• Maggoty@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    That man is politically immortal. There is nothing he can do to “commit political suicide”.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      He can lose, repeatedly. But that doesn’t really end Trumpism. It just mutates the brand into Republicans who can pitch themselves as “winners”.

      A big problem with Lincoln Project Republicanism is that it doesn’t refute the fundamental fascist tenants of Trumpism (the xenophobia, the white nationalist Christiandom, anti-Democratic sentiments). They just pitch Trump as on the wrong side of foreign policy (not hawkish enough on Russia or China).

      So we end up with Trump on one end and Ted Cruz on the other, as our range of conservative options.

      • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        Things have definitely changed and there’s republicans agitating to just blow it all up and start over. The old party wasn’t great but it was at least loyal.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          there’s republicans agitating to just blow it all up and start ove

          There are Republicans who lost their primaries and want their seats back. But they aren’t going to throw away Reaganism to defeat Trumpism.

          • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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            3 days ago

            Everyone calls it Reagan, but he just did what Republicans were saying they wanted for decades already. In fact I’m not sure where the Republicans could fall back to ideologically. Ever since the Dixie Flip they’ve pretty much built their entire party around racism and religious extremism.

            • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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              3 days ago

              In fact I’m not sure where the Republicans could fall back to ideologically.

              At the heart of every Republican is a British Tory who desperately wants an American King.

              Ever since the Dixie Flip they’ve pretty much built their entire party around racism and religious extremism.

              Republicanism, even back to Lincoln, was a theory of Industrial expansion. Modern Republicans simply have nowhere else to expand into.

              Racism and religious extremism are about re-colonizing the interior a second time, with a smaller and more “pure” cohort of settlers.

              But without the large locus of dense population like the party had when it was dominant in the metropoles, that’s increasingly difficult to accomplish.

              What the GOP needs is a new Mecca (or, perhaps, a New New York). A large, population dense center of power to expand out of again. Maybe they’ve found that in Salt Lake City. Maybe they’ve found it in the increasingly right wing Texas capital of Austin. Or in Silicon Valley. Or in Tel Aviv. Maybe they’ll rediscover New York (Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo certainly suggest fascism still plays well in the Big Apple).

              But Settler Colonialism 2 is the dream.

              • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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                3 days ago

                That’s an interesting way to look at it. I’m not sure they need a single city though, the analogy kind of falls apart if you take it too far. But the whole restricting voting rights to white Christian men married with kids could certainly be described as a new form of colonialism. It’s essentially apartheid, and that was an outgrowth of colonialism.

    • Randomgal@lemmy.ca
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      4 days ago

      I came to say something like “too bad this guy is a zombie, smells like one too.”