Let's just ignore the original racist party...
(I will need to retrieve a map overlaying elections of Dwight Eisenhower and Barack Obama. Please be patient while I so do).
Honestly, why bother? He doesn't appear willing to try and understand how the parties have changed since those days. It's just easier to make simple comparisons while ignoring the multitude of factors that make such a comparisons inaccurate. His comment on the usage of identity politics already shows he either can't or won't be objective, either.Educational purposes, I suppose. A simplistic falsehood takes a little sophistication and effort to debunk. Besides -- I love that map.
I have been saying for years that conservatism in America is cultural not ideological. Is this news to people?
Yeah, because you're still wrong.
I think the issue here is that the vehicle for supposed conservatism
(the Republican party) is not actually being driven by conservatism right now. It's being driven by resentment of cultural change in this country, and frankly, it's the actual conservatives' fault. Either they were too naive/ignorant to see where their racially divisive and out of touch politics was going, or they did see but were too greedy while enjoying the short-term electoral benefits, but the end result is they have lost control. Perhaps Hagrid didn't express it accurately enough, and there are actual conservatives who don't buy into / aggressively perpetuate this bigoted bs, but they are being overshadowed quite a bit.
To that end, it sort of makes 'conservative' politics irrelevant right now. A large portion of the party's voters do not seem to give a hoot about supply-side economics, deregulation or the like, but rather when, and approximately how fast the brown people can be dealt with.
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If anything, the Democrats have been co-opting much of what used to be conservative values that Republicans used to exploit. The map suggests that many of the demographic groups that would have voted for Eisenhower in the 1950s have gone to Barack Obama, or that the states have specific cultures favorable to Obama were generally favorable to Ike in the 1950s. It is amazing, is it not, that Eisenhower won some states that have consistently been tough wins for Democrats beginning in 1928 -- Massachusetts and Minnesota, the hold-out states preventing 50-state landslides for Nixon in 1972 and Reagan in 1984, and Rhode Island, one of only two states outside the South that went for Al Smith in 1928 (the other such state was Massachusetts).
Democrats are coming to recognize such old conservative values as rationality, sobriety, and even patriotism.
The 2016 overlay could be very interesting. Wait a couple months.
