War Room Lounge v154: People don't realize how many people had to die just for the eight hour day

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Sara said:
I feel like I’ve gone over how Diet Coke is the nectar of the gods.....
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Aspartame causes strange muscle twitches and other neurological weirdness, for me anyway. I'm off that stuff.
 
Gregolian said:
“Supremacy”

but didn’t win.....
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If not for Broke's horseshoe and clover I'd be the reigning champion right this very moment. So I am actually the People's Champ. <{smellit?}>

Did you even make the playoffs? I can't remember what happened down below.
 
Son I did not push your ass through a hole in my body just to see you laugh it off, son this is unacceptable I implore you, and you don't seem happy and you're loud
 
Why are you guys playing with the troll? You are getting feces everywhere.
 
Son why do you have a doll still, you're a boy, oh no my efforts are in vain
 
Fawlty Elizabeth said:
Son why do you have a doll still, you're a boy, oh no my efforts are in vain
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Actually I might need to back off. I enjoyed the banter but I know a few leftcuck mods already don't like me and I may be pushing dubs? I really don't care but not actually looking to get banned either
 
Good article on how the now-undeniable departure of conservative intellectualism from relevance was, in retrospect, inevitable, since the values of conservative intelligentsia never really differed from the least intelligent within the conservative coalition. I trimmed it up to make the 15,000 character limit

How the GOP Became the Party of Resentment
Have historians of the conservative movement focused too much on its intellectuals?

In 1979, Barry Goldwater turned to his diary to register a change in the nation’s politics. “Today as I sit in the Senate,” he wrote, “it is interesting to me to watch liberals, moderates, and conservatives fighting each other to see who can come out on top the quickest against those matters that I talked so fervently and so much about in 1964.” That year, Goldwater had been thoroughly crushed in his presidential contest with Lyndon Johnson, earning only 52 electoral votes against LBJ’s 486 and less than 40 percent of the popular vote. Richard Rovere wrote in The New Yorker that the election had “finished the Goldwater school of political reaction.” But 15 years later, Goldwater looked out on a different landscape. “Now that almost every one of the principles I advocated in 1964,” he concluded, had “become the gospel of the whole spread of the spectrum of politics, there really isn’t a heck of a lot left.

Before the Storm, Nixonland, The Invisible Bridge, and the new Reaganland—take the reader from Goldwater’s campaign, through the rise and fall of Richard Nixon, to the eventual triumph of Ronald Reagan in the presidential election of 1980. Perlstein largely moves through this history chronologically (augmented with some biographical flashbacks), taking the reader on the same journey in politics and culture that a person living through the time would have experienced. Garnering popular acclaim as well as respect from academic historians, the books have helped redefine the 1960s—often popularly a metonym for the left-wing counterculture—as a time also marked by the growing power of conservative political organizing.

But even with this historical perspective, Perlstein was shaken by Trump’s election. In a piece that appeared in The New York Times Magazine in April 2017, Perlstein asked if historians (like him) who had failed to see Trump’s victory had made some fundamental mistake. Historians are a more ideologically diverse lot than they are sometimes made out to be, but many fall somewhere on the spectrum from liberal to left. Had they, perhaps, focused too much on intellectual figures of conservatism that they could understand, underplaying the power of the paranoid fringe? Have historians, in effect, looked too hard for a conservatism that they could respect (even if most disagreed with it)? If Trump demands an explanation rooted in American history, where do we look?

[...]

Much of the press greeted [Goldwater] as an extremist, his supporters as mentally disturbed. (It was the Goldwater campaign that prompted the historian Richard Hofstadter to compose his best-known essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”) Journalists were roundly booed at Goldwater events, and a mob once threw stones at the press bus following the campaign. “Goldwater in 1964” bumper stickers were soon met with mocking counter-stickers: “Goldwater in 1864.” The Goldwater slogan “In your heart you know he’s right” would be parodied by the Johnson campaign as “In your guts, you know he’s nuts.” The only international support he got came from apartheid South Africa, Spanish monarchists, and German neofascists. He resented being portrayed as an extremist, and his famous line spoken while accepting the party’s nomination—“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!”—was greeted with 41 seconds of sustained applause.

[...]

The book combines a biography of Nixon with a portrait of the nation. Perlstein sees the key to Nixon—both psychologically and politically—in the club he founded at Whittier College: the Orthogonian Society, a home for the strivers, rather than manor-born Franklins who ran the place. A man who collected hatred and resentments became a good match for an electorate, for a time. “The inner dynamics of the Roosevelt coalition have shifted from those of getting to those of keeping,” a pollster observed, and Nixon knew how to thrive in the backlash to the civil rights movement and the cultural changes of the 1960s. “What one side saw as liberation the other saw as apocalypse,” writes Perlstein, “and what the other saw as apocalypse, the first saw as liberation.”


