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» Ship of Fools   »   » Oblivion   » How did the party of Abraham Lincoln become the party of Donald Trump?

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Source: (consider it) Thread: How did the party of Abraham Lincoln become the party of Donald Trump?
venbede
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Can any US shipmates explain? Indeed how it became the party of George Bush or Sarah Palin.

The GOP seems to find more and more ignorant leaders.

Margaret Thatcher and Enoch Powell were right wing menaces, but they weren't stupid.

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Sioni Sais
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quote:
Originally posted by venbede:
Can any US shipmates explain? Indeed how it became the party of George Bush or Sarah Palin.

The GOP seems to find more and more ignorant leaders.

Margaret Thatcher and Enoch Powell were right wing menaces, but they weren't stupid.

It's a matter of representation. There are a lot of stupid, nasty and greedy people out there [and over here] and in Bush jnr, Palin and Trump they see people just like themselves.

FWIW, right- or left- wing isn't the problem. You get stupidity, greed and nastiness all across the political spectrum.

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rolyn
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It takes a genius to realise that stupidity, or the feigning of it, can indeed get you to the top of the pile in certain circumstances.
If Mr. Trump makes it all the way to the Whitehouse then history will point to the circumstances which made this happen rather than the person himself.

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Freddy
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quote:
Originally posted by venbede:
Can any US shipmates explain?

The great H.L. Mencken wrote:
quote:
“No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”
Over time, this longer quote came to be paraphrased and misquoted, most commonly in the form:
quote:
“No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”
Trump mouths popular jingoism, very much like a drunk in a bar, without shame or irony. He is not afraid to say what he thinks, and he has a biting retort for every possible criticism.

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rolyn
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It could well be that that mask of political correctness has slipped to point whereby people have concluded that if the same ol' shite goes on behind the mask. Then let's have it unmasked.

I mean what's the worst this fellow can do? Get sucked into an Asian war that caused untold misery to millions, destabilise half the Mid-East with some naïve strategy of Liberation which seems to had the same effect?
Oh, and then there was that 2008 Bankers crash which all the experts assured us wouldn't happen.

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Stetson
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In general, I would argue that the GOP went from left to right as a result of consistently being the party of what for lack of a better phrase I will call "coprorate interests".

In the mid-19th Century, the interests of certain corporations(especially railroads) dovetailed with those of the Abolitionist movement, so the Republicans became a coalition of anyone who, for moral or economic reasons, wanted a halt to the expansion of slavery. Post-Civil War, this colation continued to thrive, thus leaving the Democrats to scoop up the votes of rural white southerners who regarded lynching as a cherished regional folkway. This "agrarian" vote was welded into a big coalition with mostly ethnic urban workers in the north.

To fast-forward through a lot of history, as the 20th Century wore on, coprorate interests, having achieved the abolition of slavery and the triumph of "free" labour, no longer had much common cause with African Americans and their liberal allies. Blacks and liberals saw benefits in an expanded role for government, to alleviate the effects of an unregulated market. Corporations and the wealthy, for obvious reasons, did not.

The wild-card in all this was the lower-income white vote, often rural southern or urban Catholic, who had traditionally been the pillars of the Democratic party. To make a long story short, with the eventual movement of black voters over to the Democrats(which took a few decades, even after the New Deal), the Republicans decided to capitalize on white opposition at governmental efforts to elevate the status of blacks, evnetually expanding this to opposition to feminism, and as the years progressed, gay rights etc.

So, you can probably just think of Trump as being the postmodern, reality TV-midwifed version of a demagogic klan-hugging southern Democrat in the 19th or early 20th Centuries.

TL/DR: The moneyed interests represented by the GOP no longer share an economic agenda with minority groups and liberals, and in fact, are in conflict with them on a lot of issues.

[ 27. May 2016, 12:26: Message edited by: Stetson ]

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Stetson
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quote:
Originally posted by rolyn:
It could well be that that mask of political correctness has slipped to point whereby people have concluded that if the same ol' shite goes on behind the mask. Then let's have it unmasked.

I mean what's the worst this fellow can do? Get sucked into an Asian war that caused untold misery to millions, destabilise half the Mid-East with some naïve strategy of Liberation which seems to had the same effect?
Oh, and then there was that 2008 Bankers crash which all the experts assured us wouldn't happen.

My own guess is that Trump, if elected, will pursue a foreign-policy not much different from that of other Republican presidents, and likely less reckless than that of Bush II(not that that's a difficult bar to reach). Actually, it might not be much more aggressive than Obama's(bombs on Libya, anyone?), but his liberal opponents will make it sound like the Second Coming Of General Custer.

