The truth is that the modern GOP is deeply anti-intellectual, and has as its fundamental goal not just a rollback of the welfare state but a rollback of the Enlightenment. Yet there are some wannabe intellectuals who delude themselves into believing that they have aligned themselves with the party of objective (as opposed to Objectivist) analysis.Nothing will. In my 64 years on this Earth, I've seen nothing to persuade me otherwise.
You might think that the election debacle would force some reconsideration. But I doubt it; if the financial crisis didn’t do it, nothing will.
One might expect a faith healer to behave in that way: no matter what the symptoms, no matter how they change, the cure is always precisely the same. But at least some faith healers are wiser than that.
The United States needs a conservative party that is, well, conservative: the nation is ill-served by the raving nut-jobbery offered by the current GOP.
The Republican Party: The death of America’s angry white man
ReplyDeletehttp://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/the-republican-party-the-death-of-americas-angry-white-man-8303846.html
GOP: You're old, white and history!
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Enfant, people have been proclaiming the death of the Republican (or Democratic) Party for my entire adult lifetime... always prematurely. Dems are never as disorganized as the Right thinks they are, and Republicans are periodically reminded that they can't be so open about their hatreds and continue to be elected. Sometimes it's a "squeaker," but each major party always pulls through. I'd like to think this is the beginning of the end for the GOP, but my rational political self knows better.
DeleteIf the GOP carries as it does then it's screwed.
ReplyDeletejams, that's true for exactly as long as the GOP allows it to be true. OT1H, it's nice to see the GOP utterly abandon message discipline, to their own cataclysmic disadvantage. OTOH, I don't believe for a moment that their abandonment is permanent. They'll relearn to lie more effectively, be nicer in public to women and ethnic minorities, etc. Of all the parties the US has ever had, the Dems and the GOP are the survivors... exactly that... and I'm not ready to start reading the funeral service for either of them quite yet.
DeleteThe day that Newtie Gingrich was claimed as an intellectual...it crossed the line forever. Even old trolls like Krauthammer have long ago crossed the line of facts and reason. Podhoretz and Kagan are two more frauds in the 'little grey cell' circus. And the clown car just keeps a rolling along.
ReplyDeletekarmanot, Krugman basically agrees with you, and so do I: Republicans in every role are poseurs, pretending to an intellectual rigor they simply don't exhibit. (Intellectual rigor mortis, perhaps!) The thing is, we don't necessarily need high-powered intellectuals in office or in the think tanks; what we need are people of good will, strength of character, devotion to the public weal, people with solid arithmetic skills, and an ability to recognize fraud when it rears its ugly head. Now those are people one can live with, in office, in support roles and yes, in the roles Republicans so typically describe as requiring close reasoning ability. Good government need not be fancy to be competent!
DeleteMark Twain comes to mind:
ReplyDeleteChristian governments are as frank today, as open and above-board, in discussing projects for raiding each other's clothes-lines as ever they were before the Golden Rule came smiling into this inhospitable world and couldn't get a night's lodging anywhere.
- Following the Equator