by comparison nov 20



So again, this ^^^ graph is the old one. With today's results, trump gains 7 from his previous high in this the first poll of 2016. Everybody else is flat, as Trump gains from carson losses today, whereas those voters seemed to go to cruz in November.

I've been away and on vacation so thankfully haven't read like most of the last 500 posts or so. Which sounds like a blessing.

But it's also important to note here is that precisely what is so corruptible and irredeemable about the establishment often goes unspoken. This is a clever political strategy because the establishment seems pretty fetid and rotten, no doubt. But my spidey sense is tingling real deep that the people who think the establishment is wholly depraved AND find hope in Trump are more or less a lot of the same dudes who were Ron Paul supporters but never decamped for Bernie Sanders or more authentic libertarian brands, if you catch my drift, and are functionally just travelers in masculinity cults. Because it's pretty apparent policy ain't go **** to do with any of this.

So there was always a cohort of Ron Paul supporters who you could rightfully describe as soft-libertarians but were more, at their core, the next generation of angry-right winger men who haven't aged into Fox News yet. So they're not so bothered by alot of the social issues that rile up other right-wingers like gays and abortions, and they're not so gung ho about foreign adventures, but are deeply into the free enterprise system and being assertive about things, and not being told what to do, and trashing the politically correct order.

You can sense this if you dig deep back into the old Ron Paul haunts of the internet and see where the old Ron Paul fans went. Not that curiously, they didn't jump on the Rand Paul bandwagon because he became too much an establishment creature. And Bernie is too much of a Democratic sissy for them, they're much too manly to vote for a liberal.

Oddly, or not, where alot of them seemed to end up is the Donald Trump column. Why some percentage of hardcore Ron Paul fans are going full TRUMP is hard to say but you see alot of this "fights the establishment!" and "has principles, says all the truth!" despite the fact Trump is a billionaire and ostensibly doesn't have a single identifiable deeply held political principle.

You guys who hate when I post about this can avert your eyes since I've been on this horse for a while, but the only commonalities I can find between Paul and Trump is that the people who shifted from Paul to Trump seem very powerfully structured by stylistic identity politics, and specifically that they get deeply engaged in these odd masculinity cults where what you say borders on irrelevant but who you are offending and bothering is a deeply important thing. It's an odd form of identity politics, but the argument is something like, the establishment is full of these squishy people not offending each other and speaking all these veiled ways and that is so destructive, but Ron Paul and Donald Trump are speaking insane argle bargale non-truths, conspiracy theories, and racist gibberish, and while I have a college degrees and am pretty financially secure so I acknowledge none of this **** Ron Paul and now Donald Trump is saying makes any sense and yeah OK is probably super racist, the MOST IMPORTANT thing is that they are angrily yelling at Hillary Clinton and the rest of the politically correct establishment or whatever.

What the establishment does wrong is not so clear, but oh boy, how they do it wrong is very obvious: way too much sensitivity and concern, and not nearly enough yelling and righteous anger and pent up masculine rage at random targets.

My 2 cents of the Paul --> Trump travelers who I would bet a whole lot of money are both Alex Wice, Th3yer, and tons of other white reasonably wealth young guys with college degrees and deep wells of inchoate rage at establishment powers, because reasons. Important to note they're different from your standard working class whites who are turned onto Trump by a cool slogan on a hat and are instead attracted to his trolling of people they don't like. As such, they are rightfully identified as just misanthropic, because they have enough money and relative white guy freedoms to not give a flying **** how anything gets governed or what politicians plan to do and can instead just enjoy the theater of sticking to the people they don't like.

passive/enabling racism is just as bad, if not worse. at least when someone exposes themselves, "we" then know where they are coming from.

So there had been some conventional wisdom that Rand Paul might have to quit his presidential bid to focus on his Senate reelection. I always disagreed with this idea since he pretty much has a hammerlock on his Senate seat, but it was commonly held among Kentucky political pundits. Anyway, it looks like I was right and they were wrong, since no one is going to run against him for his Senate seat.

I mean, he could very well drop out of the presidential race soon, but it won't be because of this.

You're a Republican. Straight down the line, on about every issue. Glad to help.

You say that people shouldn't assume you are dumb, and that you want to have a reasonable conversation. If that is the case, I would invite you to read and respond to these posts which directly challenge your opinion that the tolerance of xenophobia or racism is a relatively small price to pay.

I know this is veering (heh heh) off topic but quickly: cash for clunkers wasn't designed as a program to benefit US auto-makers in any protectionist sense. It was partly economic stimulus and partly a plan to reduce environmental impact from older, less fuel efficient, and less clean vehicles.

I'm not sure it was the most effective program of all time, but it's odd to characterize it as evidence of Obama's indifference to U.S. car manufacturers while ignoring the much more expensive but rather successful bailout of GM and Chrysler .

DVaut,

What you wrote may explain Alex and THAY3R, but it doesn't explain Trump. Ron Paul never had THAT much support.