[...]

The coalition that elected Carter would be undone by both cultural divisions and economic ones. The economic fundamentals were oil shocks beginning in 1973, leading to a persistent energy crisis throughout the decade. High inflation eroded real wages. With earnings seeming to fall behind needs, more women took on jobs outside the home, which some perceived as a threat to traditional family structures. With wage increases falling behind productivity gains, people sought tax relief. In California, tax revolts that did not begin as exclusively conservative were seized on as a way to try to force the government to shrink; conservatives worked to portray the problem as the liberal state redistributing money away from workers and toward undeserving minorities. It was all mixed up in a stew of resentments, bundling crime, race, and liberalism together. A columnist for The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Mississippi, observed that many fighting the Equal Rights Amendment were the same people who had been in White Citizens’ Councils in 1950s and 1960s. “Their enemy now is not the black man but ‘liberalism,’ in any form, as they see it.”

Other issues were not as obviously economic, but still painted liberalism as the enemy. Culture wars raged over gay rights, the content of school textbooks, feminism, abortion. Religious conservatives fumed over what they saw as liberal institutions—the media, schools and universities, the federal government—forcing their values on them. In Dade County, Florida, singer and orange juice spokeswoman Anita Bryant led a campaign to overturn an ordinance that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. “I don’t hate the homosexual,” said a mailer intended to take her anti-gay campaigns national. “But as a mother, I must protect my children from their evil influence.” Phyllis Schlafly led the successful charge against the Equal Rights Amendment, beginning most of her speeches with the line: “First of all, I want to thank my husband, Fred, for letting me come—I always like to say that, because it makes the libs so mad!”

Religious conservatives were joined by other groups in the making of movement conservatism’s success. (Movement conservatism generally refers to active participants in the “New Right.”) There were the intellectual neoconservatives, in both senses: those who had worked up a perversity argument against the welfare state, charging that good liberal intentions were deepening social problems rather than solving them by supposedly trapping beneficiaries in welfare dependency. And there were the national defense neoconservatives, convinced that the United States was falling hopelessly behind the Soviet Union in military preparedness, and urging it to redouble its commitment to empire. Now-forgotten issues like the negotiations of the transfer of the Panama Canal to Panama were enormously hot. The American Conservative Union made a tidy profit by airing a program called There is no Panama Canal…. There is an American Canal in Panama. Reagan’s handlers, worried that he seemed old and sometimes confused, courted intellectuals. His staff flattered writers by sending them memos making it seem as if Reagan had read their pieces and praised them for their cogency. But it was artifice: In the letters he actually dictated, Reagan mused about things like the relationship between politics in the Middle East and “the Old Testament prophesies that would foretell Armaggeddon [sic].”

Nader’s Raiders,” supercharging lobbying efforts and supporting think tanks that presented consumer activists as anti-choice. Reagan, speaking in radio commentaries in 1975, described “the professional consumerists in Washington” as “really elitists who think they know better than you what’s good for you.” From the fringes of the economics profession, Reagan picked up supply-side economics and a discourse that held government regulations responsible for economic problems.

As with many presidents, the image of Reagan that survives has been burnished in his absence into something that, in his own time, he was not. Many want to cling to an idea of Reagan as a unifying president, to contrast with the divisiveness of our own time. But he frequently made statements and took positions that were designed to offend liberals and delight his base. Yes, he was “optimistic,” but his professed belief in American greatness excluded the possibility of wrongdoing, and did not grapple with its critics. He insisted that the “Vietnam Syndrome”—a hesitancy to commit to overseas military involvements—resulted from a Communist plan to “win in the field of propaganda here in America what they could not win on the battlefield in Vietnam.” Though he spoke favorably of immigrants—who were choosing the country he cherished—his story of the nation was fundamentally based in the experience of white Christianity. When the miniseries Roots aired on ABC over eight consecutive nights in 1977, proving a sensation in its telling of slavery’s history, Reagan commented, “I thought the bias of all the good people being one color and all the bad people being another was rather destructive.”

[...]

