Could the GOP's general problem be that the ave. American is getting poorer?

[pbrower2a]

No. Poor white people vote for Republicans with zeal. Compare the 2012 election results of the coal counties of Virginia (the poorest area of the state) with Fairfax county (the most affluent area of the state).

But the increasing minorities includes poor Hispanics and poor African Americans, so this wouldn't disprove the argument.

I'm not sure I agree with the assertion that there's a significant trend of Americans getting poorer. The Democratic comeback started prior to the Great Recession, and hasn't resulted in historically impressive numbers.

One of the signs of most groups' assimilation is their drift into the Republican Party. Jews and blacks were obvious exceptions. But note well -- middle-class Hispanics and Asians have drifted D.

Many middle-class Hispanics were Cuban-Americans whom right-wingers could win by exploiting their antipathy to Fidel Castro. Cuban-Americans are no longer single-issue voters. But non-Cuban Hispanic-Americans quit drifting R when the financial crisis hit them hard in the Far West. (Republicans still did OK with Hispanics in Texas, but that is because a financial meltdown similar to that in much of America around 2008 did not happen in Texas. Texas had its financial calamity in the 1980s and reformed its banking system extensively).

That said, middle-class Hispanics respect formal education and attribute much of their success to formal education. They still get respect from poor Hispanics because they have no great cultural divide. Much the same is true of Asian-Americans.

The white middle-class is slightly R, but it has a huge cultural divide with poor Southern whites. Just think -- does an urban middle-class German-American Protestant in California have a world view more like that of an urban middle-class Mexican-Americans or with Appalachian white people?       

[pbrower2a]

It all boils down to media and colleges. For decades we placed our confidence upon colleges and education as a path for our kids. Gramsci knew it, and its no wonder why he stressed the importance of starting indoctrination not on Kindergarten, or Trade School, but precisely at those very high-brow intellectual circles.

Then we have the media, which being also heavily contaminated, does everything it can to portray the GOP as the party of the uneducated, of the stupid, of the anti-science, of the angry old white racist man.

These two things don't explain it all, however. There's a third factor. See, though not an American, I'm a GOP supporter. I agree with Reps far more than I do with Dems. If I was American, I'd be a registered Republican. And unfortunately, the GOP not only has had its reputation tarnished by the enemy. Its been tarnishing itself since the rise of the Christian Right. Goldwater warned you, and apparently, you gave the poor man little attention. Its not about being pro-life. I'm a pro-life too, even though I also happen to be an atheist. Its not about the drugs. William Buckley Jr. was a proponent of decriminalising the herb. Its not about gay marriage, which I oppose simply because I am totally against Civil Marriage at all, even though its something I'd easily compromise.

Its about how you present yourselves.

Wait, what the hell are you talking about with college and the media? Education doesn't have much effect on voting patters, except on the extreme ends of the education spectrum.

Are you saying  that colleges "indoctrinate" people to be liberal and vote Democrat?

And the media doesn't have to "portray" the GOP as what you said; Republican politicians do it just fine by themselves. The media just reports on it.

On the short term, it doesn't. On the long term, however, it does. Just look at how professors profess liberal ideologies so strongly. By teaching this to kids.

Were that so, then the kids born in the 1960s and 1970s, whose professors went through the radicalizing trends of the 1960s, would be the most politically-liberal of all voters. They are not. They reacted to the stale and (by then) irrelevant Leftism of '60s radicals by voting heavily for Reagan and both Bushes.  

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It's impossible to discuss much of American history -- at least as late as the Civil War -- from a Left-Right viewpoint unless one introduces anachronisms. States generally select the textbooks, and one of those States is right-wing Texas. Schoolbooks too left-wing to pass the Texas board lose a huge market. To fit Texas those books must never criticize "free enterprise" even by calling it "capitalism".

As for geography classes... One with which I am familiar with as a substitute teacher is a thinly-disguised  course in remedial reading. Social studies? In general they treat 'socialism' as a bad idea. That said, K-12 education is largely for teaching the basics.  

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What is left-wing in Hollywood is its talent, particularly in screen actors and scriptwriters. Maybe that is because a disproportionate part of that talent is Jewish. No complaint there; the culture that I am from is largely incompetent in entertaining people. But at that one largely discusses entertainment whose didactic purposes are usually well concealed -- if there is such a purpose. But some right-wingers (Frederic March, John Wayne, Walter Brennan, Jimmy Stewart, Bob Hope, RONALD REAGAN, Charlton Heston, Clint Eastwood) have done well in Hollywood -- at least as screen actors.  

