Can Moderate Republicans Save America?
That’s the question asked in the December issue of the Atlantic.
The article about this topic is titled:
How America Ends: A tectonic demographic shift is under way. Can the country hold together?
By Yoni Appelbaum
The article’s premise is this: The Republican Party in the near future, will become the permanent minority party. It will become powerless and have little or no effect in the governing of America. For all intents and purposes, it will cease to exist. The reason for this is the shifting racial and religious demographics of this country. Brown skinned people will soon become the majority, changing forever the white, Protestant culture that has dominated this nation since it’s beginning.
Sensing this change and the fear in whites this situation has provoked, a new radical right wing strain has gained control of the GOP. It is Trumpism, named after the president who has so skillfully used white fear to gain political power. It is a strain of conservatism “defined by identity” — white identity.
The article maintains that the moderate right is critical to keeping our democracy intact, and that it must reach out to brown skinned people in order to expand it’s base of support and survive. It must also resist the call to become further radicalized by Trumpism and to disavow “ethno-nationalism.”
Whether the American political system today can endure without fracturing further…may depend on the choices the center-right now makes. If the center-right decides to accept some electoral defeats and then seeks to gain adherents via argumentation and attraction—and, crucially, eschews making racial heritage its organizing principle—then the GOP can remain vibrant. Its fissures will heal and its prospects will improve, as did those of the Democratic Party in the 1920s, after Wilson. Democracy will be maintained. But if the center-right, surveying demographic upheaval and finding the prospect of electoral losses intolerable, casts its lot with Trumpism and a far right rooted in ethno-nationalism, then it is doomed to an ever smaller proportion of voters, and risks revisiting the ugliest chapters of our history.
The ending comment ominously implies the possibility of civil war.
Personally, I see no sign of the “moderate right,” (whatever is left of it), distancing itself from the Cult of Donald Trump. If politicians do so, they risk getting “primaried” — attacked by rival politicians who are in lockstep with Trumpism and his base.
Is there hope of moderation, or might we be headed to civil unrest, even civil war?
No, moderate Republicans cannot save America. There are only 6 of them. But there will be no civil war. Americans are so fat and out of shape that once they have shot their first couple of rounds, they will want to quit and get beers and donuts.
No, moderate Republicans cannot save America. There are only 6 of them. But there will be no civil war. Americans are so fat and out of shape that once they have shot their first couple of rounds, they will want to quit and get beers and donuts.
Or, in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, tequila and tacos.
Hmmm.
Beer and Donuts. Tacos and Tequila.
Perhaps the next civil war will be fought by drunks having a food fight?
I wonder whether “moderate anythings” can save America. I’m almost as worried about the extreme left.
I wonder whether “moderate anythings” can save America. I’m almost as worried about the extreme left.
The extreme left will trash you on the internet and try to ruin your life and livelihood.
The extreme right will send you a pipe bomb.
I’d fear the far right much more.
I wonder whether “moderate anythings” can save America. I’m almost as worried about the extreme left.
The extreme left will trash you on the internet and try to ruin your life and livelihood.
The extreme right will send you a pipe bomb.
I’d fear the far right much more.
In addition, the extreme left will try to curtail your liberties, and - depending on your definitions - I think that thee are far more on the e-left than on the e-right.
I wonder whether “moderate anythings” can save America. I’m almost as worried about the extreme left.
The extreme left will trash you on the internet and try to ruin your life and livelihood.
The extreme right will send you a pipe bomb.
I’d fear the far right much more.
In addition, the extreme left will try to curtail your liberties, and - depending on your definitions - I think that thee are far more on the e-left than on the e-right.
I’m not so sure about that.
I don’t have proof of this, so take it with a grain of salt, but I tend to think of extreme leftists as idealistic college students and twenty-somethings who think they can change the world via the internet.
Far right and Alt-right groups include armed militias, veterans, and old, well-armed white guys.
I’m not so sure the pen is mightier than the sword.
I wonder whether “moderate anythings” can save America. I’m almost as worried about the extreme left.
The extreme left will trash you on the internet and try to ruin your life and livelihood.
The extreme right will send you a pipe bomb.
I’d fear the far right much more.
In addition, the extreme left will try to curtail your liberties, and - depending on your definitions - I think that thee are far more on the e-left than on the e-right.
Republicans currently in office are curtailing people’s liberties.
I wonder whether “moderate anythings” can save America. I’m almost as worried about the extreme left.
The extreme left will trash you on the internet and try to ruin your life and livelihood.
The extreme right will send you a pipe bomb.
I’d fear the far right much more.
In addition, the extreme left will try to curtail your liberties, and - depending on your definitions - I think that thee are far more on the e-left than on the e-right.
Republicans currently in office are curtailing people’s liberties.
Yep. Take for example the Republicans’ war on Planned Parenthood. That’s curtailing people’s rights by making it economically impossible for some people to exercise them. There are others too inconvenient to mention in a brief response.
Experts, not moderates, will safe the US, as they have always done.