Republican Debate: The Hateful 8

Actually I’m unsure how many are left standing, doesn’t really matter anyway. The point is that we are watching the implosion of the Neoliberal System.

This is how a political party dies: Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders — and the collapse of our failed political elites
by Paul Rosenberg, Salon
Saturday, Feb 6, 2016 09:30 AM EST

(T)here’s one simple, obvious explanation for what’s going on: the existing party system may be crumbling right before our eyes. As confusing and chaotic as the presidential race drama has been, it could be only symptomatic of something even deeper and more profound: the death and dissolution of one or both major political parties.
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Shortly after the Whig Party died, the Democratic Party almost died as well—and from basically the same cause: the issue of slavery. In 1860, the party split into sectional factions. Northern Democrats supporting Lincoln Douglas, who gained 29.5 percent of the vote, and Southern Democrats supporting Breckenridge, who won 18.1 percent. Lincoln won election with just 39.8 percent 0f the vote, while a fourth candidate, John Bell, won 12.6 percent as head of the short-lived Constitutional Union party, a fragmentary Whig offshoot. With Lincoln’s election, the Southern states that supported Breckenridge quickly seceded, bringing on the Civil War, but by 1868 most were back in the body politic, with both major parties intact.

No major party has died since then—except for Teddy Roosevelt’s “Bull Moose” Party, which was largely reabsorbed into the GOP in 1916, after Roosevelt’s second-place showing in the 1912 election briefly demoted the GOP to third party status. The GOP’s ability to recover from such a profound shock stands in stark contrast to the party history of the earlier era. If we want to understand why that long record of stability over the past 150+ years may come to an end—or at least why it might be worth considering—we need to first get a better understanding of the more stable era, how it falls into two distinct parts, and how it fits together with the more tumultuous era that preceded it.
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But in 1968 something unprecedented, something distinctly different happened—a change possibly as profound as what happened in the 1860s. Instead of a realigning election coherently reorganizing the two parties along new lines, we had what realignment theorist Walter Dean Burnham called a “dealigning election,” after which divided government became the rule, just slightly before the explosive growth of inequality and elite power that has blighted America ever since, with the asymmetric polarization of politics that has followed.

The dealigned state of American politics is what today’s political elites consider normal—from political scientists to media commentators to officeholders, operatives, donors and all the rest. It’s what shapes their whole view of the political world—not just what is, but what is imaginable. And yet, it’s a profoundly atypical state that American politics is in.
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Barack Obama’s 2008 election could have been so significant, in terms of shifting the entire political system back into a more traditionally functional mode. The multifaceted failures of the Bush administration created a profound political opening, reflected in the political results. Obama won election by almost 10 million popular votes, taking the electoral college 365-173, while winning Indiana and Virginia from the GOP for the first time since 1964. Democrats won a 21-seat wave election in the House, for a 257-178 total, and an eight-seat gain in the Senate for 57-41 margin (59-41 with two independent allies). Although just shy of what’s needed to overcome a filibuster, there were still half a handful of Republican senators—Snowe, Collins, Specter and possibly Murkowski—who could be publicly pressured not to filibuster sufficiently popular proposals that Democrats might advance.

Obama’s 2008 election represented a real opportunity for the dawn of a new multi-decade party system era of Democratic policy dominance, but Obama, as a creature of the divided government era, did not even aspire to such a goal, seeing “bickering” between the parties as the real obstacle facing the country, and setting out to overcome it by seeking compromise. Obama’s consensus-seeking—rather than consensus-shaping—approach left him wide open for the GOP rejectionist strategy that followed, wrapped up in the false claim that it was he who would not compromise, when they insisted on repeatedly pulling sharply to the right.

Obama was so deeply imbued with the dealigned worldview of the post-1968 era that he never pursued the possibility of initiating an era of Democratic dominance—even when near-absolute GOP opposition made the path of bipartisan policymaking untenable, as his repeated bipartisan overtures were rejected again and again. Despite the fact that Obama typically began his policy negotiating from a position of “consensus” compromise, Republicans responded by portraying it in extremist terms, and the hapless political press duly fell into “he-said/she-said”/“both-sides-do-it” line. Thus, Obama’s attempt to deal with the accumulated backlog of unresolved issues, problems, tensions and unmet expectations in a bipartisan manner, within the imaginative framework of the dealigned era was successfully mis-portrayed as a radical departure, when, in reality, only a radical departure could possibly have dealt with all that accumulated backlog. (A radical departure, I should add, which would first and foremost consist of restoring how our politics has usually functioned.) This is precisely the argument that Bernie Sanders is advancing today.

If neither party is prepared for such a radical departure, then one or both of them very well may die, because the American people demand it, even as the established frameworks of American politics fail to deliver for them—both the frameworks of intra-party organization, which evolve over time, and the framework of periodic inter-party/transparty reorganization, which used to occur via realigning elections.

The unexpected storylines of the 2016 election cycle so far are but superficial expressions of far more fundamental untold stories deep within the bowels of our collective public life. Even if the GOP thwarts Donald Trump, and Hillary Clinton’s almost unanimous support by the Democratic establishment keeps Sanders at bay, the profound elite failures of the post-1968 era cannot be wished away, including the chimera of elite bipartisan solutions. Sooner or later, something’s got to give. If neither party is equipped to respond to what the people demand, it would be foolish not to expect a return to the more chaotic politics of the pre-1860 era.

The all too predictable fecklessness and bloviating of the Villager Media Chattering Class of Bourgeoisie Bootlickers is more vapid than ever as they scramble to figure out why Revolution is now the topic of the national conversation. The longer the charade continues the more exposed they are as clueless mediocrities privileged by accident of birth instead of highly trained meritocrats worthy of their bloodsucking apex status.

What is the end of our revolution? The tranquil enjoyment of liberty and equality; the reign of that eternal justice, the laws of which are graven, not on marble or stone, but in the hearts of men, even in the heart of the slave who has forgotten them, and in that of the tyrant who disowns them.

We wish that order of things where all the low and cruel passions are enchained, all the beneficent and generous passions awakened by the laws; where ambition subsists in a desire to deserve glory and serve the country: where distinctions grow out of the system of equality, where the citizen submits to the authority of the magistrate, the magistrate obeys that of the people, and the people are governed by a love of justice; where the country secures the comfort of each individual, and where each individual prides himself on the prosperity and glory of his country; where every soul expands by a free communication of republican sentiments, and by the necessity of deserving the esteem of a great people: where the arts serve to embellish that liberty which gives them value and support, and commerce is a source of public wealth and not merely of immense riches to a few individuals.

We wish in our country that morality may be substituted for egotism, probity for false honour, principles for usages, duties for good manners, the empire of reason for the tyranny of fashion, a contempt of vice for a contempt of misfortune, pride for insolence, magnanimity for vanity, the love of glory for the love of money, good people for good company, merit for intrigue, genius for wit, truth for tinsel show, the attractions of happiness for the ennui of sensuality, the grandeur of man for the littleness of the great, a people magnanimous, powerful, happy, for a people amiable, frivolous and miserable; in a word, all the virtues and miracles of a Republic instead of all the vices and absurdities of a Monarchy.

ABC if you must find it.