ShivaX
5434
He said it better than I could.
Maybe, but he’s also talking to “conservatives” in a language they understand.
Nesrie
5435
It’s not maybe. By using it that way he’s agreeing to it which is just not okay. He can talk to whomever he wants but he’s not getting brownie points for arguing on their terms on their grounds and letting them control the narrative. By doing that, he’s agreeing with them.
Timex
5436
Yeah, this is an important part, and part of what would make it harder to understand from an outside perspective… Because of course sometime further left isn’t going to associate those bad things with their ideology.
And really, that’s perhaps what could enable some kind of bipartisanship, because those types of bad things aren’t things that anyone on either side actually believes in. They are a straw man caricature.
But the fact remains, while those criticisms were leveled against a straw man representation of liberal ideology, they do in fact ACCURATELY describe Trump.
Trump actually is the bad crap that conservatives merely imagined liberals to be.
He also says that Trump is neither conservative nor liberal, which i think is acccurate. I don’t think Trump has a coherent ideology beyond being self-serving.
Timex
5438
Trump is just a piece of shit.
But Tom’s point is that all these so called conservatives lined up behind him, despite him being the opposite of seemingly everything they pretended to stand for.
Because they didn’t ACTUALLY stand for anything.
Trump is a conservative. He’s just more racially conservative then anything else. He is the end point of the small government conservative, where only money matters.
And being racially conservative is a fundamental part of the GOP and of conservatives in general. Much like believing in Jesus is a fundamental part of being Christian.
Edit:. Sorry, Money and greed matter. Not just money. Plenty of people are richer than him but he is the poster boy of what conservatives want. Someone that will make sure white people get what is owed to them.
Edit 2:. Forget the -ly at the end of racially.
Oghier
5440
Are you using ‘racially conservative’ unironically? Because there’s no such thing. It’s just racism, a trait now mainstreamed in conservative politics.
Timex
5441
Trump isn’t conservative in any traditional sense.
His economics are just a mishmash of garbage… Tariffs and trade wars are not conservative.
Raw-dogging a pornstar and cheating on your third wife, who you cheated on your second wife with, who you cheated on your FIRST wife with, is not in line with the moralizing puritanical stuff that was traditionally associated with conservatism.
Tons of the conservatives eating such views were, seemingly more often than not, hypocrites. But they at least PRETENDED. They at least said they stuff for things like family values, free trade, etc.
Trump doesn’t even pretend.
Everyone knows that he’s a piece of filth. And they now say that it doesn’t matter. He is an idiot, and totally immoral… And they just don’t care. They are all about that now. Just anger and hate and filth. A weak man’s idea of strength. A dumb man’s idea of intelligence. A poor man’s idea of wealth.
Trumpism is in fact what the GOP is now. It is that party. There’s no going back.
But it’s not what they used to be about.
SlyFrog
5442
Yes, Trump shows the modern Conservative party for what it really is. No pretense of morality. No pretense of dignity. No pretense of fiscal responsibility.
Just give rich people more tax breaks, and take away basic things like healthcare from poor people (so that rich people can have more), and conservatives will vote for you, regardless of what else you do or stand for.
The modern conservative movement appears to at its essence be solely about wealthy people getting more.
He loves putting his name on things, so Trumpservative?
“Racial conservative” is a nice try.
That part is objectionable, too. From a policy perspective, the Trump Presidency has not abandoned the Conservative agenda, which is to cut taxes for the wealthy and increase military spending so as to create a deficit crisis which they can use as an excuse to cut social spending. Neither has Tom Nichols, which is evident in the language he uses in the tweet I quoted above.
Maybe, but if that’s what he’s doing he left out the best parts, stuff like welfare queen and strapping young buck and so on.
If I say that Tom Nichols and people like him (e.g. Max Boot) spent years giving racists cover with pseudo-intellectual economic and philosophical arguments, and as a result gifted us with the end product of that process in Trump; and as a result I don’t really see the point in giving them credit for being anti-Trump now; it really isn’t because I don’t understand Tom’s perspective.
Which of the long-standing True Conservative governing agenda policies has Tom repudiated? Who believes Tom won’t line up to support the very next not-Trump Republican candidate, even if that candidate’s actual governing agenda is identical to Trump’s as a practical matter? Tom just wants a more subtle dog-whistler, one who won’t embarrass Tom quite so much.
That’s how conservatives who hate nonwhite people discribe themselves these days. They aren’t racists, they are racially conservative.
And they describe themselves as conservatives. And this is what the conservative movement has always been about. They espouse small government because that makes it easier and more acceptable to be racially conservative.
And Donald Trump is what this sort of thinking leads to. He is what conservative Americas want.
Nesrie
5448
Yep. The GOP went down this road years ago. Occasionally groups of conservatives like to claim otherwise, but race baiting, cutting taxes for the rich, pointing at boogeymen for all their problems, going on and on about balanced budgets but not actual doing it when the party is in power… these are decades in the making not some sudden Tea Party pushed into Trumpism manifestation, oh and the small government bs unless it is to force others to do their social norms then of course that’s aok.
RichVR
5449
The trunk needs to be smaller.
Almost. . . mushroom-esque.
CraigM
5451
Short, round, and feeds on shit?
Craig, I would appreciate it if you didn’t try to put the image of Trump’s dick feeding on anything into my head.
I mean, hey, no visual imagination, so I’m probably fairly immune, but still. Children could be reading this forum!