I've hated republican ideals on censorship, on drug legalization, on religion, and I'm not in favor of overturning rvw.
I agree with Republicans on most issues but their stance on many moral issues is atrocious.

And I never said I was a staunch libertarian. Well named said if I agree with tariffs why I'm not a dem and I said I'm libertarian enough to be a dem except for x y z and you guys nitted it up as usual to try to laugh at any non democratic you can

It was pretty pathetic

It was done in response to the gm bailout. It should have encouraged sales from the big 3

When was the last time anyone in this country complained about Japanese economic invasion? Has metsandfinsfan just awoken from a prolonged coma?

That must be Bob Ojeda in his avatar.

That's 90% of white people. The ones that aren't voting for Trump are not doing that because he will damage minorities (or whites they don't know). And when those minorities attain equality, 90% of them wouldn't switch their votes if the best candidate for them damaged whites (or minorities they don't know).

Cool

I'd just like us to encourage things to be built here

I know, I'm insane

You have a very grim view of the world.

This is not even close to accurate, a very sizable chunk of the population consciously votes against their own economic interests in the hope of achieving better "global" outcomes for society. I think this is true even in the US, the two party system just makes it harder to identify these voters.

Are you arguing that the reimbursement wasn't enough, and Obama should have required the money earned in the program be spent only on "American" cars?

Further, Obama should make a point of wearing a "Buy American" trucker hat. And would it kill him to smoke a corn-cob pipe?

When you're stating a preference for policies that fly in the very face of the core ideas of being a libertarian you really look like an ass trying to define yourself as such.

While there's no need to stuff yourself in a box in the first place if you insist on applying a label, something that more specifically speaks to "I don't want you to tell me what to do but I want to tell other people what they should do" ethos that so many of these "I hate the establishment so I couldn't possibly be a Republican even though I support the majority of their policies" libertarians.

It's a classic libertarian position.

Does Thayer have one?

I feel like the folks (especially on here) who hold his positions are often folks who dropped out/didn't go to college to play poker and have educated themselves on the internet and youtube. It's how you get these very unaware/self-centered folks who because they were able to find some degree of success in a mostly independent fashion don't understand the need others have for more basic support systems (and like, compassion).

They end up making a pretty compelling argument for the intrinstic value of the college environment. Not so much for the education, but for the benefits that come from not being isolated to other types of ideas.

More thoughts on the nature of humans from a guy who has demonstrated that he is utterly unequipped to discuss the nature of humans. Not everybody has your lack of humanity.

Japanese investors buying Pebble Beach in 1990 was the top of the hysteria in my recollection.

Good point. To be clearer, I have no idea and I should say -- these guys are different from the downtrodden whites who just want to hear about how awesome and exceptional America is and how Trump is going to make America great again by kicking out the rapey Mexicans and #winning against China in negotiations or whatever. They are just like the Ron Paul types, in fact, maybe of them are in fact unreformed Ron Paul voters: they are generally literate and sentient middle class and up young white guys with an axe to grind and animated by the notion Trump is mad too. About what, exactly, and about what precisely he will do, well who the **** cares, those are just details. The important thing is he's you know, shakin' things up.

I wasn't really talking about you specifically, we were discussing the motivations of Trump supporters generally. Alex and Thayer were asked for examples of non-racist/xenophobic Trump positions that they agreed with. You brought up the idea of tariffs. I pointed out that in general that sort of position is something you find more support for among Democrats than Republicans so in context of the rhetorical point being made in asking Alex/Thayer the original question, bringing up protectionist policies raises as many questions as it answers.

I grant that it is possible for you to hold a mix of policy positions that doesn't holistically fit into either party's mainstream and that it is conceivable for you to recognize that your views on manufacturing in the US deviate from Republican orthodoxy and still prefer Republicans over Democrats for other (non-racist) reasons. Although even in this case I'd also point you back to the previous arguments why supporting Trump perpetuates racism and xenophobia regardless of all this. And as far as the most widely held motivations for Trump supporters, it's pretty clear from his new ad that Trump believes his support is closely tied to fomenting that racism and xenophobia.

Beyond that, your argument that Obama or the Democrats in general don't care about the issue seems rather more like post-hoc rationalization than a reasonable argument. It's not clear to me why the bailout coming before cash for clunkers matters to the argument one way or another.

It's certainly not that high, lol. For starters, you have to take into account people who have mixed family members due to interracial marriage. If someone has a daughter who marries a brown/black husband, then that person is now much more likely to give a ****, esp since grandchildren many times also look like minorities. Obama's maternal family and the Bush family (via Jeb marrying Mexican wife & half-Mexican kids) would be examples of this.

Aside from that % of people, I do believe there are well over 10% of white people with no minority family members who would oppose a candidate on the basis of them being hateful bigot towards minorities and gays. Just look at the liberals itt. Maybe 10% of white GOP voters (or less) but not overall population