Over the course of four books, Perlstein had chronicled the transformation of the Republican Party into a conservative party, and the transformation of the country that it required. In some ways, this history shows how short a step it was from all this to Trump. How could the United States elect a paranoid and vulgar man who trafficked in racial division, and who made criminal behavior standard operating procedure in the White House? Well, it elected Nixon. How could it elect an intellectually shallow entertainer, who was seemingly incapable of speaking truthfully on a consistent basis? Well, it elected Reagan. And as powerful as the right grew, its entrepreneurs in media and politics stoked culture war divisions to cultivate a powerful sense of grievance.

Why then did Trump’s election strike Perlstein as a mystery in 2017? Trump lacks Goldwater’s consistency, Nixon’s cunning, and Reagan’s ability to craft a story of progress rather than decline. One of the shocks of his victory was that the intellectual architecture that had been seen as important to conservatism’s rise—the generously funded think tanks and the support of supposedly respectable publications like National Review—had proved inessential. Perhaps the closest that the book comes to a thesis that addresses both past and present is about three-quarters of the way through. “William F. Buckley had supposedly affected a purge of [conspiratorial] lunacy from the conservative movement following Goldwater’s loss,” writes Perlstein, “on the theory that conservatism could never prosper unless it was considered respectable. The purge didn’t take; conservatism was prospering nonetheless.”

To this it might be added that the high- and lowbrow versions of the conservative movement were driven by impulses more similar than is usually acknowledged. The painters of graffiti in Charleston, South Carolina, who expressed their feelings about school textbooks containing a picture of a white girl giving flowers to a black boy with “get the n***** books out” were not intellectuals. But after New York City’s blackout of 1977, it was Midge Decter in the pages of Commentary who described looters as “urban insect life.” National Review published pieces defending segregation and apartheid, and one of its writers speculated at a conference on the “innate inferiority in the Negro race.” There were more and less erudite-sounding ways of deciding who deserved to be seen as fully human, but both the vigilantes and the intellectuals tended to reach the same conclusions. If what we want from our histories of conservatism is an explanation for Trump, we have the evidence that we need.

One of the values of Perlstein’s heavily narrative and loosely argued approach is that it restores a sense of randomness to outcomes. In retrospect, Reagan looks like the inevitable product of capital’s alliance with social and religious conservatism. But even in the 1980 primary, the “boardroom Jacobins” favored John Connally. They had to accept Reagan, and they certainly made their peace. But none of this was fated. Conservative activists remade the country with intensity, opportunism, and persistence through defeat. Those hoping to push back against their influence today might take some strange comfort in the story of their success. Studying the past does not tell you what will be possible in the future, nor promise that hard work will be rewarded. But it seems fair to conclude that the work is necessary, if not sufficient, and that many will not feel the tremors as the ground shifts under their feet.


https://newrepublic.com/article/158...entment-reaganland-rick-perlstein-book-review
 
Oh son oh no, we've done everything wrong, as you fear the karate forum, I am sorry I have failed
 
Trotsky said:
Good article on how the now-undeniable departure of conservative intellectualism from relevance was, in retrospect, inevitable, since the values of conservative intelligentsia never really differed from the least intelligent within the conservative coalition. I trimmed it up to make the 15,000 character limit

How the GOP Became the Party of Resentment
Have historians of the conservative movement focused too much on its intellectuals?

In 1979, Barry Goldwater turned to his diary to register a change in the nation’s politics. “Today as I sit in the Senate,” he wrote, “it is interesting to me to watch liberals, moderates, and conservatives fighting each other to see who can come out on top the quickest against those matters that I talked so fervently and so much about in 1964.” That year, Goldwater had been thoroughly crushed in his presidential contest with Lyndon Johnson, earning only 52 electoral votes against LBJ’s 486 and less than 40 percent of the popular vote. Richard Rovere wrote in The New Yorker that the election had “finished the Goldwater school of political reaction.” But 15 years later, Goldwater looked out on a different landscape. “Now that almost every one of the principles I advocated in 1964,” he concluded, had “become the gospel of the whole spread of the spectrum of politics, there really isn’t a heck of a lot left.

Before the Storm, Nixonland, The Invisible Bridge, and the new Reaganland—take the reader from Goldwater’s campaign, through the rise and fall of Richard Nixon, to the eventual triumph of Ronald Reagan in the presidential election of 1980. Perlstein largely moves through this history chronologically (augmented with some biographical flashbacks), taking the reader on the same journey in politics and culture that a person living through the time would have experienced. Garnering popular acclaim as well as respect from academic historians, the books have helped redefine the 1960s—often popularly a metonym for the left-wing counterculture—as a time also marked by the growing power of conservative political organizing.