My biggest concern with Trump is court appointments, which is the one remaining Ace Up The Sleeve of the right-wing culture-warriors on issues like marriage equality etc. Trump brags about attending gay weddings and whatnot, but I could easily see him appointing judges to the SCOTUS who take a "state's rights"(or whatever) approach to these matters. And then just say he has nothing against gays, it's just that his judges respect the Constitution.

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mdijon
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This seems relevant. It has that apocryphal quote from LBJ (covered by "reportedly" here). The interesting thing though is that the graph doesn't seem to show an abrupt switch of Southern voters from Democrat to Republicanism but rather a gradual creep.

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mdijon nojidm uoɿıqɯ ɯqıɿou
ɯqıɿou uoɿıqɯ nojidm mdijon

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mousethief

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How the Southern Strategy Made Donald Trump Possible

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Stetson
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Oh, and in regards to the intelligence issue...

quote:
Margaret Thatcher and Enoch Powell were right wing menaces, but they weren't stupid.
Yeah, but how brilliant would you say Nigel Farage is? Maybe he's not a complete and utter imbecile, but I'm guessing he doesn't speak as many languages as Enoch Powell. (Hat tip to Python.)

Now, imagine that the UKIP is not a party unto itself, but a faction of the Conservative Party. That might give a guy like Farage a better opportunity to rise to the top. Whereas under Westminster, the most influence he could hope to have, outside of a coalition, would be making demands on the Tories in a minority parliament.

Now, granted, even if Farage managed to worm his way to the top of the Tory Party(I think a Primary system would help here), a majority of voters might be turned off by his antics in the general election. Though if there were only two viable parties(as in the US), you might see a lot of Tories just holding their noses and voting for the party.

[ 27. May 2016, 12:54: Message edited by: Stetson ]

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Brenda Clough
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Here is another quite cogent explanation.

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mousethief

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quote:
Originally posted by Brenda Clough:
Here is another quite cogent explanation.

This explains a lot about why people put up with his outrages. But this presupposes "voters who find his views congenial," which are not produced by Dunning-Kruger. So it's not an either/or but (as is so often the case) a both/and.

I like the warning at the end that we ALL need to check ourselves to make sure we're not falling prey to D-K. Which is VERY hard, especially in the bubbles we create (and Google and Facebook et al. help us create and maintain) of like-minded people.

[ 27. May 2016, 13:45: Message edited by: mousethief ]

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Stetson
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quote:
...we ALL need to check ourselves to make sure we're not falling prey to D-K.
Speak for yourself. I am a complete and total expert at avoiding lapses into the Dunning-Krueger Effect.
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mousethief

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quote:
Originally posted by Stetson:
quote:
...we ALL need to check ourselves to make sure we're not falling prey to D-K.
Speak for yourself. I am a complete and total expert at avoiding lapses into the Dunning-Krueger Effect.
So I see.

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Stetson
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Seriously though...

The article cites as an example of Trump's incompetence his opinion that South Korea and Japan should develop their own nuclear weapons. This, apparently, is an example of D-K because he was "casually reversing decades of US foreign policy."

I won't claim to be enough of a logician to know if that's a non-sequitur or an argumentum ad verucundiam, but I'm pretty sure there's some classical fallacy at work in the writer's critique.

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Stetson
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quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by Stetson:
quote:
...we ALL need to check ourselves to make sure we're not falling prey to D-K.
Speak for yourself. I am a complete and total expert at avoiding lapses into the Dunning-Krueger Effect.
So I see.
Absolutely. I am the Galileo, Newton, and Einsten, all rolled into one, of not being D-K.

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mr cheesy
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There seems to be something of D-K about Trump, and I think it makes sense that he would be behaving like that; he has a persona of self-confidence, he has made a lot of money by making tough calls in business and probably has a lot of confidence in whatever comes out of his mouth. He probably believes in himself to the extent that he thinks Trump will be President and therefore whatever he says must be accurate and worth listening to.

The argument that the voters are D-K seems weaker to me. I'm no expert, and it genuinely puzzles me that so many people seem to want to vote in candidates who apparently want to do things which would hurt them and none of the things that would help. Given the number of people without (or without comprehensive) healthcare insurance, I don't understand the reluctance to vote for a much better/fairer system. Somehow either the people to whom those things would really matter are not voting (possibly because they think there is nothing for which to vote) or they're somehow seduced by free market rhetoric to vote against their own interests.

