Could it be that both parties are doomed?

[TitanTiger 20,472]

 

Quote

 

Could It Be that Both Parties Are Doomed?

This much is certain: Neither of them is in good health.

By Jonah Goldberg — November 3, 2017

For all the obvious reasons, the Republican party gets most of the attention these days. For starters, it controls the White House, the Senate, and the House, and the party in power always warrants more scrutiny, even when it’s operating smoothly.

Of course, that’s not happening.

The GOP is running as smoothly as a dry Slip ’N Slide made from sandpaper. That the party is as dysfunctional as the human-resources department at the Weinstein Company stems from a host of ideological, political, and structural problems that are only compounded by the fact that the president grabs the public’s attention like a spider monkey running through a church with a lit stick of dynamite.

The Democratic party, meanwhile, has gotten drunk on the spectacle. And as with many a drunk, it’s grown oblivious to its own decrepitude. Like a bitter lush sitting in his own filth amid a sea of empty bottles, moldering pizza boxes, and fried-chicken bones, it shouts at the TV and boasts how it could do better.

Donna Brazile, the longtime high-ranking Democratic functionary, was made interim chair of the party shortly before the 2016 election in the wake of revelations that the previous chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, seemed to be playing favorites in the primaries, tilting the scales toward Hillary Clinton and against Bernie Sanders. In an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Hacks, Brazile reports that Wasserman Schultz wasn’t simply partial toward Clinton. She was in fact Clinton’s vassal.

It’s widely known that Barack Obama left the Democratic party in shambles. On his watch, the party lost more than 1,000 elective offices at the federal, state, and local levels. One underreported reason for this is that Obama opted to create a parallel institution out of his 2012 campaign outfit, Organizing for America. The renamed Organizing for Action siphoned money and the president’s energies from the DNC.

Brazile reports that the party was so hollowed out with debt that Hillary Clinton essentially scooped it up in a distress sale. Wasserman Schultz cut a deal with the Clinton campaign in which Clinton would raise millions ostensibly for the party, particularly at the state level. But those funds were sluiced back into the Clinton campaign coffers in Brooklyn, and the campaign extracted de facto control of the party’s messaging and hiring. Team Clinton mocked Sanders as a paranoid dotard for claiming that the Democratic primary system was rigged against him. As it happens, his paranoia didn’t go far enough.

It seems axiomatic that any party weak enough to be taken over by Hillary Clinton is not in good health.

Today, the Democratic party’s sole unifying principle is opposition to Donald Trump. Given Trump’s standing in the polls, that may be good enough for the 2018 midterm elections. But when it comes to ideas about governing, all of the passion is reserved for two things.

First, there is Sanders’ idea of “socialism,” which is really an unworkable stew of banalities and nostrums stemming from a nostalgic idea of a “Scandinavian model” that no longer exists (if it ever did). It’s as if Fabian socialists created an Epcot Center exhibit of Sweden in the 1950s, and irascible tour guide Bernie rides by in a trolley, shouting: “This could be us!”

The second source of passion is the angry, sanctimony-besotted identity politics popular on college campuses and a handful of left-wing websites. The DNC’s data-services manager recently sent out an email soliciting applications for new hires in the IT department. She cautioned that she wasn’t looking for any “cisgender straight white males.”

If you want to know how Trump was elected, ask yourself how a laid-off, cisgender, straight, white, male coal miner who went back to community college to learn computers might react to that.

Again, you wouldn’t be crazy for thinking the GOP is like a runaway fire at a soiled-diaper-reclamation center. And I’m sure I’ll have opportunities in the near future to expand on that.

But the important point is that dysfunction isn’t zero-sum. Right now, the best argument Republicans have is “we’re not Democrats,” and the best argument Democrats have is “we’re not Republicans.” Like two punch-drunk pugilists leaning on each other in the twelfth round, if one falls, the other may well fall too.

