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To: rurgan; pissant; SunkenCiv; TigersEye; Impy

People do hate both parties, and for good reason. The question is, how can we gain political power most rapidly? Clearly not by horning in on the DNC. A third party? Too slow. The GOP? Bingo. The GOP is more used to us, even though they too have been halfway indoctrinated in universities.

The Ruling Class [mentioned frequently by Rush] is a very deep study of our current condition. It also addresses this problem:

America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution
By Angelo M. Codevilla from the July 2010 - August 2010 issue
http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/16/americas-ruling-class-and-the

The Political Divide

Important as they are, our political divisions are the iceberg’s tip. When pollsters ask the American people whether they are likely to vote Republican or Democrat in the next presidential election, Republicans win growing pluralities. But whenever pollsters add the preferences “undecided,” “none of the above,” or “tea party,” these win handily, the Democrats come in second, and the Republicans trail far behind. That is because while most of the voters who call themselves Democrats say that Democratic officials represent them well, only a fourth of the voters who identify themselves as Republicans tell pollsters that Republican officeholders represent them well. Hence officeholders, Democrats and Republicans, gladden the hearts of some one-third of the electorate — most Democratic voters, plus a few Republicans. This means that Democratic politicians are the ruling class’s prime legitimate representatives and that because Republican politicians are supported by only a fourth of their voters while the rest vote for them reluctantly, most are aspirants for a junior role in the ruling class. In short, the ruling class has a party, the Democrats. But some two-thirds of Americans — a few Democratic voters, most Republican voters, and all independents — lack a vehicle in electoral politics.

Sooner or later, well or badly, that majority’s demand for representation will be filled. Whereas in 1968 Governor George Wallace’s taunt “there ain’t a dime’s worth of difference” between the Republican and Democratic parties resonated with only 13.5 percent of the American people, in 1992 Ross Perot became a serious contender for the presidency (at one point he was favored by 39 percent of Americans vs. 31 percent for G.H.W. Bush and 25 percent for Clinton) simply by speaking ill of the ruling class. Today, few speak well of the ruling class. Not only has it burgeoned in size and pretense, but it also has undertaken wars it has not won, presided over a declining economy and mushrooming debt, made life more expensive, raised taxes, and talked down to the American people. Americans’ conviction that the ruling class is as hostile as it is incompetent has solidified. The polls tell us that only about a fifth of Americans trust the government to do the right thing. The rest expect that it will do more harm than good and are no longer afraid to say so. [snip]

If, for example, you are Laurence Tribe in 1984, Harvard professor of law, leftist pillar of the establishment, you can “write” your magnum opus by using the products of your student assistant, Ron Klain. A decade later, after Klain admits to having written some parts of the book, and the other parts are found to be verbatim or paraphrases of a book published in 1974, you can claim (perhaps correctly) that your plagiarism was “inadvertent,” and you can count on the Law School’s dean, Elena Kagan, to appoint a committee including former and future Harvard president Derek Bok that issues a secret report that “closes” the incident. Incidentally, Kagan ends up a justice of the Supreme Court. Not one of these people did their jobs: the professor did not write the book himself, the assistant plagiarized instead of researching, the dean and the committee did not hold the professor accountable, and all ended up rewarded. By contrast, for example, learned papers and distinguished careers in climatology at MIT (Richard Lindzen) or UVA (S. Fred Singer) are not enough for their questions about “global warming” to be taken seriously. For our ruling class, identity always trumps.

Much less does membership in the ruling class depend on high academic achievement. ... But didn’t [they] go to Harvard and Princeton and Stanford? Didn’t most of them get good grades? Yes. But ... getting into America’s “top schools” is less a matter of passing exams than of showing up with acceptable grades and an attractive social profile. American secondary schools are generous with their As. Since the 1970s, it has been virtually impossible to flunk out of American colleges. And it is an open secret that “the best” colleges require the least work and give out the highest grade point averages. No, our ruling class recruits and renews itself not through meritocracy but rather by taking into itself people whose most prominent feature is their commitment to fit in. The most successful neither write books and papers that stand up to criticism nor release their academic records. Thus does our ruling class stunt itself through negative selection. But the more it has dumbed itself down, the more it has defined itself by the presumption of intellectual superiority. [snip]


188 posted on 08/15/2010 5:26:34 AM PDT by Arthur Wildfire! March (Want stimulus? Look to Harding, JFK, and Reagan. Tax cuts work. FAnnie/FReddie hurt.)
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To: Arthur Wildfire! March; AdmSmith; Berosus; bigheadfred; blueyon; Convert from ECUSA; dervish; ...
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Thanks Arthur Wildfire! March.


189 posted on 08/15/2010 6:27:22 AM PDT by SunkenCiv ("Fools learn from experience. I prefer to learn from the experience of others." -- Otto von Bismarck)
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To: Arthur Wildfire! March

A third party wouldn’t be slow it would failure, just split the vote.

A conservative GOP is the only thing that can bring good government to the country. If conservatives can’t take over the GOP they sure as hell can’t form a successful third party that supplants the GOP. In Canada in the right fractured into 2 parties. The left won every election until the 2 parties united.


190 posted on 08/16/2010 5:01:41 PM PDT by Impy (DROP. OUT. MARK. KIRK.)
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