Quite how Trump fits into that isn't clear to me. He doesn't seem to be particularly Conservative, and doesn't seem to have many long and strongly views on anything substantial. He seems to talk in sound-bites that when examined do not seem to be thought-out policies. The only thing that he seems to have going for him is that he's not a career politician, and perhaps people who are voting for him are giving the political structures of the GOP a bloody nose. Perhaps it is the charisma of a reality TV star which is contrasting to the other recent presidential nominees.

It is very hard to understand.

[ 27. May 2016, 15:56: Message edited by: mr cheesy ]

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Stetson
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quote:
Originally posted by mdijon:
This seems relevant. It has that apocryphal quote from LBJ (covered by "reportedly" here). The interesting thing though is that the graph doesn't seem to show an abrupt switch of Southern voters from Democrat to Republicanism but rather a gradual creep.

I'm not gonna do the security check to get onto the Economist. These two maps might exemplify the historical phenomenon you're referencing...

1952 election

1956 election

Adlai Stevenson was pretty much the epitome of the urbane, northern liberal. Yet in both races, he managed to win a majority of the former Confedeate States, plus a few border states, at a time when the Democratic vote in those states would have been mostly white and segregationist.

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Stetson
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Cheesy wrote:

quote:
Quite how Trump fits into that isn't clear to me. He doesn't seem to be particularly Conservative, and doesn't seem to have many long and strongly views on anything substantial. He seems to talk in sound-bites that when examined do not seem to be thought-out policies.
The problem with "thought-out policies" is that often the reasson they're so thought-out is that they've been concocted by a committee of wonks who have tried them out on a dozen focus groups before handing them over to the candidate to recite at a time and place cherry-picked by the same wonks. And I think at some level, the public recognizes that this is going on, and resents it.

As an example of how Trump has managed to break this mold, if only a little...

On two of the social issues where Trump initially leaned liberal, equal marriage and transgender washrooms, his comments sounded like an average guy just expressing his spontaneous views after being asked the question.

On SSM, it was something like "Look, we've had the court decision, and gay marriage is a reality now, so deal with it." Which sounds like something you'd hear from your slightly-upright-but-still-basically-tolerant uncle over the family dinner table.

Whereas more typical politicians would come out with something like "Americans are now embracing the wonderful tapestry of diversity that is blah blah blah loving relationships blah blah blah bringing us together blah blah blah imagine all the people blah blah blah", which quite frankly, sounds as bad as any soundbite, if indeed it doesn't qualify as one.

[ 27. May 2016, 16:55: Message edited by: Stetson ]

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Freddy
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quote:
Originally posted by mr cheesy:
There seems to be something of D-K about Trump,

Totally what is seems like to me.

I think the real driver is the extent to which people loathe political correctness. The expansion of the battle for civil rights into every conceivable arena of life drives people crazy. Yet there is no possible argument against it - fairness and individual rights trump everything, after all - so they are stuck.

But then, whoops, there is this big loud total jerk who doesn't care who he offends. He is the one who is going to kick political correctness out the window.

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Brenda Clough
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What is baffling is that
a) nobody cares if Trump is lying. Even video of him contradicting himself has no power.

b) and an allied problem, nobody seems to care if Trump contradicts himself.

The rules of logic seem to be gone.

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Crœsos
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quote:
Originally posted by Stetson:
quote:
Originally posted by mdijon:
This seems relevant. It has that apocryphal quote from LBJ (covered by "reportedly" here). The interesting thing though is that the graph doesn't seem to show an abrupt switch of Southern voters from Democrat to Republicanism but rather a gradual creep.

I'm not gonna do the security check to get onto the Economist. These two maps might exemplify the historical phenomenon you're referencing...

1952 election

1956 election

An even better illustration might be the 1956 presidential electoral map and 1964 presidential electoral map. Those were both landslide years, yet the electoral map is almost exactly reversed in the space of two presidential election cycles. In other words a tectonic shift in electoral patterns right around the time the Civil Rights movement was at its peak.

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no prophet's flag is set so...

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Trump like Reagan before him, is always acting. But probably Nixon started the moral decline.
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Prester John
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quote:
Originally posted by Stetson:
In general, I would argue that the GOP went from left to right as a result of consistently being the party of what for lack of a better phrase I will call "coprorate interests".

