The Personal Attacks On McCain In The Trumpworld Need To Stop

[pbrower2a]

I see a struggle between the older members of the GOP (the moderates of the past) and the younger, more ruthless hard-liners. The former recognized politics as give-and-take, and would go along with a Ronald Reagan who recognized the inevitability of his side losing its attractiveness  as it exhausted its ideals and achieved its agenda. The younger Republicans believe in winning everything and never conceding power. They have Donald Trump -- an extremely-flawed politician -- as the current vehicle. After him? Someone who truly believes in a Christian and Corporate State intent on spreading some new form of Manifest Destiny where it is unwelcome while crushing or at least making irrelevant all dissent.

The Party of Lincoln has begun to increasingly a Party of Lenin except for fully endorsing capitalist power, wealth, and privilege as an objective instead of as anathema. 

Personal moderates could be drifting Democratic, but those are voters and not politicians. When the Democrats get enough such voters (biggest such constituency: college-educated white people), then the game is up for Republicans who have suckered for the Trump campaign. It is telling that both Obama and Eisenhower (the definitive moderate!) did very well among well-educate4d people (meaning a college degree)  -- but there are far more well-educate4d people now than in the 1950s, and the well-educated population is much more diverse (in the 1950s, most college grads were still WASPs) today. College education selects for certain cultures of mind (ethnicity and religion matter little) and creates its own intellectual consequences, most notably that college grads are much less likely to become suckers for demagogues of any kind.

It is also telling that Obama elections have an uncanny resemblance to Eisenhower elections. Overlap of states between politicians with opposite parties and dissimilar curricula vitae suggest similarities more of state culture over fifty years. (Obama did do badly in those states in which ranching is the predominant form of agriculture, but that is relatively few states).

 

[pbrower2a]

This is the inevitable result of putting a madman with the morals of a rabid weasel in charge of the GOP. If decent human beings want vile stuff like this to stop, Trumpy needs to be removed from office and his party punished for their evil and stupidity in supporting him - ideally by being politically destroyed. Real conservatives and those who truly want to see policy guided by sincere religious views (should any such people exist) can pay their dues and form a new party untainted by the toxic social cancer that is Trumpism.

The problem is that too few people saw this. It was up to Republicans to decide what was their best offering in the election, and someone who bragged about grabbing women by their crotches, who had ties to underworld people, and who showed more admiration for dictators than for people who get elected fair-and-square should have been a quick reject. 

Republicans could have made protest votes in November 2016 for Gary Johnson or for candidates of others like Gary Johnson or Evan McMullen. But winning is everything even if it means voting for a lying demagogue. Sure, they would be stuck with Hillary Clinton, but at least we wouldn't have so many scandals crippling the President's agenda.