So, Republicans -- What's the Next Step?

[paft.livejournal.com]

There's been some discussion here about the right wing response to the shocking, I tell you, SHOCKING re-election of President Obama and the over-the-top reaction we've been seeing. A lot of it has involved personal idiocies from Freeper vowing everything from cutting off disabled Obama supporting relatives from support (I kid you not) divorcing spouses, spitting on neighbors, moving into bunkers, etc.

And there have been some hints of payback from people actually in a position to hurt either Obama supporters or perceived Obama supporters. The CEO of the same coal company that forced employees to spend a day without pay listening to a Romney speech laid off over a hundred employees on November 9th after publicly reading an unctuous and insulting "prayer," and on Thursday a man claiming to be a business owner in Georgia called C-Span and boasted about cutting employee hours and laying off two people because of the election. “I tried to make sure the people I laid off voted for Obama,” he said.

The fact remains -- Obama won.

Attempts at limiting the franchise and making it hard to vote didn't help Republicans. It just pissed off a lot of voters to the point where they were willing to stand in line for seven hours to vote for a Democrat. Threatening to fire employees if Obama were re-elected didn't help Republicans. It just highlighted the insidious damage Citizens United has done to our political environment. Attacking blacks, women, gays, and hispanics didn't work. It just galvanized a large portion of black, gay, female, hispanic, etc. voters into fighting Republicans.

So my question is, Republicans, what's the next step?

A couple of weeks ago, Frank Rich wrote a piece in Salon about the fact that losing an election does not seem to make the Republicans reassess their extended march to the right. They just double down and march further to the right.

Is that what's going to happen, Republicans? Because I have to tell you, you've been marching to the right for so many years you're on the verge of stepping off one hell of an ideological cliff. Are you going to openly embrace the genteel racism of Charles Murray? Are you going to openly work to limit the vote only to people of a certain income level? Is the aim going to be disenfranchising large portions of the public and telling the rest, "vote for us or we'll fire you?"

Just curious.

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Comments

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

It should be obvious what the oversight is meant to achieve: no breadlines and no large revolutionary movements hellbent on destroying the established order.

The idea that modern liberalism is this is because contemporary Progressives in the USA have no term they use for themselves so they've co-opted terms that had nothing to do with what they advocate.

BTW, modern genocides have invariably been the products of Right/conservative regimes. Ask the Native Americans massacred by the USA and its 20th Century conservative allies, ask the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, and ask the people of Nanjing whether the people that slaughtered them were Leftists. Most of them would say no, actually, they weren't. Of course the Right has a fetish with dodging responsibility by attributing all that is wrong with the world to the treason of a Left that no longer exists here in the USA, so I'd love to see a conservative US argument that recognizes that the world has really, really changed since 1991. I'm not holding my breath.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

It should be obvious what the oversight is meant to achieve: no breadlines and no large revolutionary movements hellbent on destroying the established order.

This would be the rationalist responce, but Paft is not a rationalist. I want to know what she thinks the goal is or if she even has one beyond more and/or democrat-sponsored regulation = good, less and/or republican-sponsored = bad.

BTW, modern genocides have invariably been the products of Right/conservative regimes.

Invariably? I don't think that word means what you think it means.

I'll grant you Imperial Japan, and the US/Indian wars but if you're qualifying Communism and its derivatives or the assorted Post-Imperialist Populism movements in Central Africa as being "right wing" you're clearly using a different definition from the rest of us (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-right_politics).

Likewise one can debate just how "Left" or "Right" National Socialism is seeing as the only difference between Ultra-Reactionaries and Ultra-Revolutionaries are the labels they apply to eachother.

[paft.livejournal.com]

s: This would be the rationalist responce, but Paft is not a rationalist. I want to know what she thinks the goal is or if she even has one beyond more and/or democrat-sponsored regulation = good, less and/or republican-sponsored = bad.

What exactly has been unclear or irrational about my own political goals?

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

It's not the goals, it is the methods.

You are an Ideologue, and blatant partisan. You constantly bemoan the level of discourse, and yet are the first to fall back on supurious accusations, appeals to emotion, and petty tit-for-tat exchanges, when faced with criticism of or oposition to your views.

At this point I am wishing that I had bothered to save our arguments from the last 3 years as I'd really like to be able to cite our numerous exchanges on triage from two years back, or our conversation on public-sector unions and budgeting from the whole Wisconnsin debate, as specific examples. Heck for some real fun we could parse your attempts to blame the Giffords shooting on tea-party rhetoric, and compare it to that argument in which I admitted to being racist against the japanese.

In short, as far as I can tell the only thing consistant about your posts is the obvious effort you put into trying to make people with whom you disagree look bad.