I think this is just a tad simplistic. The Republican Party has always been a coalition of smaller factions. One of those factions was the remnants of the American Party, more commonly known as the Know-Nothings. A nativist and anti-Catholic party who were suspicious of Masonic influence among the political elites. Hardly left wing.
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Stetson
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quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
quote:
Originally posted by Stetson:
quote:
Originally posted by mdijon:
This seems relevant. It has that apocryphal quote from LBJ (covered by "reportedly" here). The interesting thing though is that the graph doesn't seem to show an abrupt switch of Southern voters from Democrat to Republicanism but rather a gradual creep.

I'm not gonna do the security check to get onto the Economist. These two maps might exemplify the historical phenomenon you're referencing...

1952 election

1956 election

An even better illustration might be the 1956 presidential electoral map and 1964 presidential electoral map. Those were both landslide years, yet the electoral map is almost exactly reversed in the space of two presidential election cycles. In other words a tectonic shift in electoral patterns right around the time the Civil Rights movement was at its peak.
Yes, indeed.

I wasn't rrying to make a contrast with my maps; both of them were meant to illustrate how long into the 20th Century the Solid South remained a thing, even with such an "un-southern" candidate. I just thought since it was the same candidate, if I was gonna include one, might as well include both.

1964 certainly shows the contrast.

[ 27. May 2016, 18:14: Message edited by: Stetson ]

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Stetson
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quote:
Originally posted by Prester John:
quote:
Originally posted by Stetson:
In general, I would argue that the GOP went from left to right as a result of consistently being the party of what for lack of a better phrase I will call "coprorate interests".

I think this is just a tad simplistic. The Republican Party has always been a coalition of smaller factions. One of those factions was the remnants of the American Party, more commonly known as the Know-Nothings. A nativist and anti-Catholic party who were suspicious of Masonic influence among the political elites. Hardly left wing.
Yeah, I know about the Know-Nothings. I believe Thaddeus Stevens had been a member at one point, in fact.

And, while there is indeed a risk of oversimplifying things, if, taking everything into account, I had to say which party in the late 19th Century was more left-wing, in the sense of promoting(admittedly, not always for altrusitic reasons) equality and related concepts, I'm still gonna have to agree with Karl Marx that that honour goes to the Republican Party.

As bad as the Know-Nothings were, I don't think they were anywhere hear as significant a force in the Republican Party late-C19 as the white-supremacists in the Democratic Party were. Arguably, one of the defininite tenets of the Democratic Party was the maintenance of white-supremacy in the south, and they barely shirked from endosing the most violent of methods toward this end.

All that said, I did read somewhere that when the second version of the KKK started up in the 1920s, there main focus was anti-immigration, with their main base being the North, and their main political conduit being the Republican Party.

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Stetson
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quote:
Arguably, one of the defininite tenets of the Democratic Party was the maintenance of white-supremacy in the south
That should read "...definitive tenets...".

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Sioni Sais
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quote:
Originally posted by Brenda Clough:
What is baffling is that
a) nobody cares if Trump is lying. Even video of him contradicting himself has no power.

b) and an allied problem, nobody seems to care if Trump contradicts himself.

The rules of logic seem to be gone.

I suspect everyone knows that these are the essence of Trump, isn't surprised by them and gives him a free pass because of them. You also have to look at his immediate opposition ie for the Republican nomination.
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mousethief

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quote:
Originally posted by Brenda Clough:
What is baffling is that
a) nobody cares if Trump is lying. Even video of him contradicting himself has no power.

It's almost like he could kill someone and people would still vote for him.

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Kelly Alves

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The Stephen King fan community has been passing around uncomfortable memes comparing Trump to King's proto-Hitler character, Greg Stillman, from "The Dead Zone". The similarities are uncanny-- particularly the idea of a "joke" candidate that won't go away.

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Brenda Clough
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Conor Friesdorf must have the patience of a saint, because he interviews a young Trump supporter in detail here. Twenty-three years old and green as grass, IMO.

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venbede
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Thank you for your replies.

I should have resisted the temptation to get in my dig at stupidity as it has lead into a lot of talk about Trump.

Stetson has tried to answer my confusion: how did the party of Abraham Lincoln, based on anti slavery, become a party based on authoritarianism?

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And when this we rightly know,
Thro' the world we safely go.

Posts: 3201 | From: An historic market town nestling in the folds of Surrey's rolling North Downs, | Registered: Sep 2011  |  IP: Logged
Golden Key
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# 1468

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venbede--

Republican Party (United States)--Wikipedia.

