The post-Bush-doctrine Republican Party is no longer guided by an idealistic and impractical vision for defeating radical Islam. All it has left is a residue of fear and nationalism, ripe for manipulation by a demagogue. The logic of Trump’s conquest…
What we are talking about is potential generational damage to the Republican Party. Consider this historical comparison: In 1956 the Republican nominee, Dwight D. Eisenhower, won nearly 40 percent of the black vote. In 1960, Richard Nixon won nearly a…
Negative partisanship has softened the Wall Street Journal too. The day after Trump released a list of selections for the Supreme Court, the Journal’s editors reassured readers: “Nothing is certain with Mr. Trump, but that’s far preferable to the certainty…
I would scarcely doubt evidence showing that the Trump campaign was a controlled experiment in what makes GOP voters tick. The remnants of the Tea Party, the biblically literate Evangelicals, the remaining adherents to the old Reagan coalition: They went…
Finally, Trump proved that many professional True Conservatives, many of the same people who flayed RINOs and demanded purity throughout the Obama era, were actually just playing a convenient part. From Fox News’ 10 p.m. hour to talk radio to…
The Republican neo-imperialists believe that the empire needs to be more aggressively defended and wherever possible expanded. The Democratic neo-imperialists believe that the empire needs mainly to be secured, or, if expanded, expanded via collaboration. The citizenry appears somewhat agnostic or passive on the main questions, except when unsettled by events suggestive of a possible un-managed and abrupt rollback that would also entail a downward adjustment in consumption and other disruptions of accustomed expectations – a possibility or set of possibilities that few outside the neo-imperial mainstream seem equipped to analyze concretely.
If Mitt Romney as presidential candidate is driven by a religious – indeed, prophetic and messianic – mission too closely held and too easily misunderstood for public words, then its essential convergence with the politics of the Republican right would be of more than biographical, cultural, or esoteric interest: It amounts to the consolidation of a new theo-political establishment waiting only for a mass-electoral mandate.
the post-CU world is a world in which the 0.0001% are financing a remarkably effective satire undermining themselves and their chosen spokespeople: Diminishing returns as morality play.
The real nightmare is already ongoing, and everyone in the family knows it: of a party splintering, each main ideological element of the Reagan Era coalition exposed both as insufficient on its own terms and as unable to discover a compelling rationale for uniting with its customary allies.
