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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
No, he can't possibly win in the general election. The reason why I don't want him to win the nomination is that it would indicate that the Republican party is beyond any possibility of redemption. Despite everything, I hold out hopes that they'll eventually cast off their crazies, much as the Democrats did during Reagan's era.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"On the contrary, i'd see it as a sign for an internal wake-up call. The alliance of convenience between the plutocrats and the white working class is strained, and grows more strained as the white working class loses its power as the consumer center of gravity (ironically due to the policies they've let the plutocrats tell them to vote for). Trump has demonstrated it's not money to say or feel these things anymore, and the plutocrats are going to start pulling against the crazies if they realize that the party is beyond all recall.
An internal civil war that restores power to the relatively sane centrists is exactly what I'm hoping for. I do not want to see Trump win that war, because it will be a devastating blow to what remains of sanity in our political process.
edited 14th Jul '15 9:49:47 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Yeah a top crazy ticket (as opposed to the bottom crazy tickets of Romney and Mc Caine) failing might actually indicate to the part that they need to reform, Until they get a top crazy ticket they're going to keeping thinking that the solution is to push further to the right.
Though Trump isn't going to get the nomination, he's still behind Bush.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranA moderate Republican party would actually be able to get things done. Bad things. Things that the public doesn't have the energy to fight against. Things that they would inevitably somehow find a way to blame on liberals. No, I'd much rather see them go the other direction into complete lunacy. That way they'd discredit everything they stood for in the process of achieving their scorched earth policies.
I see Trump to the Republican party as Grexit would be to Europe. Let it all burn, I hear that the ashes of post-apocalyptic economic hellscapes make for fertile crop-growing ground.
Furthermore, I think Guantanamo must be destroyed.Yeah. I suppose I hold out perpetual hope that sanity will resume without having to go through a catastrophic failure state, but it seems that we'll get crazy Republican candidates into perpetuity until one of them rises to the top and is shut down hard.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"You sound like a neoliberal. "Crashes are in the market's natural way of cleaning up misinvestment. They should be allowed to take their course."
The scary part? I agree with you.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.Okay, let's run with this analogy:
If the republican party crashes, what happens in the process? Obviously, political matches previously winnable by Republicans are won by Democrats. But what happens while the Republicans are still in office but their parties are crashing? What happens to the occasional UTTER LOONBALLS who still manage to get elected in the meantime?
When the economy crashes, there's mass devastation. What kind of mass devastation will occur if the Republican party well and truly crashes?
Frankly? I expect genuine secession attempts from those legislative units that remain under Republican control, with possible military intervention, a la school desegregation during the civil rights era. I can't see a true civil war happening, but we might get a lot of insurgent activity from the Right Wing Militia Fanatics.
edited 14th Jul '15 10:22:18 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Yeah, I know what I sound like. Five years ago I would have been much more moderate. Ten years ago I would have thought current me was talking like a crazy person. But persistent extremism eventually breeds extreme responses amongst those who would otherwise be moderate. How the Republican Party has chosen to respond to the current presidency has impacted my feelings about them as an institution pretty significantly.
If we're playing prophet... military intervention? I dunno, I'm not sure it would be that necessary. Rightwing protests would likely involve more guns, but they'd also be more concentrated in rural areas, wouldn't they? So I'd imagine the casualties would be pretty minimal. Nonetheless, there's still a lot of people with the idea that the states are the heroes and the feds are the bad guys, and there's going to be some kind of dramatic fallout in the process of resolving that.
But I like to think it would be as simple as the federal government cutting off funding to the relevant rightwing enclaves until they realized that, oh yeah, no man really is an island.
Once that nonsense was settled, I like to think the new political layout would be Greens versus Democrats, with the Democrats absorbing most of the Republican career politicians and casting off the ideologues entirely.
edited 14th Jul '15 10:31:31 AM by Karkadinn
Furthermore, I think Guantanamo must be destroyed.The reason that I predict insurgencies, at least in the short term, is that it's uniformly the response of crazies like the Tea Party to the recognition that they are being disenfranchised thanks to no party being willing to take them on as constituents. Give them A Taste of Power, and they'll cling to it bitterly.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"The closest thing I can think of in immediate terms is the Cliven Bundy ranch situation, which enjoyed some Republican support before he became politically inconvenient to them. People like their symbols of idealized freedom, but once that freedom starts putting out real inconvenience in tangible terms, any popular support is going to drop real fast.
Furthermore, I think Guantanamo must be destroyed.I'm not as pessimistic as Fighteer in terms of expecting actual armed intervention becoming necessary, but the Republican party collapsing would be a scary, scary thing, as we don't know what would replace it. The American political system essentially requires two parties, so something would rise to replace it in (relatively) short order. Pretty much one of two things would happen. US politics could shift left, with the Democrats becoming the center-right party and a new party (Liberal party? Progressive party?) taking the leftist position — incidentally mirroring most of the rest of the developed world. The other possibility is that the right wing doubles down and the Tea Party becomes permanently entrenched as the conservative side of American politics, and the moderate Republicans flee to the Democrats.
Now, if the Republican party did collapse, there would inevitably be a combination of the two; surely the hardcore right wingers would try to do their own thing, and some of the moderate conservatives would turn to the Democratic party. (The latter has already happened for some people, actually: see Charlie Crist.) The question is which manages to take power at the national level. If the right manages to keep enough of a hold on national politics for the Democrats to maintain a coherent identity in opposition to them, then you'd end up with "Democrats vs Tea Party". If the Democrats completely sweep national elections, then they'll inevitably split and we'll end up with "Liberal Progressives (or whatever) vs Democrats".
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.I'd love to be proven wrong about the dissolution of the Republican party being accompanied by armed insurrection. Please, please let me be proven wrong. But then, we have idiots like Chuck Norris, and I start to despair again.
edited 14th Jul '15 11:54:46 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Eh, I wouldn't be surprised if there are militia groups that get violent, but the question is, what exactly is the scale of the violence going to be.
Without a full fledged civil war, the military can just steamroll over everything, and once people realize "Wait, the country doesn't WANT an armed rebellion" then it's just down to a small handful of domestic terrorists that become increasingly marginalized.
I mean, any loss of life is a tragedy, so it'd certainly be a bad thing. But, well ,with the Republican party as it is, what kinds of tragedies would its reform prevent?
Point, but I don't want any more tragedies. I suppose we can't all have our wishes.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Re: a right-wing insurgency
Have you seen the state of the people in the Tea Party? I'm sure they'd be great insurgents if their buggies could climb hills. Of course, food wouldn't be a problem. Their, er, reserves would last for weeks.
edited 14th Jul '15 12:17:39 PM by Achaemenid
Schild und Schwert der ParteiOn the one hand I'd be sooooo happy so see every loon out here who thinks that just because they bought an AR-15 and some canned beans that they're a survivalist who can take on a Marine get crushed under the awesome might of the 101st Airborne I also really don't want another civil war. Yet.
Lemme move out of the south first.
Oh really when?

Because then there's a chance he might actually win.