11.27.12
A famous person leaves WhiteManistan
Pointed to by Paul Krugman, Reaganite supply-side economist Bruce Bartlett throws in the towel in a long essay for the American Conservative. It’s clear he wants to write another book about it. Presumably, it is meant to serve as a leader for offers.
The essence of it is the Republican Party is well and truly fucked, no surprise. And it purged him for not being of the body. And he’s clearly very upset that he was expelled, fired, blacklisted, and permanently crossed off the lists of former friends.
All the stupidity and closed-mindedness that right-wingers have displayed over the last 10 years has come back to haunt them. It is now widely understood that the nation may be center-left after all, not center-right as conservatives thought. Overwhelming losses by Republicans to all the nation’s nonwhite voters have created a Democratic coalition that will govern the nation for the foreseeable future …
The economy continues to conform to textbook Keynesianism. We still need more aggregate demand, and the Republican idea that tax cuts for the rich will save us becomes more ridiculous by the day. People will long remember Mitt Romney’s politically tone-deaf attack on half the nation’s population for being losers, leeches, and moochers because he accurately articulated the right-wing worldview.
Although Bartlett never says it rudely, he informs that all the shitting on everyone not white and nonsensical ideas about the economy have perhaps irreparably maimed the Republican Party in the electorate.
He suggests this could be ameliorated by trying to be more appealing to the black voter, since the Hispanic voter is totally lost.
Yeah, that’s going to happen.
Bartlett doesn’t actually go far enough. He concedes the GOP is doomed to be a blocking minority party, preserving power to interfere with things but not advance any national policy or people.
Because it has successfully proven itself to be suicidally capable of obstruction, it’s gone so far as to become a national security threat. Most notably, this in the area of advancing environmental disasters.
The GOP denies science and successfully derailed all action on global warming in the US at the federal level. It transformed actually trying to do something about a documented global problem into an electrified third rail.
Wait and see. Six months from now the GOP will have cooked up some crazy conspiracy theory and a raft of fake facts to argue that Sandy was normal. And on their tv, web sites and radio they will laugh and titter at everyone else so stupid as to believe what they witnessed just before the election.
The 2012 election rendered the GOP structurally dead in California. If you’re a Republican politician in California, now you’re just a powerless white asshole, persona non grata, someone who could not ever be reasoned or worked with.
I moved here in 1991 when the San Gabriel Valley was essentially conservative GOP. In the following years it turned blue.
From the time I arrived until 1998, Republican Pete Wilson was governor. And as part of the GOP, he implemented the party’s war on Hispanics with the horrible Proposition 187 to deprive illegal immigrants of any social, health or educational services in California.
Although it was passed by a reactionary white referendum its eventual effect was to permanently turn a substantial part of the state electorate against the GOP.
And now it has finally changed, irreversibly. California is a one party state. But not without cost. The GOP, as a blocking party, assiduously wrecked the place for two decades.