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Chris
07-25-2015, 12:03 PM
Some time ago I considered myself a radical centrist. That's something akin to what's described below as the radical middle, except the radical center's distrust of government is distrust of the system itself, not merely who the officers holders and their ineptitude might be.

Revenge of the Radical Middle (http://freebeacon.com/columns/revenge-of-the-radical-middle/)


...The radical middle is attracted to populists, outsiders, businessmen such as Perot and Lee Iacocca who have never held office, and to anyone, according to Newsweek, who is the “tribune of anti-insider discontent.”...

Well, here we are again, at the beginning of a presidential campaign in which the Republican Party, having lost its hold on the radical middle, is terrified of the electoral consequences....

...The men and women in the uppermost ranks of the party, who have stood by Trump in the past as he gave them his endorsements and cash, are inclined to condescend to a large portion of the Republican base, to treat base voters’ concerns as unserious, nativist, racist, sexist, anachronistic, or nuts, to apologize for the “crazies” who fail to understand why America can build small cities in Iraq and Afghanistan but not a wall along the southern border, who do not have the education or skills or means to cope when factories move south or abroad, who stare incomprehensibly at the television screen when the media fail to see a “motive” for the Chattanooga shooting, who voted for Perot in ’92 and Buchanan in ’96 and Sarah Palin in ’08 and joined the Tea Party to fight death panels in ’09.

These voters don’t give a whit about corporate tax reform or TPP or the capital gains rate or the fate of Uber, they make a distinction between deserved benefits like Social Security and Medicare and undeserved ones like welfare and food stamps, their patriotism is real and nationalistic and skeptical of foreign entanglement, they wept on 9/11, they want America to be strong, dominant, confident, the America of their youth, their young adulthood, the America of 40 or 30 or even 20 years ago....

What the radical middle has seen in recent years has not given them reason to be confident in our government, our political system, our legion of politicians clambering up the professional ladder office to office....

..That Trump is not a conservative, nor by any means a mainstream Republican, is not a minus but a plus to the radical middle. These voters are culturally right but economically left; they depend on the New Deal and parts of the Great Society, are estranged from the fiscal and monetary agendas of The Economist and Wall Street Journal. What they lack in free market bona fides they make up for in their romantic fantasy of the patriotic tycoon or general, the fixer, the Can Do Man who will cut the baloney and Get Things Done. On social questions their views tend toward the moderate side—Perot was no social conservative, either. What unites them is opposition to elites in government, finance, culture, journalism; their search for a vehicle—whether it’s a political party or an outspoken publicity maven—that will displace the managers and technocrats and restore the America of old....

midcan5
07-25-2015, 02:13 PM
...they want America to be strong, dominant, confident, the America of their youth, their young adulthood, the America of 40 or 30 or even 20 years ago....

Whenever I hear this spoken, I wonder how old the speaker is? Any reading of history will contradict the sentence and yet you hear it all the time. 'You know when I was young....' Most can fill in the rest.

I am going to reference the same book a second time in a few minutes. 'American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945-1960' by William L. O'Neill

Chris
07-25-2015, 02:22 PM
Whenever I hear this spoken, I wonder how old the speaker is? Any reading of history will contradict the sentence and yet you hear it all the time. 'You know when I was young....' Most can fill in the rest.

I am going to reference the same book a second time in a few minutes. 'American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945-1960' by William L. O'Neill



It was criticism of people who think that way. :facepalm: