PDA

View Full Version : tPF Reagan-era Supply Side guru upset with modern Republicans



OGIS
04-25-2016, 01:00 PM
I wonder how many Trump and Cruz Republicans are secretly "done with" the trickle-down myth that they were sold for 30 years? How much is their quietly-husbanded rage over being conned fueling the embrace of off-the-reservation populists?

This guy sounds butthurt and nervous.


“Complete and total destruction of the Republican Party”: Former Reagan official Bruce Bartlett on why he backs Trump
Republican apostate Bruce Bartlett sees Donald Trump as the calamitous reckoning the GOP desperately needs Regardless of how you feel about Donald Trump, his ascendance as the frontrunner for the Republican Party’s 2016 presidential nomination signals major changes within the GOP. Large segments of the Republican Party and the conservative movement have arrayed themselves in opposition to Trump to ward off the political reckoning his candidacy threatens, but there are some people who want Trump to win precisely because his nomination would inflict much-needed violence upon the Republican Party as it currently exists.

Bruce Bartlett, a former official in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and a longtime critic of the GOP’s increasingly conservative politics, sees Trump as both a product of the Republican Party’s decline and a potential catalyst for its eventual reclamation. I talked to Bartlett about why he voted for Donald Trump, what he sees in the GOP’s future, and whether something worthwhile can be salvaged from a political party that looks to be on the verge of cracking up. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

I wanted to talk about 2016 and Trump and the future of the GOP. You are a former Reagan official, you worked for George H.W. Bush, and you voted for Donald Trump in the Virginia primary. And I was hoping if you could just explain why.

I think the Republican Party is sick. It’s dying, it just doesn’t know it. And I think anything that speeds up its demise is to the good, because then it can reinvent itself and return as something healthy. Or you could use an addiction metaphor, where people have to hit bottom so that they can reach out and ask for help before they can cure themselves. I think that Trump is a symptom of a disease of rampant stupidity, pandering to morons and bigots and racists and all the sort of stuff that defines today’s Republican coalition. And I just think it’s awful. It’s terrible for the country in a great many ways that I don’t need to tell you. And I think that we need to have a healthy two-party system. We need to have a sane, functioning conservative party and a sane, functioning liberal party. And I think that half of that equation, at least, is not working, and it affects the other half.

So I think it’s just bad for the country. So I think that giving Trump the nomination is the surest path to complete and total destruction of the Republican Party as we know it. And I look forward to him getting the nomination for that reason. I think he will have a historic loss. I think he may well bring in a Democratic Senate. But more importantly, my hope is, at least, that he will lead to a really serious assessment of the problems of the Republican Party, and lead to some opening of thought, opening of discussion, conversation among groups that have been sidelined for quite a long time. Mainly moderates and people of that sort who have been just pushed to the sidelines in favor of ever more rabid, nonsensical, right-wing authoritarianism.

But I also don’t think...

Cigar
04-25-2016, 01:02 PM
:poopfan: All it took was one Skinny Community Organizer :grin:

The Sage of Main Street
04-25-2016, 04:24 PM
I wonder how many Trump and Cruz Republicans are secretly "done with" the trickle-down myth that they were sold for 30 years? How much is their quietly-husbanded rage over being conned fueling the embrace of off-the-reservation populists?

This guy sounds butthurt and nervous. After attacking Trump's ideas and having it boomerang on them, all that the Establishment's flunkies have left is scare stories.