"When the tribe stages a revolt, the leaders have no choice but to follow."
Then, what makes them leaders? Newt led the party into the mire, but he set a course. He was corrupt, of course, and that's part of his flawed vision.
But what makes Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell a leader but for the votes of other Republicans who dare not rise above the wallow?
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The "base" in Alabama got to make a decision between two disgusting politicians. The real question: Who decided on those exact disgusting politicians? The Democrats showed that their base did not count when Bernie was not nominated due to the interference of Deborah Wasserman Schultz. Thanks to such interference, the Democrats' base currently can't find either their party or its platform. The Republican "base" has the same type of "party" problem, only worse because Russia (Trump's biggest creditor vis a vis Azerbaijan bankers) and American billionaires (empowered by Citizens United) are interfering.
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I will say this for the Republican base: they absolutely deserve to get what they vote for.
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But we don't deserve it.
9
It's synchronicity, and NOT in a good way. They feed off one another, in a vicious möbius LOOP. And unintentionally or not, the word base is extremely apt. Just saying.
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Just to answer the question in the title: In every other democracy, the Base is responsible for its representatives. But in America, the ONLY democracy that allows its representatives to draw their own district boundaries (with a few isolated exceptions) it is very much the case that Politicians are responsible for their Base. By artificially identifying favored voters and leaving out the 'undesirables' they MANUFACTURE support without earning it. No need to convince people your party has better ideas than the other side, just convince them your primary opponent is a no-good, unpatriotic sleaze that can't wait to sell-out to the other side.
Think about it. For the voters it's very much like watching poker being played with marked cards. Take out the bad ones and keep all the 'good' ones. Would you consider that a game you'd want in on? And does it matter, if the outcome is already rigged?
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The author does not emphasize the failure of Black & Brown(hispanic) people to vote is a huge problem for Democrats. Compare their votes in 2016 to 2012 & 2008--the Obama elections- in these critical states: Penn., Michigan, NC & Wisconsin. The Dems cannot win Nationally with just the Northeast incl. VA & 3 huge Pacific Coast + Nevada, even if we did get
3 Million more votes. The first 3 States have big populations of the above & Wisc. has a high union membership. With low/no raises in those states, can these people be aroused; earlier generations were for their own good.
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I question Mr. Homans' decision to use abortion rights as a signifier of the Democratic party's monolithic views as opposed to Republican open-mindedness. The Republican party - from platform to elected officials - stands united in opposing women's reproductive rights. Its few politicians who favor extending women the moral agency to control their own bodies are few and far between. Beyond party affiliation, however, is the reality that a majority of all Americans favor safe, legal abortion. On this issue, it is less that the Democrats represent a monolith and more that elected Republicans and their wealthy donors skew far to the right of the nation and even their own voters.
Indeed, the entire discussion of the Democratic party here stands in contrast to the Times' general political reporting, which breathlessly claims the Democrats are being pulled between establishment politicians and the far left.
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Whoa! What base? The Republican base is a greased pig in that it is hard to catch. They're a confused, confusing, fractured, stubborn group specializing in saying NO to effective government.
Each faction in the GOP believes that they're the base. Evangelicals? The base. 2nd Amendment NRA members? The base. Nationalists? The base. Tea Party? The base. Deficit hawks? The base. Joe Plumber? The base. Sheriff Arpaio? The base. On and on we go. Libertarians? OK, wanna be the base.
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"The winking subtext of the party's white identity..delivered without the wink." That is a perfect summery of Trump's appeal, and why Moore bested him. He winked even less. We may come to miss winking racists who acknowledged, however weakly, the shame of what they were doing by remaining sub-textual.
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The Republican base is only as strong as it's allowed to be. If you want something different then get organized and Get out your vote.
The comment about the Democrats being more monolithic is true, they're hopeless.
If we're lucky, Trump is going to prove neither the Republican or the Democratic Party is worthy of support because of their extreme positions and a creditable third-party candidate will appear.
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It's worth mentioning that, while both parties have long believed that "elections have consequences" (as they should and do), no modern party has ever believed that the opinions of its opponents should be as utterly disregarded as the GOP and its base now do.
Huge majorities of voters disagree with Republicans about destroying Obamacare, lowering taxes on corporations and the wealthy, refusing background checks on guns, throwing out the Dreamers, kicking transgender soldiers out of the military, and quite literally dozens of other issues.
Republicans and their voters JUST DON'T CARE. Only the base matters: if the base is not fed, placated, and given exactly what it wants, there will be blood.
