Posted on 12/02/2017 9:14:44 PM PST by Oshkalaboomboom
Donald Trump’s election felt like a revolutionary act and love him or hate him, his first year in office has rewritten the rules of the political game. That’s why it’s surprising how little political thinking seems to have shifted. There are some big lessons we can learn from Trump’s first year in office.
1) Conservatives Have Lost Faith That Good Behavior Will Be Rewarded: There was a time when conservatives took great pride in being the sort of people who wouldn’t tolerate a Ted Kennedy, Marion Barry or William Jefferson in their ranks. However, eventually conservatives have started asking a basic question: How does this benefit us? Do we get credit from the American people for being more moral than liberals? Is this helping us to succeed? What’s the pragmatic value of doing the right thing beyond feeling superior to the Left? When conservatives concluded there was no practical value to having high standards, standards declined. A lot. In a hurry. Is that a good thing? No, but when you create a situation where virtue is no longer rewarded, you can’t expect virtuous people to slam their heads into a wall forever.
2) Conservatives Have Lost Faith In The Old Guard Institutions And Personalities: The attitude seems to be, “What good did all these talk radio hosts, conservative websites and columnists do? Did the country move to the Right under Bush? Did conservatives stop it from moving Left under Obama? Our nation is going down the tubes and what you’re doing isn’t working!” Do I think that’s entirely fair? No. There are a lot of conservatives who have pushed the right approach, but getting rid of people like McCain and McConnell is hard and getting them to put the country first is nearly impossible. At the end of the day though, if there are no results, people will take that Al Davis attitude and say, “Just win, baby” and they won’t be all that particular about how it gets done.
3) We Are More Tribal Than Ever; So We Need To Have The Biggest Tribe: In the Trump era, every story is treated completely differently based on who’s involved. What’s shrugged off or treated as a scandal depends almost entirely on whether you’re talking about Moore or Franken, Trump or Hillary. This is not a good thing for the country, but it is what it is and there’s an important lesson. If everything is tribal, it’s essential that conservatives hold everyone in the tribe that we have and expand our ranks. Policy should even be thought of in those terms. Does that help the people that are allied with us? Can we use this policy to bring new people into our tribe? This also means gridlock is going to be the order of the day because when everything is tribal, cooperating with the other side gets you nothing but grief from everyone involved. Again, not saying this is good, but you have to live with the world as it is, not as you would wish it to be when it regains its sanity.
#4) Train Wrecks Sell: One of the biggest reasons Trump won the primary and the general election was that he absolutely dominated the nightly news on a day in, day out basis. Sometimes it was because of good things he said. Other times it was because he made news in a bad way. In any case, you could be sure that he’d always be in the news and that whatever it was for, it wouldn’t be boring. This has bled down to the grassroots level. There used to be an assumption amongst conservatives that you need to be smart, interesting and have some kind of principles to make a name for yourself in politics. All that has now been replaced by just being “interesting.” “Interesting” can mean pumping out conspiracy theories, being extremely offensive, being an outright propagandist, wildly speculating about things you can’t prove or just fighting with liberals. Say something mind numbingly stupid that’s gets the attention of a lot of liberals and by the end of the day, you may have another few thousand twitter followers. Get enough twitter followers and you’re treated as important, whether you spend your time pushing laughably bad news stories or picking fights with Leslie Jones. Does this make politics more exciting? Probably. Does it also make it dumber, more toxic and less principled? Absolutely.
5) The Mainstream Media Has Lost All Credibility With Much Of The Population: Most politicians live by that old Mark Twain quote, “Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.” That made sense back when the mainstream media had more credibility. Today, saying that CNN, MSNBC, the WAPO or the New York Times said it means large numbers of people will assume it’s a lie. Mainstream media outlets traded their “all the news that’s fit to print” reputation to be partisan players. What they forgot is that nobody on the other side believes partisans, which is why Trump can go toe-to-toe with them on a daily basis and survive.
6) The Presidential Soapbox Matters More Than Ever: In a world where congressional gridlock has become the new norm, the presidential soapbox has become more important than ever. Realistically, Trump is not going to have a lot of legislative victories; so using the soapbox to stick it to the NFL for disrespecting the flag or helping Republicans to get rid of bad actors like Jeff Flake helps give people a sense that he’s doing something important. Guess what? He is. For example, by taking on the NFL he sent a loud and clear message to corporations all across America. Every one of them is looking at the mess the NFL is in and thinking, “Thank goodness we’re not in that situation. We’ve always been careful about offending liberals, but I guess we better make sure we don’t upset conservatives either.” Reagan understood the importance of the presidential soapbox, but Republicans seemed to have forgotten that lesson until Trump got into office.
#7) The Republican Establishment is Hopeless and Must Be Replaced: If Trump’s election didn’t wake up the GOP establishment, then it’s hard to know what could possibly do it. The very fact that the Republicans didn’t even make a good faith effort to get rid of Obamacare after railing against it non-stop for years tells you it’s time to give up on them. They’re never going to change. What that means is that we have to get McConnell, Ryan, McCain, Flake, Corker, Graham, Alexander, Corker, Heller, Portman, Murkowski, Capito, Collins, etc. out of office if we want to save the country. These are people who will fiddle while America burns and laugh at how dumb anyone was to have ever trusted them as they stand in the ashes.
