Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Remember this issue...

...of the National Review titled "Against Trump"? That was just four months ago.

From the editors (my emphasis):

But he is not deserving of conservative support in the caucuses and primaries. Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.

Whoa.

But even on immigration, Trump often makes no sense and can’t be relied upon.

In fact,

This plan wouldn’t survive its first contact with reality.

But is he qualified?

Indeed, Trump’s politics are those of an averagely well-informed businessman: Washington is full of problems; I am a problem-solver; let me at them. But if you have no familiarity with the relevant details and the levers of power, and no clear principles to guide you, you will, like most tenderfeet, get rolled.

What about his experience?

The burdens and intricacies of leadership are special; experience in other fields is not transferable.

Trump’s record as a businessman is hardly a recommendation for the highest office in the land. 

Finally,

We sympathize with many of the complaints of Trump supporters about the GOP, but that doesn’t make the mogul any less flawed a vessel for them. Some conservatives have made it their business to make excuses for Trump and duly get pats on the head from him. Count us out. Donald Trump is a menace to American conservatism who would take the work of generations and trample it underfoot in behalf of a populism as heedless and crude as the Donald himself.

Wow! I guess they didn't like him.

In a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, however, Trump has the support of eighty-five percent of Republicans.

Never mind.

1 comment:

Ed Crotty said...

The Republican party has shown it has no loyalty to any position except white supremacy and Trump fits that bill. This is what Nate Silver refers to as "tribalism" and others refer to as "white resentment politics". The traditional "marquee" issues of the GOP are just smokescreens and symptoms of this single core value.

1) low taxes - makes the government weak and unable to help non-whites with class mobility
2) low regulation - keeps profits up generally to the detriment of poor and non-white people.
3) law and order - results in the mass incarceration of non-white folks.


You can see that these are not actual "core" values because they are able to ignore them whenever they want - Regulating people's most personal activity, spending literally trillions on foreign wars, medicare drug benefits completely unpaid for. This shows that these "show" values are


 You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

http://www.thenation.com/article/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/