canpakes wrote:honorentheos wrote:Coulter's argument is interesting in that she took a similar stance to one Tucker Carlson takes, arguing that it's Trump and just about any non-socialist Washington outsider that people should support because the enemy is the wealthy elite who benefit from policies like providing a path to citizenship for immigrants. She went after the Koch brothers for God's sake! Imagining her saying the things she said in that clip just 10 years ago would be unthinkable.
Coulter's argument is both safe and disingenuous. Nothing about the situation she describes is new; she simply finds herself needing to shift blame for Trump's ineffectiveness in order to keep the Base supporting him. The Base won't vote for Democrats regardless, and Republican legislators know this, as does Coulter... and the Kochs.
Behind the rhetoric is the hope that Trump remains in office for as much time as required to allow his strings to be pulled by every ideological and corporate interest needing its desires satisfied - including the Koch Brothers. Meanwhile, Coulter paints herself as the protector of The People with her BS routine, in order to stay in the public eye and sell her books. It's all just a game with the Trump Base as the mark.
There's a reason why the Republican Party - the very folks that Coulter is just now claiming are promoting a dysfunctional immigration situation - is in near-complete lockstep behind Trump. Everyone is lined up to get their pony, including Coulter.
I mentioned the Words Matter podcast on the board before, with Steve Schmidt who worked on the McCain campaign in 2008. I don't recall if he was the one who described this or one of his guests, but in an early episode there was a discussion over the politics of rightwing outrage and how the politicians on the Right mistakenly thought they could whip up their target constituents with anti-government vitriol without believing it would ever get out of control. Whomever said it compared it to the mutually assured destruction of the cold war, and the assumption being neither Republicans nor Democrats would be well served by a candidate actually following through on the anti-government threat. He was apologetic about not recognizing that this was reckless, and the consequences are what they are today with the extremists on both sides beginning to bubble over the pot but clearly the Republicans with Trump were the first to uncap it to let it run wild without any sense of restraint.
I bring that up because Coulter was and still is part of the machine that whipped up people into an irrational perspective regarding their relationship to government and pluralistic societies central to western liberal democracies. I don't think we do the present justice by viewing it as a continuation of the constrained two-party past in the same way that Schmidt/his guest failed to realize that past beliefs were wrong in assuming the social glue that held society together was too strong to break, and could withstand their reckless disregard for choosing to whip up antagonistic sentiment they viewed was to their advantage - and it was so long as the base believed they were their guys. Their error, and I think one being perpetuated in this thread, is to imagine the options on the table are only binary. "A person MUST choose Republican or Democrat, and no matter what happens the dynamics of American politics will assure us that Fox News listeners will vote for the R over the D." But 2016 was essentially an election where Trump wasn't an R. He was/is a renegade anti-politician who won the R's nomination. Bernie Sanders isn't a Democrat. He's a socialist democrat who votes with the D's most of the time. The two party system is being challenged, and will be even more challenged in 2020 I would guess. And if public sentiment on both sides is against anyone viewed as an establishment R or D, the ideology - or lack thereof as we should realize by now - that ends up on either ticket can be quite radical and quite possibly not fit to govern.
Coulter is a voice of provocation. She and Carlson appear to know that their main audience is working class and older, rural people being left behind by the fall out of the Reagan tax cuts, Clinton's economic conservatism, and 16 years of Bush/Obama doing whatever it took to try and keep the American economy running as hot as it could after the slow down following the go-go 90s and our expensive military adventures post-9/11. The Fox crowd appears to know that this group is more and more aware they are being left behind, and the argument its due to taxes alone isn't cutting it. Public sentiment has turned on the corporations and the public opinion machines on the extreme left and right are starting to churn out very similar messages, but with either a pro- or anti-capitalism bass note. What they both have in common is a lack of depth in the discussion, and given it's meant to whip people up, it can't engage in nuance or considered discussion of what is really at work.
In that sense, I view the real conflict being between those on both sides who want to whip people up v. journalism and research that argues for being informed with a considered view. The later isn't something that exists easily in the stark binary world of social media outrage, either, and is the underdog in this fight by far. There is real danger in letting opposition to the other side blinding one to real problems coming dressed up as a member of one's own side. The partisanship that makes this possible is the real threat to democracy. Coulter is part of that, but so is Maher.