The Fight Against Fascists (I Can't Believe This Exists)

[Belsnickel]

(06-17-2021, 07:57 PM)Nately120 Wrote: It's possible, but it is also hard to assign any sort of gains Trump has made to the republican party in general since the guy is a total wild card.  I can't help but feel if Trump had the ability or desire to appoint someone else "the next Trump" he would do it and the republican party wouldn't be so beholden to a 2024 candidate who lost a re-election bid and will be nearly 79 by the time he would take office. Ted Cruz ain't getting the angry "straight white men are under attack" vote like Trump does, is he?

Republicans need Trump to do what Hulk Hogan did for the Ultimate Warrior at the end of Wrestlemania 6.  It wasn't enough that the Ultimate Warrior beat Hulk and got the belt, but Hulk Hogan had to personally hand the belt to him and raise his arm up and point to him and basically tell the crowd "Cheer for this guy now."  Even then, the Warrior fizzled out and the Hulkster was back before you could blink.  Geez, it's depressingly easy to compare politics to professional wrestling these days.

I'm interested in seeing the long term effects of Trumpism. It's the political scientist in me. The only things Trump matched with the GOP with on was the fear-mongering anti-immigration takes and the anti-intellectualism. He isn't free market (protectionist policies are antithetical to the modern Republican party), he certainly wasn't a budget hawk (though the GOP actually being budget hawks is highly debatable, anyway), he just out and out wasn't a conservative. Trump has no political ideology. He just spouts his faux populism and doom-and-gloom take on the US society and gets a lot of people who don't understand these things to cheer for him.

The GOP is in an identity crisis. They have been continually shifting the Overton Window in this country to the point where both parties are, legitimately, on the right of the geopolitical spectrum (on a good day I'd count the Democrats as centrist) and at this point they have moved further and further into anti-democratic territory. The path they are on is counter to everything they claim to love. The principles of the enlightenment that the founding fathers used to create our republic are now incompatible with their politics. So where do they go from here?

(06-18-2021, 01:40 AM)CarolinaBengalFanGuy Wrote: This shit was handled well before he even got into office. He was hand wrapped the an already developed vaccine program.

Vaccines had been developed by the private industry and the government had purchased a bunch. There was no fleshed out distribution plan in place. Essentially, states were fending for themselves and it wasn't working well.