Democratic incompetence has made the previously unthinkable possible: Republicans are re-imagining themselves as a labor party
— emphasis added
..writes Matt Taibbi, a couple of weeks ago (August 8, 2016).
This farce can not stand
While I’m a bit more optimistic about the Dems (not) moving to the right as time goes on, especially after reading up on Hillary Clinton on the issues plus this devastatingly precise speech, in addition to what Bernie Sanders had to say about the Dems platform that included many progressive goals, along with Digby’s assessment recently...
...Matt Taibbi isn’t the first to raise questions about what direction we can expect the Dem party to take. The choice of Ken Salazar being one of the issues of concern.
Dave Johnson wrote (August 17, 2016): New Clinton Transition Head Has Some TPP ‘Splainin To Do
Matt Taibbi begins here:
A horrifying article appeared in The New York Times last week, entitled "They Want Trump to Make the G.O.P. a Workers' Party."
In it, conservative intellectuals say they disavow Donald Trump, but also see in his rise a reason to shift their party's focus.
The new Republicans would no longer be the party of "business and the privileged," but the protector of a disenfranchised working class.
As Howard Dean has been saying for years now, the GOP can’t honestly talk about their trickle down corporatist economic agenda because nobody but the Oligarchs would buy it. Nobody:
“Exactly. That’s exactly right. Trump is hanging it all out there and it’s scaring the living Hell out of the republicans, because the republicans knew that their view was never going to be successful anyway in front of a general electorate. And it hasn’t for quite some time.
“What they're now afraid of;..here's a guy, out there just laying it all out. Laying their case [agenda] out in a language that everybody can understand, and they're not going to like that, and they don’t like it and they’re scared to death of Donald Trump.”
..but as Taibbi continues, that is the idea behind the swindle the GOP and various republican talking heads are trying to pull off:
A few conservatives saw this coming. Chin-stroking New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, whom Esquire's Charles Pierce once described as a
"god-bothering newsboy on his best day,"
along with National Review editor Reihan Salam, claim they saw the writing on the wall.
In their 2008 book, Grand New Party, Douthat and Salam argued that the Republicans needed to reshape themselves, and admitted "the policy elite of the Republican Party" is "out of touch with the majority of Republican voters."
They also noted, in a recent Times editorial, "A Cure for Trumpism," that the Republican Party has "increasingly depended on mostly white working-class support, even as its policy agenda was increasingly unresponsive to working-class voters' problems."
[...]
Republican propaganda for decades pushed magical-thinking concepts like "trickle-down economics" that asked lower-income voters to accept present sacrifices for theoretical bigger payoffs down the road.
Taibbi’s piece is damn good read for raising questions — imo — Right now there are a number of stories out discussing how to reverse Trump’s “appeal” to blue collar workers, especially when it comes to Dems winning from the top of the ticket all the way down ballot in states that are either known as red states or battleground states where, due to “conservative” policies including deregulation, manufacturing has been off-shored, jobs disappeared, and wages have been stagnating for decades
The GOP as the “working party” ( ! ??? ! )
This should be a no-brainer. The “conservative” anti-democratic agenda has been to legislatively apply downward pressure on workers wages for many decades. Trump and the GOP are right now desperately trying to capture the blue collar vote. Let’s crush that union-busting (AFL-CIO), anti-environment (global warming/climate change denying) farce of campaign in every state, in every precinct possible
We the people can and will prevail big time on this if we Dems make it absolutely clear by our actions in support of labor/collective bargaining/unions in the next few months and continuing actions years down the road on what shouldn’t even be a question — imo — we can do this :)
— time to turn in — be back tomorrow