I always enjoy Hawkins’ commentaries.
Everything we are seeing boils down to his third point. Tribalism is one of the most primitive human impulses and largely impervious to rational debate.
We are indeed in a cold civil war.
Delete the de rigeur pearl-clutching about how Trump is boorish, insensitive, a conspiracy theorist, and a sexual predator on the order of Clinton, and this is a pretty good column.
If you take the turd out of the punch bowl, the punch is still real tasty!
#8 - Judge a politician by actions - not words. The pearl clutchers focus on speech as opposed to intent. To date - Trump’s actions are more conservative than any actions taken by Congress in years.
IMO - Congress would not have passed tax reform if they thought they could keep their jobs. And I don’t believe they will pass anything after tax reform if they think they can keep their jobs. They dispise Trump more than Hillary does.
I hope voters now recognize that politicians do not care about this country. 17 million dollars spent to cover settlements and no one noticed or cared. That says it all!
Between Kennedy and Trump (except for Reagan), every President has been a globalist traitor, and either publicly or secretly pro-abortion. Several might not have been rapists. Several might not have been pedophiles. Most murdered thousands of Americans and millions of foreigners. Several might not have made their fortunes through crony capitalism or blatant criminality, either before election, or after, or both.
I still believe that Trump understands that his eight years in the WH will be nothing but a holding operation (like Reagan’s) if he fails to destroy these people. Because the party platform is pro-abortion, ALL Democrats are criminals. Something less than 100% of Republicans in Congress are criminals.
bookmark
Hope they learned that when you get punched...you punch back hard. You don’t apologize for being punched.
Lesson 0:
Stand up for yourself god dammit! If you show weakness it is over and you will be manipulated by people who are less moral than yourself.
“1) Conservatives Have Lost Faith That Good Behavior Will Be Rewarded”
Think of how Mike Pence was treated when he said that he’s never alone with women other than his wife. That should be enough of a clue right there.
“3) We Are More Tribal Than Ever; So We Need To Have The Biggest Tribe:”
This is the CRITICAL POINT in the piece. What he’s saying is that not too long ago, Democrats and Republicans went 100% for ALL AMERICANS, which meant that you couldn’t give every group of people everything they wanted, but you never despised any group and you fought for even the groups that disagreed with you on many issues.
Well now the Democrats are TOTALLY THROUGH with that approach. They’ve identified their target voters (minorities and special interests) and they’ve now identified the voters they despise (whites, particularly white men, but all whites - the Deplorables).
But the Republicans kept playing the 100% game, they handed whites tax cuts (or at least tried), resisted gun control, nominated good judges when they had the White House (usually), and said good things about America. But where the 100% kicked in is that they also tried to play for Hispanics by pushing Amnesty, allowing huge chain migration, and now resisting the wall, they tried to play for blacks by protected hugely fraud-filled, and destructive, welfare programs, and they tried to play for Muslims by bashing Israel and calling Islam a ‘religion of peace’. What has it gotten them? California is now lost for good, thanks to Democrat Hispanics...and blacks still never vote more than about 12% Republican, and likely similar for Muslims.
About the only effect of this pandering was to totally piss off the white voting base, to the point where Republicans could only win when they were the only opposition to a hated Democrat president. Obviously Trump at least showed the IDIOT REPUBLICANS that being tribal does work - there were literally tens of millions of ANGRY white voters, many Democrat, many who up for grabs. While, they hated Democrat policies, they correctly felt that the Republican leadership also despised them...so if they did vote Republican, they were holding their noses. Trump gave them a REASON TO VOTE, which, of course, showed in the Midwest...a place that the Republican leadership had TOTALLY WRITTEN OFF...and for no reason other than that they didn’t give a crap about working class whites.
Those are really important points.
Repealing the Obamacare mandate is in the Senate tax bill. If that’s in the final bill, we can assume the establishment finally got the message. If not, we can assume they are still the Swamp - self-proclaimed elites who think they have a right to rule us - and not our representatives. I pray they will choose wisely.
They won’t learn that until the entire current crop that believes in making themselves personally wealthy by extortion and skimming off ever-increasing Federal expenditures is gone. Until then, D.C. “conservatives” will continue to have enabling the socialists as a top priority. Enabling and befriending socialists keeps these “conservatives” in the gravy.
Many conservatives can never learn because they will not learn.
They are so wrapped up in sanctimonious self righteousness, no change in outlook can penetrate
Many conservatives can never learn because they will not learn.
They are so wrapped up in sanctimonious self righteousness, no change in outlook can penetrate.
They are hobbyists. Some people like model trains. They like virtue signalling their “conservative” moral superiority more than actually winning elections and advancing conservative principles incrementally.
amen!
Lesson 8 - Liberals use dog-whistles, various names they call conservatives in particular, to get conservatives to tear down their own in the desperate hope of looking more moral and getting praise from liberals who don’t even apply a fraction of the same moral standard to their own.
So stop tearing at your own leaders as your enemies want you to do, support the true conservative leadership, and ignore the liberals who use various smears to turn you against each other.
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