Realignment

6 Comments for “Realignment”

  1. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    I am glad to hear it, Stephen. I look forward to significant changes in the Republican Party’s platform. It is about time that the party dumped hard line social conservative, conservative Christian positions and moved more in line with the American mainstream.

    • posted by JohnInCA on

      I’ll believe it when I see it. The apologists have been promising that such “change” is right around the corner longer then I’ve been alive.

    • posted by Mike King & David "TJ" Bauler on

      Part of this is an old hat trick of the GOP. The right-wing took over the libertarian movement in America and turned it into a very right-wing, survival of the fittest, Ayn Randian movement.

      These libertarians — right libertarians — get pulled out whenever the right-wing wants to showcase that it has a (a) big tent, or (b) is going to stop denying equal rights/basic civil rights to a particular class.

      It is a magic trick, because these libertarians are expected to kindly accept the religious right domination of social policy.

  2. posted by Mike King & David "TJ" Bauler on

    Thus far, the change has not been found within the national (or most state) GOP party platform. In my neck of the woods (upper Midwest), homocons have little actual policy influence outside of very comfortable urban centers.

    In the Minneapolis/St. Paul region their is a chapter of the Log Cabin Republicans and they participate in the pride parade (with almost no fuss or bother). But, the Twin Cities is a pretty blue-purple place.

    In more rural and suburban parts of the upper Midwest, the homocons are expected to kindly put up with anti-gay policies.

  3. posted by Jorge on

    I’ve never even heard the term “Intellectual Dark Web” before.

    And what’s this about putting Ben Shapiro among such a ratified group and wondering if it’s diverse? The only thing remarkable about Shaprio is that he quit World Net Daily when… no wait that was Ann Coulter. He quit Breitbart News when Corey Lewandowsky assaulted that reporter. Nothing happened to Lewandowsky, and then his boss Trump won. Shapiro’s been something of a voluntary exile from the right since. There is a hint of shame about him since, and he wears it rather well, for there must be winners and losers in politics.

    I don’t know what the story is for all the others, but from my observation of politics over the years, including the pages of this website, the sort of separations Shapiro and Coulter have gone through are more common among the left than among the right, and they’re more traumatic. To say the wrong thing in the wrong setting is to be attacked en masse and ostracized to the point you simply do not have a political home among the left, though your ideology remains.

    I can scarcely believe the crass stupidity necessary for anyone with a remote grasp of politics to think the following statement is reasonable for even one moment:

    “In this particular case, if it’s true that the IDW members, with the exception of Shapiro, align almost entirely with liberals on the main issues that divide liberals and conservatives, then we should reasonably expect them in practice to align politically with liberals and not conservatives.”

    Is no one from the left a violent thug? Is there truly no room on the left for a “Never Socialism” movement?

    What these people all have in common is something very simple, yet so antithetical to the politics of blind tribalism: they have decided to walk their own path.

    • posted by Jorge on

      “And what’s this about putting Ben Shapiro among such a ratified group…” Ugh, stupid spellcheck and less than perfect eyesight. Rarefied group.

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