Posted on 07/26/2016 4:33:23 AM PDT by Kaslin
"Make America One Again." That was the stated theme of the last night of the Republican National Convention. In the welter of analysis of Donald Trump's acceptance speech, few have commented on it, but it's worth taking it seriously.
Liberal commentators have dwelled repeatedly on Trump's "dark" and "dystopian" view of America. Apparently, you're not supposed to think badly of our nation when we have a black Democratic president.
This is mostly just partisan spin. The candidate of the out party invariably takes a dim view of the way things are going. Yes, they usually add more uplift than Trump provided.
But when two-thirds of voters think the nation is not moving in the right direction, pessimism does not go against the grain. You heard similar pessimism, although about different things, in the campaign for the Democratic nomination. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders depicted the nation as if we were in the seventh and eighth years of a Bush presidency.
Unlike other recent acceptance speeches, Trump's made almost no mention of history, except for a reference to a Lyndon Johnson IRS regulation, and made no attempt to put his candidacy in historical context. There was no mention of Ronald Reagan.
Nevertheless, the theme of "making America one again" is in line with the historical character of the Republican Party, which has always had a central core of people seen as typical Americans but are never by themselves a majority. They must attract others to their cause.
In contrast, the Democratic Party has been a coalition -- sometimes fractured, sometimes a majority -- of disparate minority groups: white Southerners and big city immigrants in the 19th century, black churchgoers and gentry liberals today.
Hillary Clinton is trying to reassemble the 2012 Obama 51 percent majority by offering something to blacks, something else to Hispanics, another thing to millennials and LGBTQs.
Trump is doing something different. He seeks to appeal to different kinds of people as all being Americans. On Thursday night, Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a Mississippi native, quoted an 1861 Abraham Lincoln speech in Cleveland: "If all do not join now to save the good old ship of Union this voyage, nobody will have a chance to pilot her on another voyage."
Thursday night speakers included the Rev. Jerry Falwell and Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who proclaimed himself proudly gay, proudly Republican and, most of all, proudly American.
In his acceptance speech Trump promised to protect LGBTQs (he charmed the audience by stumbling over the acronym) from a "hateful foreign ideology" and thanked evangelicals (while admitting that he is far from being one himself) for their support.
The message is that the culture wars are over. As for "who uses which bathroom," the latest cultural brouhaha, Thiel's answer was: "Who cares?"
Other arguments have become stale. Abortion won't be criminalized, but abortions have been rarer and the number of abortion clinics is declining, and not just because of restrictive state laws.
Same-sex marriage has been legalized everywhere by the Supreme Court, saving Republicans from the task of opposing majority opinion. But you don't have to participate (I haven't seen any recent cases of bakers sued for refusing to making wedding cakes for gay couples). This is in line with basic etiquette, which says you can decline a wedding invitation without giving a reason.
The debate over these issues seems stale, and it's not clear that Democrats' efforts to pump up their constituencies' enthusiasm or arouse their fears will work; we'll get some idea in Philadelphia. But it may prove hard to provoke alarm in those who have been mostly winning on these issues.
Democrats have a more target-rich environment in attacking Trump as volatile and unreliable, as presumptive vice-presidential nominee Tim Kaine did Saturday. More difficult will be attempts to present a sunnier alternative to Trump's "dark" narrative.
It's true that, as Barack Obama said Friday, crime is down compared to 30 years ago, and increases in urban homicides may just be, as he said, an "uptick." But Trump's numbers are accurate also. A president who people thought would be something like Martin Luther King has sounded more like Al Sharpton.
It's hard to make the case that things are not really as bad as you think they are, and that sophisticated people realize that terrorist incidents are less common than bathtub accidents, that murders of police are less of a problem than bathroom issues. We'll see how the Democrats do.
It’s about ending the divisions started by Obama.
Exactly.
THAT'S why there was no negative press about "Making America One" .... if there HAD been, it would have dethroned THEIR meme.
The way to shut down abortion clinics are with state regs for their meeting hospital codes. They seldom do.
This is another reason: Tim Kaine promises bill to legalize illegal immigrants in ‘first 100 days’
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jul/25/tim-kaine-promises-bill-legalize-illegal-immigrant/
That and record gun sales as terrorism, and BLM rampages and Police killings along with increased crime and RAT gun control efforts are being pushed. Along with all those refugees and illegals bringing wiped out diseases into the USA. The threat of 20+ thousand more non-vetted muzzie refugees is not a good thing.
“....when you have a black alien muslim democrat pResident.....” seems more complete. JMHO.
Liberals think that ‘make America one again” means that we want to kill them all so there’s only us left! Projection of what they’d like to do to us...
Michael Barone is a smart guy, but this statement is dumb, dumb, dumb. The reason he hasn't seen any cases of bakers (or florists) being sued 'recently' is that the word is out...issue a couple six digit fines and the message is clear...resist the pink Mafia and we'll ruin your business.
So it's the traditional conservatives who must surrender their rights of association and our freedom of speech,and we'll all get along just fine, is that it Michael?
And all we have to do is lay down our arms in the culture wars that were declared upon us by the left, every bit as much as the muzzies have declared war on the rest of our culture -- and then we will have "peace," and "one-ness" is that is it, snowflake?
If Trump understands math at all, Trump needs to start appealing for the support of the 25% of delegates who represented 25% of the (R) base that was at his convention, instead of that 1%-strong ass poker wing that is destroying our freedoms and culture every bit as much as the muzzies with the bombs and the knives.
Barone is usually fairly circumspect and historically informed. In this piece he's just been co-opted like so many others calling themselves conservatives have this election season.
Since when did conservatism transform from being about this...
... to being cajoled at the Republican convention on acceptance speech night into embracing these cultural mutants?
FReegards!
Really? A majority of the Supreme Court is NOT majority opinion. If it were, gay "marriage" would have never gone to court because we all would have already voted it into law on one of the many chances we have had to do so.
There is no such entity as gay "marriage" in any case. Marriage is a legal framework developed to protect the biological relationship that people of opposite sexes form to produce children. Gays cannot form such a biological relationship; hence, they cannot marry.
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