-trump

[filghy2]

The Republican party has become an attack party, organized around developing and implementing political vitriol. [/url]

That goes to a related point, that tribalists tend to be very focussed on hostility and resentment towards those outside the tribe. They may even reject policies that could benefit them if they perceive that others would receive a disproportionate share of the benefits. It is often argued that race is the main reason why the US has such a limited social safety net.

Another element of the tribalist mindset is the need to exclude outside influences that might challenge the prevailing culture - hence, the Republican party's increasing tendency towards anti-intellectualism and anti-internationalism.

[Stavros]

I wonder why, other than voter suppression, the Democrats don't make more of all the Rights that Americans had, which have been taken away since 2017, in particular the rights of America's disabled.

And since January, the Covid Contact now shrouds American's racial contractt-

"The coronavirus epidemic has rendered the racial contract visible in multiple ways. Once the disproportionate impact of the epidemic was revealed to the American political and financial elite, many began to regard the rising death toll less as a national emergency than as an inconvenience. Temporary measures meant to prevent the spread of the disease by restricting movement, mandating the wearing of masks, or barring large social gatherings have become the foulest tyranny. The lives of workers at the front lines of the pandemic—such as meatpackers, transportation workers, and grocery clerks—have been deemed so worthless that legislators want to immunize their employers from liability even as they force them to work under unsafe conditions. In East New York, police assault black residents for violating social-distancing rules; in Lower Manhattan, they dole out masks and smiles to white pedestrians."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...howing/611389/

[broncofan]

This change preceded Trump, but he has taken it further and been more overt about it.

Your contributions here have helped me see that. I think it hadn't been completely obvious to me because their most recent presidential candidates have tried to hide that fact. Both Mitt Romney and John McCain were more or less respectable faces covering a brewing pot of racism, corruption, and political tribalism. They have also been able to exploit a corrupt right-wing media empire that systematically deceives large portions of the population about basic, objective facts. Fox News had been there but new media keeps popping up to keep up with their conspiracy theories, from Breitbart to OANN. If Fox doesn't promote Hydroxychloroquine or isn't committed to the idea that Harris is ineligible to run as President, there are nascent outlets that will fill the void.

The problem with expecting Republicans to rein in Trump is not that they don't have the courage but that they are happy to support his erosion of the rule of law if he is able to get away with it. I worry about the financial corruption but in the long-term I worry more about the use of executive authority to cover up crimes for their allies and to persecute their enemies.

Beyond that development, there is the grim reality that Trump has personally caused a death toll in this country through negligence, egotism, and incompetence. The fact that people are unaware of this speaks to the dearth of reliable and easily digestible news and the lack of accountability in government. It is too easy to make personal failures seem like someone else's fault, in addition to the fact that a portion of the public has become resistant to believing indisputable, but inconvenient truths. If Trump wins this election, it will mark an American decline, if we're not already part of the way down that slope.

[MrFanti]

BET founder Robert Johnson calls for $14 trillion of reparations for slavery
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/01/bets...r-slavery.html

It will be interesting to see just how much in taxes from their paycheck that White Democrats will take (before even they get upset) so I can get my share of this! (If it were to happen under Biden/Harris)....

[Stavros]

Reparations, one of the most stupid and damaging ideas in human history- punishment, guilt, call it what you will. The reparations that France imposed on Haiti in 1825 were not paid off until 1947, making one wonder if more money was lost to Reparations than was made from the Slavery whose abolition in Haiti it was meant to compensate. France, again, imposed such punitive reparations on Germany after the First World War, it has been claimed it fed into the resentment that underpinned Hitler's political programme. And Germany met this old rogue again after the Second World War, counted in bilions, not to mention the USA's 'intellectual reparations' known as 'Operation Paperclip'.
And what was the point of Germany paying Reparations to the victors of 1945 and the US pumping bilions into West Germany as part of the 'Marshall Plan'? I guess money goes around, and around, and around.

For who gets the money? If you get it, what will you do with it, buy a house? It is a nonsense, and should be dismissed as such.

[decastro]

Reparations, one of the most stupid and damaging ideas in human history- punishment, guilt, call it what you will. The reparations that France imposed on Haiti in 1825 were not paid off until 1947, making one wonder if more money was lost to Reparations than was made from the Slavery whose abolition in Haiti it was meant to compensate. France, again, imposed such punitive reparations on Germany after the First World War, it has been claimed it fed into the resentment that underpinned Hitler's political programme. And Germany met this old rogue again after the Second World War, counted in bilions, not to mention the USA's 'intellectual reparations' known as 'Operation Paperclip'.
And what was the point of Germany paying Reparations to the victors of 1945 and the US pumping bilions into West Germany as part of the 'Marshall Plan'? I guess money goes around, and around, and around.

For who gets the money? If you get it, what will you do with it, buy a house? It is a nonsense, and should be dismissed as such.

not sure I'm following your logic here....if you could identify the families that profited from slavery and have them pay back wages, adjusting for inflation, to the families of the slaves they owned, why would this be a stupid and damaging idea? lol How could it be any more damaging than the act of slavery itself? And how could buying a house, if you don't own one already be dismissed as nonsense?