Action-adventure movies, police dramas, war flicks, and westerns are generally conservative in their ethos; the only "left" tendency in something like Raiders of the Lost Ark is disdain for Nazism. OK. Nazis will always be fair game; admit it: you loved the scene in which the Ark was opened and Nazi brutes died in some of the most horrific ways possible. Melting? Decaying in place? When there's a sequel to the series involving Indiana Jones' grandson (maybe granddaughter) seeking the stolen Amber Room (the Russians still want it back!) in archeologically-rich Iraq under Saddam Hussein, the thugs who die horribly will be Ba'athist brutes. It's hard to place Saddam Hussein on the Left-Right continuum. I assure you -- you will be delighted as those thugs die in ways that you will find delightful to your sensibilities.

The entertainment media are not creating any cult of personality to fit Barack Obama. As an Obama supporter, I consider that a very good thing.  

But that is Hollywood. Media includes pop music. If it were so left-wing you would see plentiful successors of Bob Dylan. I see mostly wish fulfillment, much of it "pimp fantasy", objectionable not so much for politics as for intellectual and moral emptiness. Rap may be full of rage, but aside from antipathy to cops doing their legitimate jobs (am I a conservative for hating drugs? I think not) they are apolitical. Country music offers numerous right-wing themes. Jazz and folk probably have a left-leaning clientele. Classical? A bit to the right of the jazz and folk audiences, maybe -- but it's hard to place a taste in music on the left-right continuum.

Books? I can't read them all. You tell me if you see any political agenda in the Harry Potter series.

Probably more expenditures of money go into sports than anything else, and perhaps because more people watch televised sporting events than anything else. It's safe to say that sports are an escape from politics.    

OK -- News. Does anyone still believe that FoX News is without an agenda? If it is as it is said, "the most watched, the most trusted name in news"... does that say that American media are left-wing? CNN has much fluff, but it seems to go with whoever is winning at the time. Anyone who thinks that the thirty-minute evening news on ABC, CBS, or NBC can be anything more than a superficial survey of events is a fool.    

      

[pbrower2a]

It all boils down to media and colleges. For decades we placed our confidence upon colleges and education as a path for our kids. Gramsci knew it, and its no wonder why he stressed the importance of starting indoctrination not on Kindergarten, or Trade School, but precisely at those very high-brow intellectual circles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramsci#Intellectuals_and_education

Read up, please. Wiki contradicts you. Gramsci wanted to create a cadre of intellectuals from within the working class to promote Marxism due to loyalty to the working class -- intellectuals with no ties to the ruling elite which co-opts its "best and brightest" of any origin, and intellectuals capable of relating to the mores of the working class.

In the absence of intellectuals from the working class with greater loyalty to the working class than to a right-wing government that intellectuals love for funding an excellent opera company despite that government serving exploiters who compel workers to toil to exhaustion for near-starvation pay.  

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The American media are no monolith. The fault with mass dissent with the portrayal of the GOP as the party of the uneducated, of the stupid, of the anti-science, of the angry old ... racist man -- so long as the alleged ignoramus is white -- is that the GOP bought into the vote of the uneducated, of the stupid, of the anti-science, of the angry old white racist man. A Party that caters to such a vote should hardly be surprised that people whose values and aspirations are incompatible with that vote leave for the alternative. I doubt that Brazil has an equivalent of FoX News, a nearly-incessant stream of right-wing propaganda.  

Republicans used to get the bulk of educated people respectful of learning and science, people usually having a stake in moderate conservatism.  They made their deal, and they have lost big parts of the American middle class. As undereducated white people die off and the non-white, non-Christian, non-Anglo, and non-straight middle class expands the Democrats can only gain.    

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You don't realize how awful the GOP has become in recent years. One almost must live in the USA to see how awful the Republican Party has become. It has taken on integralist characteristics. It has largely lost its moderates to the Democratic Party.

Of course you are right that America has been treating its poor as expendable objects. Poverty has become a third rail of American politics, something that reminds us of our failures.   As a candidate Barack Obama hardly addressed poverty; the Republicans largely blame the victims of poverty for their own poverty. The Republican 'solution' to poverty is to make poverty sting even harder as an incentive for people to work harder and longer for less.

[pbrower2a]

Books? I can't read them all. You tell me if you see any political agenda in the Harry Potter series.

This post is in general quite correct, but Harry Potter is actually quite ideologically left of center.

It's practically impossible to make heroes of businessmen and bureaucratic elites and have good literature. Schindler's List is one of the few that succeeds. Can you imagine that an accountant is one of the heroes? As an accountant, nonetheless!