I’m losing my patience for reading these pieces about how America is self-polarizing itself. You want to know why Washington has changed and Republicans no longer sit down to break bread with Democrats? It’s simple. Up until the 1990’s, the Democratic Party was split between pork-addicted Jim Crow Democrats who generally supported the New Deal and the Great Society, and all the people you see in the Democratic Party today: union workers, Jews, racial minorities, and the intelligentsia. What happened is that all the pork-addicted Jim Crow Democrats have become Republicans. And that means that virtually every asshole in the country is now a Republican. It’s true. It used to be true that religious nut-jobs had no real preference when it came to political parties. Roe v. Wade changed that. Today, nearly every religious nut-job in the county is a Republican.
So, basically, every time I read a story that sobs about the loss of the good old days when the Dems and Republicans got along so well, I think to myself that the author wants us to bring all the racists and fundamentalists back into the fold of the Democratic Party for the good of the country.
The problem this country faces is not complicated. We have way, way too many assholes living here. Someone should come up with a whole legislative program aimed at reducing the levels of assholery.
Now, I don’t think the level in increasing, except maybe in response to economic difficulties. In the 1960’s, this country’s attitude about almost everything was worse than it is today. But Congress had just as many asshole country club Republicans as it had white supremacist Democrats. We spread it around. Now it’s all lop-sided.
One party has absorbed nearly 100% of the greedhead, religious wacko, and racist vote. The problem isn’t that the parties don’t talk nice to each other. The problem is that one party encompasses almost all of our worst instincts. And civilized people, decent people, don’t want to deal with them. And they do what greedy, magical-thinking, assholes do. They break things, steal everything that isn’t nailed down, and act like jerks on principle.
Does that mean that overturning Roe v Wade would fix everything?
LOL
might we convert the National Monument and other great landmarks into bidets, so that they nation may at least remain hygienic?
Indeed.
Indeed.
I feel the same way, but then I’m an extremist. I suspect we’re all idealists trying to push the envelope.
Dylan’s been explaining it all to me for a long time.
I don’t want everyone to be like me. I enjoy conflict. If everyone agreed with me, I’d have to disagree with them.
I always thought that the “Maggie’s Ma” verse was uncomfortably close to Hillary Clinton. All it takes is a couple of strategic apostrophes in the fifth line.
I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s Ma no more.
No, I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s Ma no more.
She talks to all the servants about Man and God and Law.
Everybody says she’s the brains behind Pa.
She’s ’68 but she says she’s ’54.
I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s Ma no more.
Until the 1960s, the Dems and the Repubs go along so well in the South because there were no Repubs. Not all Southern Democrats back in the day were pork-addicted nor were all in fact privately Jim Crow Democrats. There were a significant number of Democrats whose interest was in the general programs that applied to everyone, including those in their constituencies. Those folks tended to last the longest as Democrats in office. Terry Sanford of NC and Fritz Hollings and Liz Patterson of SC were good examples of those folks and Fritz retired in 2002.
And there were non-Southern and urban, pork-addicted Jim Crow Democrats in the party as well. Generally backbenchers, they could be relied upon to stand in the way of progress. Their districts are now controlled by Republicans.
So what happened to the nice Jim Crow country club Republicans? They seemed to have turned into Gordon Gecko Galtian assholes too.
So your fourteen point plan to get rid of assholery is what? There is a school of thought that says that the degree of self-confidence you need in order to become an elected official tends immediately toward assholery. And the higher the office the greater the tendency.
This is one hell of a way to start a Monday.
I don’t have a plan to defeat assholery. Seems too daunting a task to me.
Anecdotal, but I was stunned by it none the less.
My brother a 72 year old life long Republican called me several weeks ago to announce who could no longer register as a Republican. They were just too damn insane. This was not the Republican Party he had voted for over the years. Next there wasn’t a Republican candidate for President he could feel good about when it came time to vote.
And then the kicker. There was no way he wasn’t going to vote for Obama.
So maybe Obama’s letting the Republicans expose their own insanity, their own unwillingness to actual govern has been a frustrating to progressives, but a plan that is slowly working.
I figured that was Obama’s goal all along. The GOP is the bull and Obama is the matador. Ole!
http://weeseeyou.com/2011/08/12/progressive-angst-and-president-obama-its-not-him-its-you/
Just right.
I think a lot of Obama’s critics would have told the people sitting in at the lunch counters that they should stand up and start screaming at the counter staff, instead of acting polite, because their efforts obviously weren’t winning over the staff.