But even with this historical perspective, Perlstein was shaken by Trump’s election. In a piece that appeared in The New York Times Magazine in April 2017, Perlstein asked if historians (like him) who had failed to see Trump’s victory had made some fundamental mistake. Historians are a more ideologically diverse lot than they are sometimes made out to be, but many fall somewhere on the spectrum from liberal to left. Had they, perhaps, focused too much on intellectual figures of conservatism that they could understand, underplaying the power of the paranoid fringe? Have historians, in effect, looked too hard for a conservatism that they could respect (even if most disagreed with it)? If Trump demands an explanation rooted in American history, where do we look?

[...]

Much of the press greeted [Goldwater] as an extremist, his supporters as mentally disturbed. (It was the Goldwater campaign that prompted the historian Richard Hofstadter to compose his best-known essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”) Journalists were roundly booed at Goldwater events, and a mob once threw stones at the press bus following the campaign. “Goldwater in 1964” bumper stickers were soon met with mocking counter-stickers: “Goldwater in 1864.” The Goldwater slogan “In your heart you know he’s right” would be parodied by the Johnson campaign as “In your guts, you know he’s nuts.” The only international support he got came from apartheid South Africa, Spanish monarchists, and German neofascists. He resented being portrayed as an extremist, and his famous line spoken while accepting the party’s nomination—“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!”—was greeted with 41 seconds of sustained applause.

[...]

The book combines a biography of Nixon with a portrait of the nation. Perlstein sees the key to Nixon—both psychologically and politically—in the club he founded at Whittier College: the Orthogonian Society, a home for the strivers, rather than manor-born Franklins who ran the place. A man who collected hatred and resentments became a good match for an electorate, for a time. “The inner dynamics of the Roosevelt coalition have shifted from those of getting to those of keeping,” a pollster observed, and Nixon knew how to thrive in the backlash to the civil rights movement and the cultural changes of the 1960s. “What one side saw as liberation the other saw as apocalypse,” writes Perlstein, “and what the other saw as apocalypse, the first saw as liberation.”


[...]

The coalition that elected Carter would be undone by both cultural divisions and economic ones. The economic fundamentals were oil shocks beginning in 1973, leading to a persistent energy crisis throughout the decade. High inflation eroded real wages. With earnings seeming to fall behind needs, more women took on jobs outside the home, which some perceived as a threat to traditional family structures. With wage increases falling behind productivity gains, people sought tax relief. In California, tax revolts that did not begin as exclusively conservative were seized on as a way to try to force the government to shrink; conservatives worked to portray the problem as the liberal state redistributing money away from workers and toward undeserving minorities. It was all mixed up in a stew of resentments, bundling crime, race, and liberalism together. A columnist for The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Mississippi, observed that many fighting the Equal Rights Amendment were the same people who had been in White Citizens’ Councils in 1950s and 1960s. “Their enemy now is not the black man but ‘liberalism,’ in any form, as they see it.”

Other issues were not as obviously economic, but still painted liberalism as the enemy. Culture wars raged over gay rights, the content of school textbooks, feminism, abortion. Religious conservatives fumed over what they saw as liberal institutions—the media, schools and universities, the federal government—forcing their values on them. In Dade County, Florida, singer and orange juice spokeswoman Anita Bryant led a campaign to overturn an ordinance that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. “I don’t hate the homosexual,” said a mailer intended to take her anti-gay campaigns national. “But as a mother, I must protect my children from their evil influence.” Phyllis Schlafly led the successful charge against the Equal Rights Amendment, beginning most of her speeches with the line: “First of all, I want to thank my husband, Fred, for letting me come—I always like to say that, because it makes the libs so mad!”

Religious conservatives were joined by other groups in the making of movement conservatism’s success. (Movement conservatism generally refers to active participants in the “New Right.”) There were the intellectual neoconservatives, in both senses: those who had worked up a perversity argument against the welfare state, charging that good liberal intentions were deepening social problems rather than solving them by supposedly trapping beneficiaries in welfare dependency. And there were the national defense neoconservatives, convinced that the United States was falling hopelessly behind the Soviet Union in military preparedness, and urging it to redouble its commitment to empire. Now-forgotten issues like the negotiations of the transfer of the Panama Canal to Panama were enormously hot. The American Conservative Union made a tidy profit by airing a program called There is no Panama Canal…. There is an American Canal in Panama. Reagan’s handlers, worried that he seemed old and sometimes confused, courted intellectuals. His staff flattered writers by sending them memos making it seem as if Reagan had read their pieces and praised them for their cogency. But it was artifice: In the letters he actually dictated, Reagan mused about things like the relationship between politics in the Middle East and “the Old Testament prophesies that would foretell Armaggeddon [sic].”

