TequilaMockingbird
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User ID: 3097
Perhaps it's simplistic to say they simply traded places, but their "axioms and organizing principles" absolutely changed, and in many cases were reversed.
...and I don't think that this claim is borne out by the historical record.
The Republican Party of the late 1800s is a big tent coalition organized around a core of aligned religious and business interests and that remains a fairly accurate description of the Republican Party today. This along with the fact a man like William McKinley (with his rhetoric about unskilled immigration is driving wages down, and advocacy for higher tariffs and lower taxes to promote investment in American business) is not only immediately recognizable as "Republican" within the context of the contemporary parties but surprisingly relevant for someone who's been dead for over 120 years, is strong evidence against the claim that the party's axioms and organizing principles have changed significantly in the intervening years.
TequilaMockingbird
1mo ago
I think that is a fairly reasonable and accurate read.
My point is that the core axioms and organizing principles haven't changed much since the reconstruction period.
I hadn't seen that specific formulation before but it does hit the nail on the head.
That the "southern strategy" gets hung on Nixon is one of the ways you can tell that its a lie. Current year Democrats are capital-D Desperate to erace Wallace and the dixiecrats from the popular consciousness lest anyone start asking akward questions.
Oh hey, I feel called out.
Maybe a little, but you are not the only one nor the most egregious.
The modern Republican party was formed from the ashes of the Whigs (who were very much a big and incoherent tent of anti-Jacksonians), and eventually accrued some northern Democrats, along with a substantial share of the Know-Nothings...
None of this contradicts the claim that...
What would become the modern republican party was founded in the late 1850s and explicitly organized as a big tent coalition of regional religious and business interests who were united in their opposition to slavery and support for westward expansion...
In fact Pam from The Office might even say that they are the same picture.
YeS THat iS bAsICalLY CorREcT. How does it not matter?
It doesn't matter for the reasons I go into in the following paragraphs. To answer your question, "the big lie" is that the underlying axioms and organizational principles of the respective parties today are fundamentally different from what they were before. That the parties today are somehow "the reverse" of what they were in the 19th century. Where as the truth is that the positions of parties never changed, what changed was the status quo.
Whereas Red Tribe really likes to bring up that the Democratic Party dominated the post-Confederate South and that most KKKers were Democrats, but sneers at the "Southern Strategy" and the great flipping of the Solid South as if it were some kind of myth.
It is a myth, the so called "Southern Strategy" is another one of those "Big Lies". Contra the popular narrative Nixon didn't win the 68 election by inviting segregationists into the fold. He won because the Democrats ended up splitting their votes between Wallace and Humphrys and a lot of people on both sides of the aisle found themselves suddenly receptive to Nixon's appeals to "Law-and-order" in the immediate aftermath of MLK's assassination and the associated race riots. Why current year Democrats might want to sweep these associations under the rug is left as an excercise for the reader.
where did all the Republican voters come from?
Reagan won a supermajority by making an effort to appeal to working class Democrats and blacks in addition to the existing Republican base.
A cynic might even suggest that Reagan's success in this endeavor explains both the Democratic party's abandonment of labour-based principals and the increasingly "populist" tenor of the GOP.
TequilaMockingbird
1mo ago
In particular, why aren’t pole arms more widely used instead?
Speaking as a history nerd/reenactor, presumably for the same reason they weren't used widely in street fights back in the day.
Shields and Pole-arms were the pre-firearm equivalent of an assault rifle or machine gun today. Far more effective than a side-arm such as a sword or dagger but also far harder to conceal and sending specific social signals regarding not just a willingness to fight but an intent to.
You walk down the streets of a town carrying a scutum or a halberd and you are not obviously part of a specific group/organization or wearing the king's colors people are going to make assumptions.
TequilaMockingbird
1mo ago
Agreed. As i said in last week's thread on the topic, I don't think a lot the posters here really grasp how unpopular IdPol is outside of Academia and Twitter.
TequilaMockingbird
1mo ago
What would you have me do?
Tell them that it's silly to capitalize one and not the other because races are not monolithic entities.
It should be remembered that it was the Democrat party that broke the ice on invoking White Identity Politics directly to muster political support. The Republican party has only ever used proxy rhetoric like "they have to come legally" or "tough on crime", but looking at the recent Convention it's clear the Republican strategy is to go for the Big Tent rather than directly appeal to white voters.
No one familiar with the histories of the respective parties should be remotely surprised by this. One of the proverbial "big lies" the Blue Tribe likes to tell itself is that the Republican and Democratic Parties of the mid-19th century are somehow fundamentally different entities from the Republicans and Democrats of today. "Read more early American history" they'll sneer while pointedly ignoring the most pertinent elements of said history.
What would become the modern republican party was founded in the late 1850s and explicitly organized as a big tent coalition of regional religious and business interests who were united in their opposition to slavery and support for westward expansion. The specific policies under debate may have changed over the last 170 years or so but this core of aligned religious and business interests along with it's identity and organization as a "big tent" coalition is still plain to see in the contemporary party. It's right there in the colloquial name of "Grand Old Party".
When pressed to defend this radical separation between past and present, the Blue Tribe response is typically something along the lines of "bUt RePuBlIcAnS dUrInG ThE cIvIl WaR wErE tHe PrOgReSiVeS oF tHeIr TiMe". Even if that statement is true i don't think it matters.
