Posted on 03/05/2012 12:55:08 PM PST by darrellmaurina
Of the various expressions of right-wing hysteria that have flowered over the past three years—goldbuggery, birtherism, death panels at home and imaginary apology tours by President Obama abroad—perhaps the strain that has taken deepest root within mainstream Republican circles is the terror that the achievements of the Obama administration may be irreversible, and that the time remaining to stop permanent nightfall is dwindling away.
“America is approaching a ‘tipping point’ beyond which the Nation will be unable to change course,” announces the dark, old-timey preamble to Paul Ryan’s “The Roadmap Plan,” a statement of fiscal principles that shaped the budget outline approved last spring by 98 percent of the House Republican caucus. Rick Santorum warns his audiences, “We are reaching a tipping point, folks, when those who pay are the minority and those who receive are the majority.” Even such a sober figure as Mitt Romney regularly says things like “We are only inches away from no longer being a free economy,” and that this election “could be our last chance.”
The Republican Party is in the grips of many fever dreams. But this is not one of them. To be sure, the apocalyptic ideological analysis—that “freedom” is incompatible with Clinton-era tax rates and Massachusetts-style health care—is pure crazy. But the panicked strategic analysis, and the sense of urgency it gives rise to, is actually quite sound. The modern GOP—the party of Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes—is staring down its own demographic extinction. Right-wing warnings of impending tyranny express, in hyperbolic form, well-grounded dread: that conservative America will soon come to be dominated, in a semi-permanent fashion, by an ascendant Democratic coalition hostile to its outlook and interests. And this impending doom has colored the party’s frantic, fearful response to the Obama presidency.
The GOP has reason to be scared...
(Excerpt) Read more at nymag.com ...
Check this out...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kiaw0hgB-fg
I think the author is blind to the flood of small scale tyrannies that govern where, with what and how we build our homes, medicate ourselves and our families, feed our families, travel, make our livings, etc.. Absolute control is essential to progressive autocracy. Freedom is abhorrent to the left.
Yeah good luck keeping all those who voted for Obama in 2008 vote for him again in 2012 with almost $ 4 a gallon gas price. All the distraction, lies, deceipts, etc... would not work when people are paying not only high prices for gas but for everything else because of high gas price. The most powerful factor in elections is the voters pocket book and when the pocket book is hurting nothing else would matter.
Demographics are not favoring democrat despite all the hand wringing from our side and the delusion from the left side. After the 2010 census the Republican states gained a net total of 10 electoral votes over the democrat states.
An attempt to instill a defeatist, panicky attitude among conservatives.
The GOP sealed its fate Almost 7 years ago. And further sealed it now. They will not put up a viable candidate who is not fake and phony. In in Romney’s case they are actually giving us RoBama.
You must be referring to GWB’s liberal second inaugural, Jan. 20, 2005.
The issue is that the country will break up...the US will be finished but the Rump Core US (the Fly over country) will go on ....while the lib areas will become third world fiefdoms akin to Mexico...
If both Romney and Santorum, Gingrich and Paul (to some degree) understand this economic and overbearing revenue reality, then it amazes me that the left continues to suck off the ever growing minority of the supply of this revenue, knowing it’ll dry up eventually...
A total rejection of any politico abdicating the continuation and or enabling the continuation of this taxation policy needs to resound deep and hard into these people...
The problem is we are saddled with having to choose between the lesser of the two evils (AGAIN!!!)...One of the evils will continue to spend us into oblivion, and the other side is feckless and cowardly, unable (or in some cases unwilling to challenge the other side) to correct the problem...
2012 is a lose/lose situation now...
I tood this to mean that the GOP must get immigration under control and make better efforts to motivate white voters in the midwest.
A gain in electoral votes comes from an increase in population, the question is were most of those new voters conservatives? If not then the advantage is lost to the other side as when NC and VA went for Obama in 2008.
RipSawyer is right.
Yes, conservative states are gaining in population while rustbelt states are losing. There are many reasons for that, and one of them is that conservative fiscal policies at the state level encourage job creation.
The problem is that not everybody moving to a conservative state is conservative. Short term, people fleeing the rustbelt to get a job results in more electoral votes for a conservative-dominated state, and since with a few exceptions nearly all of the electoral college votes are from winner-take-all states, that means places like Texas gain influence as conservative powerhouses.
Long-term, we have a major demographic problem if we can't convince Hispanics other than Cubans to become Republicans. Texas is not a swing state today, but Florida is, and California — the home of Ronald Reagan — is now in the Democratic Party's camp.
Once key Southern states cross the tipping point to have large liberal minorities, RINOs will become the norm, and not long afterward, those states will become Democratic rather than RINO.
MSF BU said that “the GOP must get immigration under control and make better efforts to motivate white voters in the midwest.”
I don't see any realistic way to control immigration as long as we have lots of low-wage backbreaking jobs that most Americans simply won't do. Economics are dominating our illegal immigration problem, and it is businessmen — farmers or meatpackers in many cases — who are behind the illegal immigration problem.
If someone can show me how to convince Americans to do farm labor that most Americans haven't done for a century, or stockyard and meatpacking work that even a century ago was typically done by low-wage Irish, Italian, or Eastern European immigrants, I'm open to saying we should close our borders. I simply don't see a way to do that.
If we can't close our borders — and I don't think we can — we have to find a way to convert our current illegal immigration into legal immigration that actually meets the needs of American business and excludes people with backgrounds we don't want, much as was done in the 1800s at Ellis Island. In the meantime, we need to do what the DAR was very good at doing in the 1800s and early 1900s, namely, teaching American values to the new immigrants.
If we don't do that, we're lost as a nation.
What presently gives him the vapors is the delicious possibility that we stupid, illiterate, Sky-God-worshipping, conspiracy-mongering, minority-hating, gun-toting, knuckle-dragging redneck reprobates might soon be going the way of the dodo and the carrier pigeon. Toward this clearly desirable end, Mr. Chait can hardly restrain his enthusiasm.
And soon will come that happy day when he and his liberal party pals can remove their Guy Fawkes masks and stop pretending to respect an American Constitution they have always detested, or making believe that they approve of free enterprise. No longer will they have to feign admiration for our military or falsely profess to respect others' freedom to express ideas they despise, such as that obviously crazy notion that human rights come from God and not the government, about which all educated people now agree.
What a weight will have been lifted from their shoulders! And then they can get on with the serious business of making the world a Better Place, beginning of course by "dealing with" those who just won't go along, because they're criminals or selfish or insane. Old Joe Stalin knew how to deal with people like that.
I’ve read the NYT article and several like it and unfortunately, they’re probably correct. Demographics is destiny and demographics is all against the anglo/republican party. What’s to replace it? I don’t know.
Oddly enough, I don’t think that what will happen after the demise of the angl/Republican party is going to be particularly pleasing to the Democrats. Never forget, the Democrats ruined our lives and after the end of the Republican party, the Democrats enemies are our friends.
Most of the low wage work we can do without or pay more. If that means some fields go unharvested then so be it, the ‘magic hand’ will work to find the right price for labor without flooding us with unskilled immigrants (while shifting the costs of education and health care to the state). Which industry collapses without immigrant labor? I agree with your other points.
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