As if changing the minds of the counter staff was the point. As if the people seeing the images on TV would side with someone screaming at the counter staff.
I think a lot of Obama’s critics would have gone for breaking the lunch counter windows and then burning the place down. Look at the excitement over the London riots.
In this kind of struggle, if you riot you lose.
The full comment by “Tom” attached to Benen’s “Chumps” article in the Washington Monthly is even better, isn’t it? It’s going viral; even Andrew Sullivan quotes the section you posted. Tom’s comment comes at 10:54 a.m., and before the part you quoted, he starts by saying this:
.
And a hit tip to you janichet for drawing my attention to this comment it in the first place!
What cracks me up are the articles about how we’re all sorting ourselves out geographically, and how the majority of people live in a county where the majority of people agree with them on stuff.
I mean, do the pundits actually expect us to want to live next door to these teabeggers? Seriously?
I do. Get ’em off politics and they’re pretty reasonable neighbors who participate in their community. But even raising the idea of local taxes is like waving a red flag in front of a bull.
It’s this sort of attitude among progressives that has seriously weakened the geographic reach of the progressive movement and allowed folks like the teabaggers the luxury of imagining that everyone agrees with them and that they are the majority.
Spot on. Further, it is possible at times to engage the baggers, politely, on nonthreatening ground with downhome analogies or local examples, and make points supporting a liberal/progressive agenda, points that will resonate with them, maybe change their thinking to some degree. I’m not talking about winning heartfelt converts to a leftist worldview; I’m talking about bending the arc a bit, refocussing their vision a tad, showing them that those crazy libruls are really fine folks too who understand their worries and don’t dismiss them, just come at them from another direction. “Hey, maybe their skulls aren’t so pointyheaded after all; maybe they might have an idea or two worth at least considering.”
Rome, day; etc.
For your info, I live in a district represented by one of the most odious teabagger reps in the nation. These people are my neighbors. I don’t want to live here anymore.
Maybe I need to take the blinders off but it occurs to me that I’m not seeing asshattery behavior coming from our Vietnamese, Chinese, Muslim, South American immigrant population, nor from the Black, Native American or Mexican peoples.
Most of those folks are not in public office yet. I’ve seen asshattery from black politicians who are in the pockets of local white money. They look a lot like Allen West.
Vietnamese asshats in politics, generally as operatives or propagandists are a dime a dozen. There are oodles of Vietnamese afficionados of Ayn Rand. Sub-continent Indians can swing hard that way if they see themselves as self-made “entrepreneurs”. Dinesh deSouza, Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley are two examples of that.
There are not many Muslim or South American politicians around here. Mexicans in this area are just getting into starting businesses. There are Native American politicians in NC, but none in this area.
But you left out Irish (O’Reilly, Hannity), Italian, German, Dutch (deVos, Hoekstra), Scots-Irish, English, Czech, Slovakian, Slovenian, French, …..Indonesian…
Surely not all of them are asshats.
Agreed, and I had just come off another viewing of a TParty rally, right after a local visit to the river with the dogs where I ran into a cluster of TPartiers, all white, all with tattered American flags, beer and a belly full of opinions. Just never seem to see a big bellied beer tottin Vietnamese…Just sayin.
Bobby Jindal
The last time two national parties — Whigs and Democrats — reconfigured as two regional parties, Republicans and Democrats, we had a civil war.
These things don’t turn out well.
I think it’s a mistake to think that there is going to be a reconfiguration as regional parties. Montana, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada are still purple states. As are most of the Plains states. Republicans just have a slight upper hand and control of the state narrative.
As are North Carolina and Virginia (for now). Florida doesn’t know what it is at the moment. And some other Southern states are tiring of extreme Republicans.
What is more likely is what happened in reverse in the 1960s. You are likely to start seeing Republicans bolt an ever more extreme party and become Democrats. That will have the short term effect of shifting the Democratic Party to the center. Where it goes from there depends on how well progressives dialog and persuade the new crossovers as to the practicality of progressive policy positions.
You forgot asshole country club Democrats like Rahm Emanuel, Dick Durbin, Joe Biden, Max Baucus, etc etc.
wow, Durbin?
He’s about as good as it gets in the Senate. There are probably 90 senators I’d pick on before I’d get to him.
Mr. “Social Security must be cut”? Wow, you really have gone over to the corporate Democrats.