Durring the latter half of the 19th century Slavery was defeated, the West was won, and the GOP began to shift from fighting over territory to consolidating and building upon what they had won. In short while the axioms attitudes and identity of the party remained consistant they became "conservatives" in the sense that they were no longer working to overturn the status-quo they were working to maintain it.
Guys like Glenn Reynolds get sneered at by all "right thinking people" for pointing out that "Democrats are the Real Racists" (and always have been) but when lies are the norm, telling the truth can be a revolutionary act.
In the 19th century racial segregation and discrimination was both legal and popular and this is the status quo that "conservative" Democrats fought to defend before they became "progressives" fighting against the status quo.
In the first half of the 20th, the status quo that "Progressive" Democrats like Woodrow Wilson looked to weaken and push back against was that which had been forcibly imposed during reconstruction and subsequently codified in the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments. While the branding may have changed ("safe spaces" replacing "separate but equal") over the last century the position of contemporary "Progressive" has not. They are still fighting for legalized racial discrimination/segregation against a Republican opposition party.
In otherwords, this is not...
...a huge shift in messaging from just a few years ago in the midst of the Floyd riots.
It is a return to thier normal position after the George Floyd riots and associated fallout/backlash forced the pro-IdPol faction of the DNC to backpedal and "hide thier power" for a bit.
TequilaMockingbird
1mo ago
Is the hatred really "irrational" though?
TequilaMockingbird
1mo ago
The "the paranoid 'mark of the beast' folks" either bailed out of politics years ago to avoid becoming "of the world", or are holding thier noses and voting for Trump out of civic duty and hopes of maintaining a conservative majority in the USSC.
The rest are electorally irrelevant and if the Republicans think they can pick up even half of a percent of the minority vote by pushing them in front of the proverbial bus they will and they should.
TequilaMockingbird
1mo ago
Trump is the exception to the rule when it comes to nepotism though. He was openly nepotistic in the appointments he made as president
Citations needed.
TequilaMockingbird
1mo ago
I started writing a similar comment but i think you said it better.
That's just one of several reasons that I think picking Romney would alienate even more potential Trump voters than picking Cheney.
Meanwhile the Democrats would presumably dust off all thier old "Mormon Christo-Fascists puting women in binders, dogs on roofs, and blacks in chains" talking points from 2012 for round 2.
Even if Romney agreed, (which as you point out is doubtful) he'd be a terrible pick.
I feel like this is an underappeciated factor both here and in the general discourse that also plays into wider trend of Democrats being increasingly unmarried and childless.
Even if they're not participating in the economy directly, wives will be concerned about thier husband's prospects and mothers that of thier children.
A cynic might theorize that recognition of this "family dynamic" is at least partially behind the hate Trump's pick of Vance as VP has gotten from certain elements of both the left and right.
TequilaMockingbird
2mo ago
I am in full agreement with you on 1, ambivalent about 2 (i think there are reasonable arguments to be made either way), and agree that 3 is an obvious end-run around not having enough votes to impeach.
TequilaMockingbird
2mo ago
Rubio would be an ok choice but is probably more useful to the party as a Senator. I don't know enough about Burgam to have an opinion, but can say with confidence that Romney would've been an absolutely terrible choice likely to alienate both Republicans and Democrats. Cheney or Manchin would come with less baggage than Romney.
Agreed, as i said in last week's thread.
The people turned off by Vance's "weird views on sex and gender" weren't going to vote Republican in the first place.
The people who applauded when the Democrats tried to put a cross-dressing luggage thief in charge of US nuclear policy are now telling us that Vance is weird and disgusting for saying that Men and Women should want to start families. In my opinion there is only one sane response.
Vance shores up Trump's position with the donors and establishment Republicans which is what he needs.
TequilaMockingbird
2mo ago
The more interesting question IMO is where is all this talk about "swapping out Vance" coming from?
Is it some sort of Journo-List thing?
TequilaMockingbird
2mo ago
Dude's gotta get those clicks.
Then we can reasonably surmise that to the degree that "debates don't matter" polling matters even less.
TequilaMockingbird
2mo ago
Yes but the Democratic Party's structure is also much more centralized than the Republican's and even if it weren't Trump would have to want to replace Vance which begs the question "Why?"
The people turned off by Vance's "weird views on sex and gender" were never going to vote Republican in the first place.
In the meantime Vance shores up Trump's position with the donors.
Its relatively trivial for a national-level or properly equipped private entity to determine where a missile or artillery shell was launched from. The trickier part is figuring out who it came from, but given that Hezbollah has been lobbing missiles and shells into Northern Isreal and the Golan Hieghts on a near weekly basis for years now, and Arab militants' reputation for scrupulus fire-discipline, I think woke claims about this being some sort of Israeli false flag can be safely dismissed barring further evidence.
TequilaMockingbird
2mo ago
Praise the Sun.
Im sorry but the people calling this an "escalation" have no clue what they're talking about.
The reason the upper leadership of Hamas, Hezbollah, Et Al. Take up residence in places like Qatar, Egypt, and France is that they know they'll be relatively safe there because the Israelis have good reasons to actually care what those countries think of them, and thus avoid doing anything too overt.
Iran enjoys no such protection by virtue of already being in a de-facto state of war with Isreal. Iran launches missile and drone strikes into Isreal and Isreal retaliates by assassinating a some scientist or dignitary or bombing an airfield. That's not escalation thats been the status quo for over a decade.
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