The Republican/GOP's spin on their own history--GOP.org.

Hope that helps.

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Blessed Gator, pray for us!
--"Oh bat bladders, do you have to bring common sense into this?" (Dragon, "Jane & the Dragon")
--"Oh, Peace Train, save this country!" (Yusuf/Cat Stevens, "Peace Train")

Posts: 18601 | From: Chilling out in an undisclosed, sincere pumpkin patch. | Registered: Oct 2001  |  IP: Logged
Enoch
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# 14322

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quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
It's almost like he could kill someone and people would still vote for him.

Anyone who opposes him is an unpatriotic American or a crypto-Mexican. They deserve to die. Obvious really.

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Brexit wrexit - Sir Graham Watson

Posts: 7610 | From: Bristol UK(was European Green Capital 2015, now Ljubljana) | Registered: Nov 2008  |  IP: Logged
Martin60
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# 368

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quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by Brenda Clough:
Here is another quite cogent explanation.

This explains a lot about why people put up with his outrages. But this presupposes "voters who find his views congenial," which are not produced by Dunning-Kruger. So it's not an either/or but (as is so often the case) a both/and.

I like the warning at the end that we ALL need to check ourselves to make sure we're not falling prey to D-K. Which is VERY hard, especially in the bubbles we create (and Google and Facebook et al. help us create and maintain) of like-minded people.

Yep. As recent events ... right up to sobering up this morning ... in my journey here show ...

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Love wins

Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001  |  IP: Logged
mousethief

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# 953

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Mother Jones has created a video superimposing audio of Trump saying things about beating people up, and how great it was in the old days when people beat other people up, over civil-rights-era video of white people beating up freedom riders and wailing on blacks. Chilling.

[ 28. May 2016, 14:09: Message edited by: mousethief ]

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This is the last sig I'll ever write for you...

Posts: 63536 | From: Washington | Registered: Jul 2001  |  IP: Logged
Gramps49
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# 16378

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Can't add much to the historical evolution of the Republican party, though I do remember the time when you still had fairly moderate, even some liberal Republicans (Rockefeller, for instance) in the party Theodore Roosevelt was Republican, remember.

More recent milestones that seemed to help push it to the extreme right: the dying of of the Great Generation--in the 50's and up to about the mid 80's both parties were willing to compromise even if they could not see eye to eye primarily because members of both parties had been in the same foxholes of WWII and Korea. As that generation has died off there has been a splintering of American political views.

The development of the Southern Strategy (which has already been mentioned) from which came the development of the FOX Noise Machine--I mean News. This created a loop where people heard what they wanted to hear and the fair and balanced news became more and more tilted. I admit it is not only FOX but other news channels have become more slanted in their views as well.

The election of the first black president and the Republican decision not to work with him on any issue.

The subsequent birther movement in which Trump was a very outspoken member.

The subsequent TEA party movement. While it claimed it was against increase taxes (Taxed Enough Already) it's background was really racist.

Thing of it is, the United States is continuing to fight the civil war. The deal is the Democrats have become a party for all people (IMHO) while the Republicans has become very white over the years.

Posts: 2193 | From: Pullman WA | Registered: Apr 2011  |  IP: Logged
rolyn
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# 16840

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quote:
Originally posted by Kelly Alves:
The Stephen King fan community has been passing around uncomfortable memes comparing Trump to King's proto-Hitler character, Greg Stillman, from "The Dead Zone". The similarities are uncanny-- particularly the idea of a "joke" candidate that won't go away.

If you watch footage of a hitler speech and read the subtitles of what he's actually saying it's a sort of fantastical nothing. Complete balderdash in the cold light of day, and yet there they are, the legions of supporters, transfixed in mesmeric adoration.
Something of a popular misconception is that people were brainwashed, spellbound is a better way of describing it.

Another interesting feature of adolf's success was that he was able to reawaken the 'Spirit' of 1914 and use it to motivate. This seems ludicrous when considering the carnage senseless waste which resonated with most who'd lived through that episode.
The comparison here, to my mind, is that the trump loco seems to have got rolling by rubbing shoulders with Iraq veterans.

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Change is the only certainty of existence

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simontoad
Ship's Amphibian
# 18096

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When I'm in America in September, I'm going to put on an "I'm with Stupid" T-shirt and go to a Trump rally.

I love how in that article on the D-K effect, one of the areas where people don't know enough to know they are shite is "firearm care and safety".

[ 31. May 2016, 00:15: Message edited by: simontoad ]

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Human

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