Everywhere else in America today, disrupters — Uber, Amazon, etc. — are dismantling established institutions. Perhaps both political parties are the next institutions to crumble under creative destruction. Or maybe not. But if it happens, no one can say they didn’t have it coming.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/453385/democrats-republicans-both-parties-dysfunctional-unhealthy

 

 

[TitanTiger 20,472]

And it's easy to sit there and point at the clown in the White House and the gaggle of howler monkeys in his inner circle and wonder why all those disaffected Republicans don't crossover to the Democrats.  The truth is though, the Democrats don't want them.  I mean, they'll take their votes if it means winning an election, but they don't want their opinions and concerns.  Especially if they are a white, cisgendered male.  

 

This is the kind of thing that stimulates the Woke:

View image on Twitter

 

Roger Kimball 

 

✔@rogerkimball

 

A picture is worth a thousand words Dept.

5:43 AM - Nov 3, 2017

 

So when you hear tropes like "Why do you people keep voting Republican when it’s against your interests?” The answer, in part, is, “Because you Democrats are powered by insane people who think that there are 40 genders, and are determined to personally and professionally ruin anyone who dissents. You liberals are the kind of people who demonize straight people, white people, and penis-having people (unless they don’t actually have a penis, but claim that they’re male anyway, in which case they are messiahs). You actually expect us to trust you with power?!”

[aujeff11 6,243]

17 minutes ago, TitanTiger said:

And it's easy to sit there and point at the clown in the White House and the gaggle of howler monkeys in his inner circle and wonder why all those disaffected Republicans don't crossover to the Democrats.  The truth is though, the Democrats don't want them.  I mean, they'll take their votes if it means winning an election, but they don't want their opinions and concerns.  Especially if they are a white, cisgendered male.  

 

This is the kind of thing that stimulates the Woke:

View image on Twitter

 

Roger Kimball 

 

✔@rogerkimball

 

A picture is worth a thousand words Dept.

5:43 AM - Nov 3, 2017

 

So when you hear tropes like "Why do you people keep voting Republican when it’s against your interests?” The answer, in part, is, “Because you Democrats are powered by insane people who think that there are 40 genders, and are determined to personally and professionally ruin anyone who dissents. You liberals are the kind of people who demonize straight people, white people, and penis-having people (unless they don’t actually have a penis, but claim that they’re male anyway, in which case they are messiahs). You actually expect us to trust you with power?!”

No way that’s a real questionnaire. 

[AUFAN78 3,894]

3 hours ago, TitanTiger said:

“Because you Democrats are powered by insane people who think that there are 40 genders, and are determined to personally and professionally ruin anyone who dissents. You liberals are the kind of people who demonize straight people, white people, and penis-having people (unless they don’t actually have a penis, but claim that they’re male anyway, in which case they are messiahs). You actually expect us to trust you with power?!”

Nailed that.

[wdefromtx 3,159]

Both parties are "hot garbage!"

[aujeff11 6,243]

It should be this simple really. 

[HVAU 673]

I'm not sure it's just about parties.  We've become an increasingly selfish society.  That makes us very susceptible to simulated division for political purposes.  That simulated division projects into true division, and eventually we're something other than the society that we all claim to want.

Maybe that's too hyperbolic.

[DKW 86 7,419]

On 11/3/2017 at 10:13 AM, TitanTiger said:

 

View image on Twitter

 

Roger Kimball 

 

✔@rogerkimball

 

A picture is worth a thousand words Dept.

5:43 AM - Nov 3, 2017

I dont even know what 90% of that crap means and I am considered very well read.

1

 

[homersapien 11,367]

First, Johan Goldberg is LOL funny. 

Secondly, how is this thread not in the trash talk forum?

Once you peel the craziness away - from both parties - I submit you are still left with a kernal of values that are in tension.  So the question becomes, if and when can either party can rebuild themselves around those kernals with serious, credible candidates.

I hope for the sake of the country this happens sooner rather than later.

 

[autigeremt 6,600]

It's not trash....it's a look at a reasonable feeling in American politics.

Personally I hope it does roast both parties. They deserve it.

 

[homersapien 11,367]

57 minutes ago, autigeremt said:

It's not trash....it's a look at a reasonable feeling in American politics.

Personally I hope it does roast both parties. They deserve it.

 

I said it belongs in the "trash talk" forum.