Looks like the tax cutters have won. I guess we should have seen that coming. Honestly it's all they seem to know. They cut taxes in good times and bad times. It's like they don't actually care about the affects of tax cuts on our budget and economy. They just want more tax cuts.
As thereisnospoon noted at DailyKos there are 3 types of Republicans left:
Residual racists uncomfortable with any portion of their tax dollars going to blacks or Hispanics, and desirous of indiscriminately killing any ethnic or religious group around the world who makes them fear for their safety;
Religious fundamentalists furious that women may be having sex without the appropriate "consequences", and terrified that gay people might "recruit" their children if allowed to live out their lives in open happiness; and
Super-wealthy families desperate to keep their 8-figure incomes untouched by the nasty hands of the same "big government" that provides the services and protections upon which they so heavily depend.
The racists and fundies are just too dumb to recognize the only group getting what they want are the super-wealthy families.
4 Comments:
The tax-cutter Republicans have been calling the shots over there ever since there was a "cultural" wing to their party (late 60s/early 70s). The fundamentalists, xenophobes, imperialists, and others never really had any power within the GOP. The very presence of these cultural groups within the GOP is, by design, to extend the influence of the money people.
It was the big Faustian bargain that wasn't. The money people have to pay lip service to a bunch of cultural issues they couldn't care less about one way or the other, while the culture warriors unwittingly adopt the party's economic philosophies that they never understood one way or another. In return, the culture warriors get the affirmation of having a major political party endorsing their views while the money people had a way to get droves of lower/middle class voters to vote against their own economic interests. Nobody ever really sold their soul here, though. Most money people can afford to skirt whatever draconian cultural laws that could ever be established and culture people are mostly oblivious to macro-economic reality anyway.
So, yes. Within the GOP, it is the interests of the super wealthy that truly govern their positions. And, yes, I agree that the racists and fundies are being used as a "cat's paw" by the money people to help them raid the cookie jar. But, this phenomenon, like religion and superstition itself, has so much more to do with laziness of thought and indifference of heart than with stupidity, and this is not new.
Here's a question for you pubwoof-what would call the faction that has left the Republican party? You know guys like my step-father who is an accountant? These are the newly "independent" voters.
Why were they ever voting Republican in the first place?
I'm not sure any discernable single faction left the GOP as much as many who sat on the center-most fringes (of whatever alignment) did. I imagine their reasons for leaving the party vary quite a bit since Democratic gains were spread amongst several demographic/psychographics.
If I absolutely had to put these new independents into labelable categories, I can think of two main ones. One group would be "Reagan Democrats" coming home after a long fucking time away. I think this is because the small-goverment anti-regulatory rhetoric has lost it's appeal amidst the current economic crisis of crooks and robber barons. We can keep these guys around for a while if Obama can deliver us from this economic evil. They went to Reagan largely because they lost faith in the New Deal style of government which they were told to believe was keeping them down. They didn't buy that bullshit this year.
The other group with high defections were the New-England-style Rockefeller Republicans. This backlash is probably due to a variety of things; unease with the role fundamentalists have played within the party, the role neocons have played in foreign policy, constitutional abuses under Bush, the GOPs culture war against "elites" and education (think Palin), or a bunch of other things a true conservative should find offensive. Many of these people voted Democratic this year after a lifetime with the Republicans they now view as having gone too far over the line. Whether we keep them has more to do with the future direction of the GOP than it does with that of our own party.
I did hear a lot of grumbling coming from those who consider themselves "smart Republicans" after the Palin pick.
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