Trump: White Nationalist or in his Second Childhood - A Response - Talking Points Memo - 0 views
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the shift of the Republican base to the right that now makes the move to the center terribly risky.
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Another way to say it is that Republicans moving to the center now means becoming something close to right wing social democrats. It would mean, for example, saying that okay we are going to fix Obamacare by reworking the exchanges and actually doing something about prescription drug prices. And we will revive U.S. manufacturing by building on Obama’s advanced manufacturing institutes. We will fight opioid addiction with a dramatic increase in drug treatment spending. Moreover funding these programs means that we actually have to raise some taxes so we are going to introduce a VAT. In short, they pretty much have to go all the way to being Eisenhower Republicans.
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Now, of course, that is what we want to happen because if the competition is to see which party is better at devising government programs that will help solve social and economic programs, it would make it possible for the Dems to move left. But I think that conservative parties only make this kind of Christian Democratic turn when the threat from the electoral left is already very strong—and we haven’t reached that point
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So this gets us to Trump. The nature of the Republican coalition keeps him from moving to the center.
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essentially, I think, because Ryan and McConnell said that they were against anything that involved a significant budgetary commitment. So all they can do is some smoke and mirrors type of privatizing effort. So basically Trump has nothing to offer the base of white, high school educated voters. He cannot protect their health care or their retirement and he cannot get them jobs.
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I think the link to personality is through bullying. Here, I think Josh Marshall is right about the dominance politics—he operates by demeaning others with name calling and threats.
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The resort to racist rhetoric is just another type of bullying that comes completely naturally to him and it is basically impersonal.
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So this is his elective affinity with the Klan and the Neo-Nazis. If he condemns them unequivocally, he is embracing the political correctness that says that you are not allowed to demean entire groups based on prejudicial stereotypes. But then he wouldn’t be able to say that Mexicans are rapists and Muslims are terrorists.
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In short, even with Bannon gone, he does not really have a choice but to double down on racism—it is all he has got.