Posted on 02/16/2016 7:50:29 AM PST by Trumpinator
"Get a job, you racists, and stop playing the victim! Don't you remember the '80s?"
Does that sound like a successful political program to you? Does it sound like an adequate response when perhaps one-fourth or more of your party's voters are staging a minor revolt? Of course not. And yet, that is effectively the message the Republican elite is delivering to Donald Trump's disaffected white working-class supporters.
I recently suggested that the Republican Party, and the conservative movement, offer next to nothing to working-class Trump supporters. There are no obvious conservative policies that will generate the sort of growth needed to raise the standard of living for these working-class voters. Instead, the GOP's Powers That Be make a great show of obedience and deference to the center-right donor class, even when that donor class' preferred policies — endless war, unlimited immigration, and slashing tax burdens on the wealthy — have almost no relation to conservative ideas or even popular opinion.
Several columnists have responded critically to my original piece. They claimed to argue with me. Instead, they confirmed my thesis.
(Excerpt) Read more at theweek.com ...
Myself, I am animated by the immigration issue and the anti-free trade positions so the small town people's issues identified here have not impacted me but I am sure they have lots of others. But just because they have not impacted me does not mean I ignore the plight of other conservatives identified in this editorial.
Oh, I’ve failed Trump’s supporters? What will I do with my life now? LOL
The conservatives commentariat and the rino party have been taken over by the comfortable and well-heeled.
They spew their purists theories from ivory towers.
In the meantime their brainchildren - Nafta, Cafta, free trade - are destroying our middle class.
They have not brought prosperity. Their theories have brought dependency and joblessness.
“The conservatives commentariat and the rino party have been taken over by the comfortable and well-heeled.
They spew their purists theories from ivory towers.
In the meantime their brainchildren - Nafta, Cafta, free trade - are destroying our middle class.”
A+
And yes it is that simple.
Yes Smoot/ Hawley was great for the middle class.
isolationisms was very good too. (well until Dec 7 ‘41)
Best people in the best places was excellent ..(circa wiz-kids in and McNamara)
If you like how America has gone downhill since 1988, vote for the Republican Establishment candidate and keep up that trend.
I want America to be great again. I’m voting for Trump.
“Conservative” policies have failed America.... Because many of the policies that get espoused by the “conservative” elites are absolutely destructive to America.
WTO, NAFTA, et al are all failures and there is nothing “conservative” about them, yet year after year, the party and its elites try to argue giving 3rd world despots open access to our consumers while expecting nothing in return is “good” for America. It’s ludicrous.
Someone tell me again how the CEO of Countrywide never spent a day in prison when he pumped and dumped his company stock??
Some “Conservative” policies haven’t just failed the blue collar worker, some of them are completely failing America and there is nothing conservative about them.
He means the GOP establishment conservatives in the article.
----------
That had zero to do with the Great Depression but free traders have latched onto it.
“He means the GOP establishment conservatives in the article.”
Then he doesn’t know the difference between the GOP establishment and Conservatives.
Ted Cruz is no conservative. Mr Filibuster sat on his hands and allowed the Senate to pass funding for Planned Parenthood and did nothing.
Donald Trump, as a private citizen, could only talk about that trainwreck. Ted Cruz was ON that train and didn’t pull the emergency brake. Don’t blame Donald Trump for that, blame Ted Cruz.
The only thing Ted was conserving was his energy to run the faux presidental campaign.
The conservatives commentariat and the rino party have been taken over by the comfortable and well-heeled.
They spew their purists theories from ivory towers.
In the meantime their brainchildren - Nafta, Cafta, free trade - are destroying our middle class.
They have not brought prosperity. Their theories have brought dependency and joblessness.
............................................................
I agree and they have brought the death of the American Dream. With the Middle Class eliminated,the lower class reduced to slavery, the upper class rules and delivers us to anonymity in the world. Voila, the New World Order.
I’m not a Trump guy. But he has done something similar to Ron Paul. He has brought voters into the party that didn’t vote for R’s in 2012 or 2016—blue collar workers, Reagan Democrats, Blue Dog Democrats, whatever you want to call them.
The R elite didn’t like the Ron Paul supporters (too many tattoos?) and permanently alienated them from the Republican party with it’s execrable behavior at the convention with Rule 40.
The GOP-E doesn’t like Trump supporters either. The article does a nice job of pointing that out. And I suspect they are planning a similar slapdown for at the convention this year. The contempt the GOP-E has for blue collar folks is contemptible and will again alienate a huge and hugely important demographic from the party.
It’s a cultural thing and we have to throw the snobs out of control of the party.
Lots of them have become rich off of conservatism.
Not by getting results, just by stringing the right thoughts together to get us pumped-up with no plan after that. We got lots of huge talk against gay marriage and Obamacare, but all we ended up doing was shaking our fists at the radio and computer screens while the left slipped it right through.
When we depended on court picks from people these guys told us to “trust” to stop these things in their tracks, we instead got shafted.
So when people decided to try something different, we get the “happy conservative warriors” bringing down the hammer on us for being “disloyal”. We were “great Americans” until we got “out of line”.
A lot of them seem to just want to protect their revenue flow than actually solve anything.
It is not Trump who has us 20 trillion in debt and on the verge of being a welfare nation.
It is these GOP-E and Liberal politicians.
I know that you know that they are the problem, and that electing one of them again is simply banging our head against a wall hoping for a different outcome.
We have had a three-decades long experiment with free trade.
The American people are in the process of deciding that it has failed. Things are about to change.
You’re absolutely right, dearest xzins.
RNC, GOP-E and their professional politician candidates offer little or nothing more than the status quo.
Not so with Donald Trump.
Not so with Bernie Sanders, who wants to turn our Republic into a Socialist regime, but at least, he’s upfront about it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/business/10every.html?_r=0
The Smoot-Hawley Act Did not cause the Great Depression:
However, a number of well-known people, especially my former colleagues at The Wall Street Journal editorial page, the late Robert Bartley (a genuinely great guy) and Jude Wanniski, began in the mid-1970s to popularize the notion that Smoot-Hawley and not monetary policy mistakes was the real cause of the Great Depression.
This popularization was a form of intellectual entrepreneurship, in which people carve out an appealing idea and then try to make capital of it.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2010/04/protectionism_didnt_cause_the.html
Let’s start by reminding ourselves of a basic fact: The Depression’s cause was monetary. The Federal Reserve had allowed the money supply to balloon excessively during the late 1920s, causing it to pile up in the stock market as a bubble. The Fed then panicked, miscalculated, and let the money supply collapse by a third by 1933, depriving the economy of the liquidity it needed to breathe. Trade had nothing to do with it.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/04/protectionism_didnt_cause_the.html#ixzz40Ld9vjvK
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook
I’ve almost convinced myself that our “heroes in commentary land” have led us in the direction that loses.
Are they a 5th column?
Maybe.
It’s clear in the article who he means. The title was not my own.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.