From Orson Welles's "The Smiler With the Knife" screenplay:John: The American public will never stand for a dictator.
Strangeways: You mean they'll never give a politician that much power. How about a hero? We like heroes over here and this one won't talk like a dictator. He'll look like a movie star and everybody'll love him.
How about a reality show star instead?
"Trump and Sanders Give Voice to the Voiceless":
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc ... ls/463206/
Whites without a college degree, who began realigning away from the Democratic Party in the 1960s (because of the Civil Rights act?), are arguably now the GOP’s most important constituency. In every presidential election since 1996, they have provided 49 to 55 percent of the votes won by the GOP presidential nominee—even though non-college whites over that period have shrunk from about half of all voters to only about one-third. They played equally crucial roles in the 2008 and 2012 Republican presidential primaries, casting about half the votes.
Yet no GOP presidential contender more formidable than the conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan in 1996 or former Senator Rick Santorum in 2012, neither of whom came close to winning, has aimed his agenda squarely at those voters. In style and substance, John McCain and Mitt Romney, the 2008 and 2012 nominees, more represented the party’s managerial white-collar wing. Trump has decisively broken that pattern with a bristling, insular message that attacks both domestic elites and foreign influences, from Mexican immigrants to Chinese manufacturers.
The GOP’s blue-collar and white-collar factions agree on many issues. But polls show that working-class Republicans are both more nativist and statist: They are more likely to support temporarily banning Muslims from entering the U.S. and deporting all undocumented immigrants, and more hostile to free trade or cuts in federal entitlement programs for the elderly.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a longtime leader in the conservative political movement, tweeted Friday that the GOP establishment should see that it is inevitable that Donald Trump will be the party's presidential nominee.
The New Republic on how "The Southern Strategy Made Donald Trump Possible":
https://newrepublic.com/article/130039/ ... p-possible
Patrick Ruffini, webmaster for the Bush/Cheney presidential run in 2004, encapsulated the establishment view earlier this week, calling Trump a “cancer” on the GOP and adding, “All of Trump’s actions are straight from the radicalization playbook. I don’t think it’s a stretch to compare his tactics to jihadists.”
But far from being a “cancer” on Republicanism, or some jihadi-style radicalizer, he’s the natural evolutionary product of Republican platforms and strategies that stretch back to the very origins of modern conservatism in the 1950s and 1960s. The single most salient difference between Trump’s supporters and those of his rivals: They are much more likely to endorse white ethnic nationalism and to express nostalgia for traditional Southern racism. In light of this polling, Trump’s campaign can best be understood not as an outlier but as the latest manifestation of the Southern Strategy, which the Republican Party has deployed for a half-century to shore up its support in the old Confederate states by appeals to racial resentment and white solidarity.
The Southern Strategy has long relied on coded appeals to racism—an emphasis on “law and order,” denunciations of racial quotas, and so on—that enticed the bigoted base while still giving the Republican Party plausible deniability. This sort of winking racism no longer works, in part because the base feels the party hasn’t delivered. Trump’s signature trait is that he doesn’t hide his bigotry, so he excites voters who feel that here, at last, they have the real thing.
Glenn Beck: "“The Trump supporters, they’re Brownshirts,” Beck said. “I’ve never witnessed anything like I saw today, it was just, it was grotesque and sad that Americans… It’s like these people are treating people like Obama supporters treated us...It was like walking into Ferguson or walking into Baltimore. There’s no reason, there’s no common decency, there’s nothing. It’s just bizarre.”'
Noam Chomsky:
MIT professor and intellectual Noam Chomsky attributes Donald Trump’s success in the Republican presidential primary to “fear” and a “breakdown of society.”
“Fear, along with the breakdown of society during the neoliberal period,” Chomsky responded. “People feel isolated, helpless, victim of powerful forces that they do not understand and cannot influence.”
Chomsky compared the political environment that’s allowed Trump to flourish to the 1930s, when the U.S. was in the Great Depression. “Objectively, poverty and suffering were far greater,” Chomsky said. “But even among poor working people and the unemployed, there was a sense of hope that is lacking now, in large part because of the growth of a militant labor movement and also the existence of political organizations outside the mainstream.”
"Neoliberalism As a Water Balloon" (2009), uses a balloon model to cleverly illustrate how Neoliberalism is essentially an attack on the social programs and safety net that keeps people from poverty:
http://africasacountry.com/2009/10/neoliberalism/
Understanding Neoconservatism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CFT88cMlQo
"Another important influence on the neoconservative movement of the 90's, was international Trotskyism. In the framework of international communism, the Trotskyites were rabid, idealistic internationalists, rather than realists or nationalists. The two Bush presidents were the neoconservative leaders, who favored support for the United Nations, preemptive war, and complex international treaties and organizations.
'A Neoconservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality." - Irving Kristol
