From Pine View Farm

Forget the Race; Look at the Racers 0

Chauncey Devega argues that far too much attention is paid to the differences amongst the Republican candidates for the presidential nomination. He find their similarities to be much more important–and troubling. Here’s a bit from his typically long and tightly-reasoned post:

A focus on the horse-race narrative and an obsessive parsing of the differences between the 2016 Republican presidential primary candidates—and the reasons for their varying levels of success in Iowa—is potentially very dangerous because it risks overlooking the extreme, radical and dangerous right-wing policy proposals that unite the field.Almost all of the 2016 Republican presidential primary candidates share the following beliefs:

      1. That the United States should bomb and kill many thousands of innocent people in the Middle East and elsewhere in order to supposedly stop the spread of ISIS and other terrorist organizations.
      2. Torturing suspected terrorists—even though such acts are both immoral and ineffective in retrieving actionable intelligence information—is acceptable.
      3. “God’s law” should supersede the United States Constitution.
      4. They are anti-science and do not believe that global warming is a real, scientifically proven, empirical fact.
      (Follow the link for the rest of the list)

The contemporary Republican Party is a radical political organization that has betrayed the core tenet of “conservatism,” what is a belief in stability in the face of radical change. To that end, movement conservatism seeks to undo the consensus politics of the World War II and post-World War II era because it views the great successes of the New Deal, the Great Society and the civil rights movement(s) as a threat to the excesses of unrestrained capitalism and white male power.

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