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Disagree. Democrats have repeated acted as if critics of Roe vs Wade are too stupid to understand the law, when actually they seem to understand the legalities far better than abortion supporters do.
I'm afraid, you'll have to provide some examples of Roe v Wade critics "understanding the law" better than the side which advocated for Roe v Wade, before that even sounds credible.
Restricting choice is limiting the physical and legal autonomy of an adult citizen, constituting half the population, due to the moral outrage we're supposed to feel for a being that does not exist independent of the mother. It is an arbitrary decision to argue legal protection for a group of cells known only to the mother and the doctor she chooses.
Particularly since it is FAR FROM UNHEARD OF for Mother Nature to cause a woman to miscarriage completely independent of any human intervention! Go ahead, ask your pro-life female friends. Inevitably, you'll run into one that can speak to witnessing a spontaneous abortion. If legal status is ever given to the unborn, that woman would likely end up in jail if she couldn't afford a lawyer. As is already happening in El Salvador, which passed a constitutional amendment protecting the unborn. The consequence is mass incarceration by miscarriaged women and any doctors involved with her care, usually out of an 'abundance of (legal) caution' when a woman can't afford legal representation.
If you want to put poor women in jail, and corrupt the judicial system, pass an amendment protecting the unborn. It will have huge unforeseen consequences, like Prohibition did in the 1930's, imagining that alcohol could be banned from the marketplace.
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sorry...Prohibition -- in the 1920s (repealed in 1933)
I've always thought the Trump won the Electoral College because of a deal: he would appoint anti-abortion judges to the Supreme Court; abortion opponents would hold their noses and vote for him. It was an old-fashioned exchange of political promises for votes. The Times needs to get its mind off "bases" and "identity politics" and go back to studying how politics actually works.
1
The base is firmly in control as seen by primarying Cantor and any that dare cross them.
The democrats best option is too engage working class whites that aren't fully converted to the other side. Otherwise they won't take back state houses that allow the gerrymandering and senate seats in predominantly white states. But as the article states they are firmly entrenched in their views as well and they may but their "principles" above winning.
2
Trump wins either way. Strange wins, Trump can say he did it. Moore wins, his base is happy.
I wonder if he even thought Strange had a chance...for all we know it could have been just for show.
1
If Republican voters are actually now Trump voters, then Trump voters will use the gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement systems that the Republicans have created to become rulers of the United States.Make no mistake: they want to be the rulers because God has told them they must be.
So the Trump base wants no compromise, no "foreigners," no "minorities," and no opinions left of Ted Cruz. They want to remove all sign of the Civil Rights Era, the New Deal and the Democratic Pary itself from American politics. They reject all science, all scholarship and all diplomacy in favor of religious belief and the use of military power.
The 1% began to create this race-baiting, "anti-Socialist" monstrosity of voting bloc 50 years ago in order to reestablish its former plutocracy. Apparently, the guaranteed way to return to a feudal aristocracy is to create an illiberal preModern society. No wonder Russia had such an easy task of creating a Trump electorate! Their leaders have been propagating a nation of medieval serfs for centuries.
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This is thoughtful. Consider this:
In a recent U.S. News and World report, Alabama's public schools were ranked 47 out of 50 among the states. This reflects a blend of higher education and K-12.
Alabama may have a great college football team, but not a great educational system.
In fact, most of the states in the bottom half of the list, and nearly all at the way bottom, voted for Trump.
Any connection between a poorly educated populace and poor choices made at the ballot box? Correlation, yes. Causation? That has not been proven, but . . . .
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Starting with Nixon's southern strategy in the late 1960s to Fox News' non-stop hate machine that went into overdrive after Obama's election, the republican party is responsible for Trump and the current cartoon characters that the party is electing.
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It depends on whether the base looks to the politician as a public servant or public boss. Meanwhile, it is all-too-often the case the political candidates campaign with promises of rendering honest service on behalf of the public, but one elected, the recently elected or re-elected public officials subvert and otherwise compromise civic expectations and manipulate the populace for the primary benefit of special interests and themselves.
3
Missing from this otherwise insightful analysis is the extent of the unmeasured reach of Russian meddling in the 2016 election through divisive political ads on Facebook and across other social media platforms. Russia is known to have interfered in elections in Germany, Britain, France and Ukraine, always aiming at stoking hot-button issues with false claims and lies. This threatens the very core of democratic freedom, especially when viewed along side the investigations into the ties of Trump and his election officials to Russian interference in the American election. It seems the west might not have "won" the cold war after all. The Berlin wall came down because it was irrelevant in the dawning of borderless internet communication. No wonder Putin smirks.
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