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R Mercer's avatar

The GoP is the party of what you are doing is wrong/bad--BUT we don't actually have an alternative.

Well, not an alternative they want to talk about in public--which is usually give the rich and corps what they want and everybody else can go hang. The GoP is only interested in governing to the extent that they can make people behave culturally like they think people should behave.

Otherwise they are basically in favor of letting the rich and powerful run things and provide whatever services they wish to provide for whatever price they can get--because, you know, the market is awesome and fair.

This ends up breaking down into some form of corporate fascism--an ethno-nationalist state with rigid authoritarian social rules that are heavily enforced (for the good of your soul, don't you know) with a free for all pretty much everywhere else.

The strong/rich do what they wish, the poor and weak suffer what they must... because if you are poor and weak you deserve what ever ration of shit you get. You want better? Get rich and buy some influence or be able to afford stuff... you parasite.

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Carol S.'s avatar

The weirdest thing I've seen is the effort to combine a sort of anarcho-libertarianism (more decentralization, less "conformity," smash the institutions ) with a theocratic ethno-nationalism in which everyone is happily unified under one religion and everyone has a strong sense of belonging.

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R Mercer's avatar

The anarcho-liberalism is part of the economic side of the ideology, NOT the cultural side.

When you destroy or weaken the public institutions and government you create the conditions that free up those who possess wealth and power... and that enslave those without wealth and power.

A lot of the little people behind that agenda (like the evangelicals and white supremacists) don't understand that... because their eye is on the cultural, not the economic (despite their protestations to the contrary).

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Carol S.'s avatar

I should add: I'm speaking of people who have said that Trump was the first GOP presidential candidate in decades who really cared about average working Americans, and who have railed against wealthy elites. But they're cool with the crypto-billionaires who are sticking it to the Establishment.

It's basically: "We need to destroy the institutions that THEY control, and build new ones more to our liking, controlled by people who think the way we do." Not exactly Burkean conservatism.

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Carol S.'s avatar

It's instrumentally on the cultural side too: smash the institutions, then rebuild them. And some of these people will also say we need more social solidarity in economics -- but just don't tell THEM what to do. IOW, it's incoherent.

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Eva Seifert's avatar

In other words, as a society, we're going back to the Gilded Age and Robber Barons instead of the 21st century. We've been doing that since Reagan convinced people that, friendly father that he was, it was right for the rich to take over.

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R Mercer's avatar

Exactly

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