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What has been really upsetting to me this election cycle has been the overt insults from the white right toward everyone else. The dependent classes, the takers vs. the makers, the 47%, government aparach etc. I don't recall Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, George W. Bush or Reagan or Bush I being so divisive, and showing such transparent contempt for large swaths of the population. Despite what I thought of his flawed foreign and economic policies, I never felt that W was racist or sexist. He seemed to like most people.
This election cycle, it is as if there are supposedly the good Americans and the bad Americans. I recall Sarah Palin playing this game in 2008, and I did not like it then. I am a hardworking, rural, white, christian, straight guy, but I really don't see myself as more American than a gay, Vietnamese, urban woman. I just don't care for this view of America, but judging by the Romney vs. Obama voters, it is as if the Repubs are very, very white, and the Dems are everyone else. I am having hard time seeing how the GOP has embraced a John Birch Society type platform in 2012.
Where did this new narrative come from, and whose idea was it? I cannot see it being a smart or very civil strategy over the long term.
What has been really upsetting to me this election cycle has been the overt insults from the white right toward everyone else. The dependent classes, the takers vs. the makers, the 47%, government aparach etc. I don't recall Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, George W. Bush or Reagan or Bush I being so divisive, and showing such transparent contempt for large swaths of the population. Despite what I thought of his flawed foreign and economic policies, I never felt that W was racist or sexist. He seemed to like most people.
This election cycle, it is as if there are supposedly the good Americans and the bad Americans. I recall Sarah Palin playing this game in 2008, and I did not like it then. I am a hardworking, rural, white, christian, straight guy, but I really don't see myself as more American than a gay, Vietnamese, urban woman. I just don't care for this view of America, but judging by the Romney vs. Obama voters, it is as if the Repubs are very, very white, and the Dems are everyone else. I am having hard time seeing how the GOP has embraced a John Birch Society type platform in 2012.
Where did this new narrative come from, and whose idea was it? I cannot see it being a smart or very civil strategy over the long term.
Sadly, it comes as a response to an increasingly aggressive and angry progressive backward movement.... for every negative action there will be a equally negative and opposite force to counter it. That opposite force is the new GOP of warmongers and corporate stooges
And America will continue to move backward as a result of both parties intent on hurting us....... and the media is the tool they use to accomplish the ends
Seems like more race-baiting, as we know there are no shortage of whites on welfare and other assistance, while there are several high-profile Black and Latino Republicans, even tea-party types.
Yes, things have gotten very divisive but all evidence I've seen shows this is mostly due to Obama administration class-warfare attitudes and the far-left and many Obama supporters pulling the race card and accusing anyone who doesn't support Obama or is critical of his administration's performance of being a "racist."
Where did this new narrative come from, and whose idea was it? I cannot see it being a smart or very civil strategy over the long term.
I will not agree with you about George Bush's errant son, since I ascribe much of the tenor now prevailing in the GOP if not to him personally then to cynical machiavellians he countenanced. But certainly the tenor is appalling. Not so much because it's new - the Jefferson-Adams fight was conducted with utterly scurrilous and despicable methods - but because it is a recurring cycle in American public life, the periodic revolt of the untutored, ignorant and malicious herd.
As Gordon Wood has demonstrated in several of his works, this cycle began shortly after the Revolution, as political life slipped from the control of the silk-stockinged gentlemen who thought they could control the forces they had unleashed. It came full circle again with Jackson's victory over the "corrupt aristocrats of the East", his preferred term for anyone who had ever read a book other than the New Testament. It took a particularly virulent and unpleasant form in the Old Democratic Party's dismantling of Reconstruction, its installation of Jim Crow and its anti-Catholic Nativism. McCarthyite red-baiting and John Bircher paranoia fanned its flames in the first decades of the Cold War.
It's the American force of darkness, and each time it has spread, sensible good people have had to fight hard to quell it.
If you are a moderate, at this time it would be easier to get the Democratic party to move to your position then the GOP position. Truth be told both have dug in very hard to their extreme positions, but the GOP has been very dedicated to their current extreme shift of late, taking the top prize.
I don't see the GOP shift as sustainable and within a decade will self-correct.
What a load of crap. Only far left loons think like this.
I agree, the OP has no problem with Obama dividing this country by race, income, wealth, workers vs non workers, and its the GOP's fault? Whats he smoking..
If you are a moderate, at this time it would be easier to get the Democratic party to move to your position then the GOP position. Truth be told both have dug in very hard to their extreme positions, but the GOP has been very dedicated to their current extreme shift of late, taking the top prize.
I don't see the GOP shift as sustainable and within a decade will self-correct.
What exactly would you like the GOP to shift on? Agree that we need wealth distribution? Agree that we need a nanny state? Agree that government creates success and not hard work? Agree that the rich should be punished and the poor should be coddled?
No thank you...
I think you can get the GOP to move on issues like gay marriage, but Im sure in hell am not going to say american isnt american because of hard work.
Ummmmm....who started the class warfare meme? Who's been attacking the 1%? Who's called bankers and Wall Street "evil". That's divisive.
The negative campaigning has come from the Left....personal attacks.
Pointing out Obama's failures isn't negative campaigning, it's how politics works.
There is a political ad playing in our area, geared towards the college crowd which pretty much goes like this.
We're going to ask the rich, to pay "a little bit more", to pay for your education..
"I'm Barack Obama, and I approve this message"...
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