Nader’s Raiders,” supercharging lobbying efforts and supporting think tanks that presented consumer activists as anti-choice. Reagan, speaking in radio commentaries in 1975, described “the professional consumerists in Washington” as “really elitists who think they know better than you what’s good for you.” From the fringes of the economics profession, Reagan picked up supply-side economics and a discourse that held government regulations responsible for economic problems.

As with many presidents, the image of Reagan that survives has been burnished in his absence into something that, in his own time, he was not. Many want to cling to an idea of Reagan as a unifying president, to contrast with the divisiveness of our own time. But he frequently made statements and took positions that were designed to offend liberals and delight his base. Yes, he was “optimistic,” but his professed belief in American greatness excluded the possibility of wrongdoing, and did not grapple with its critics. He insisted that the “Vietnam Syndrome”—a hesitancy to commit to overseas military involvements—resulted from a Communist plan to “win in the field of propaganda here in America what they could not win on the battlefield in Vietnam.” Though he spoke favorably of immigrants—who were choosing the country he cherished—his story of the nation was fundamentally based in the experience of white Christianity. When the miniseries Roots aired on ABC over eight consecutive nights in 1977, proving a sensation in its telling of slavery’s history, Reagan commented, “I thought the bias of all the good people being one color and all the bad people being another was rather destructive.”

[...]

Over the course of four books, Perlstein had chronicled the transformation of the Republican Party into a conservative party, and the transformation of the country that it required. In some ways, this history shows how short a step it was from all this to Trump. How could the United States elect a paranoid and vulgar man who trafficked in racial division, and who made criminal behavior standard operating procedure in the White House? Well, it elected Nixon. How could it elect an intellectually shallow entertainer, who was seemingly incapable of speaking truthfully on a consistent basis? Well, it elected Reagan. And as powerful as the right grew, its entrepreneurs in media and politics stoked culture war divisions to cultivate a powerful sense of grievance.

Why then did Trump’s election strike Perlstein as a mystery in 2017? Trump lacks Goldwater’s consistency, Nixon’s cunning, and Reagan’s ability to craft a story of progress rather than decline. One of the shocks of his victory was that the intellectual architecture that had been seen as important to conservatism’s rise—the generously funded think tanks and the support of supposedly respectable publications like National Review—had proved inessential. Perhaps the closest that the book comes to a thesis that addresses both past and present is about three-quarters of the way through. “William F. Buckley had supposedly affected a purge of [conspiratorial] lunacy from the conservative movement following Goldwater’s loss,” writes Perlstein, “on the theory that conservatism could never prosper unless it was considered respectable. The purge didn’t take; conservatism was prospering nonetheless.”

To this it might be added that the high- and lowbrow versions of the conservative movement were driven by impulses more similar than is usually acknowledged. The painters of graffiti in Charleston, South Carolina, who expressed their feelings about school textbooks containing a picture of a white girl giving flowers to a black boy with “get the n***** books out” were not intellectuals. But after New York City’s blackout of 1977, it was Midge Decter in the pages of Commentary who described looters as “urban insect life.” National Review published pieces defending segregation and apartheid, and one of its writers speculated at a conference on the “innate inferiority in the Negro race.” There were more and less erudite-sounding ways of deciding who deserved to be seen as fully human, but both the vigilantes and the intellectuals tended to reach the same conclusions. If what we want from our histories of conservatism is an explanation for Trump, we have the evidence that we need.

One of the values of Perlstein’s heavily narrative and loosely argued approach is that it restores a sense of randomness to outcomes. In retrospect, Reagan looks like the inevitable product of capital’s alliance with social and religious conservatism. But even in the 1980 primary, the “boardroom Jacobins” favored John Connally. They had to accept Reagan, and they certainly made their peace. But none of this was fated. Conservative activists remade the country with intensity, opportunism, and persistence through defeat. Those hoping to push back against their influence today might take some strange comfort in the story of their success. Studying the past does not tell you what will be possible in the future, nor promise that hard work will be rewarded. But it seems fair to conclude that the work is necessary, if not sufficient, and that many will not feel the tremors as the ground shifts under their feet.


https://newrepublic.com/article/158...entment-reaganland-rick-perlstein-book-review
Click to expand...

You know you can put that wall of FUCKING text in a FUCKING quote right?
 
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