Conservative Tom says:
Paul Krugman is a liberal and therefore his column is based on his view. Ok, we get it. However he assigns all the blame on Republicans who until the last couple elections have been a minority party for years. So any blame should be assigned to those who were in power as the nation changed. That was the Democrats.
Let's look at the last election. Hillary got her questions and answers before her debates. The Democrats sabotaged Bernie Sanders choices by using "super delegates" who gave her the nomination before any primary was held. Talk about destroying the political system. Then Hillary in all of her glory calls the vast majority of average Americans "deplorable" --could anyone vote for her after that?
Trump might not be the best President ever, however, it is not his fault the nation is falling apart, after all he has only been in the office for four months. The reason the country is in trouble can be laid at the feet of one party, the Democrats with the helpful acceptance by the Republicans.
It is the entire political system that has gone from doing what is in the best interests of the country to what is in their best interests to get re-elected. That is the reason for the decline, and all politicians present and past must face up to their failings.
But lets not let off the media including Paul Krugman, the supposed "guardians of the nation" who have become political hacks promoting one issue--the demonization of Trump, his issues and his supporters. They have taken up the "deplorable" handle and pasted it over everything Trump.
They should be ashamed as they are the ones who are supposed to report the "facts" and only the facts, yet they overused the term "confidential source" to the point that no one knows if the source is real or made up. Certainly some of their "facts" have been proven to be falsehoods.
The nation is ending, crushed into smithereens by political correctness, political hackery, and media bias. It was a good run but like most democracies (actually the US is a representative republic but that is another story) they only last so long. Will America make it to its 250th year? We know it won't make it to 300!
Conservative Tom
How Republics End
Many people are reacting to the rise of Trumpism and nativist movements in Europe by reading history — specifically, the history of the 1930s. And they are right to do so. It takes willful blindness not to see the parallels between the rise of fascism and our current political nightmare.
But the ’30s isn’t the only era with lessons to teach us. Lately I’ve been reading a lot about the ancient world. Initially, I have to admit, I was doing it for entertainment and as a refuge from news that gets worse with each passing day. But I couldn’t help noticing the contemporary resonances of some Roman history — specifically, the tale of how the Roman Republic fell.
Here’s what I learned: Republican institutions don’t protect against tyranny when powerful people start defying political norms. And tyranny, when it comes, can flourish even while maintaining a republican facade.
On the first point: Roman politics involved fierce competition among ambitious men. But for centuries that competition was constrained by some seemingly unbreakable rules. Here’s what Adrian Goldsworthy’s “In the Name of Rome” says: “However important it was for an individual to win fame and add to his and his family’s reputation, this should always be subordinated to the good of the Republic … no disappointed Roman politician sought the aid of a foreign power.”
America used to be like that, with prominent senators declaring that we must stop “partisan politics at the water’s edge.” But now we have a president-elect who openly asked Russia to help smear his opponent, and all indications are that the bulk of his party was and is just fine with that. (A new poll shows that Republican approval of Vladimir Putin has surged even though — or, more likely, precisely because — it has become clear that Russian intervention played an important role in the U.S. election.) Winning domestic political struggles is all that matters, the good of the republic be damned.
And what happens to the republic as a result? Famously, on paper the transformation of Rome from republic to empire never happened. Officially, imperial Rome was still ruled by a Senate that just happened to defer to the emperor, whose title originally just meant “commander,” on everything that mattered. We may not go down exactly the same route — although are we even sure of that? — but the process of destroying democratic substance while preserving forms is already underway.
Consider what just happened in North Carolina. The voters made a clear choice, electing a Democratic governor. The Republican legislature didn’t openly overturn the result — not this time, anyway — but it effectively stripped the governor’s office of power, ensuring that the will of the voters wouldn’t actually matter.
Combine this sort of thing with continuing efforts to disenfranchise or at least discourage voting by minority groups, and you have the potential making of a de facto one-party state: one that maintains the fiction of democracy, but has rigged the game so that the other side can never win.
Why is this happening? I’m not asking why white working-class voters support politicians whose policies will hurt them — I’ll be coming back to that issue in future columns. My question, instead, is why one party’s politicians and officials no longer seem to care about what we used to think were essential American values. And let’s be clear: This is a Republican story, not a case of “both sides do it.”
So what’s driving this story? I don’t think it’s truly ideological. Supposedly free-market politicians are already discovering that crony capitalism is fine as long as it involves the right cronies. It does have to do with class warfare — redistribution from the poor and the middle class to the wealthy is a consistent theme of all modern Republican policies. But what directly drives the attack on democracy, I’d argue, is simple careerism on the part of people who are apparatchiks within a system insulated from outside pressures by gerrymandered districts, unshakable partisan loyalty, and lots and lots of plutocratic financial support.
For such people, toeing the party line and defending the party’s rule are all that matters. And if they sometimes seem consumed with rage at anyone who challenges their actions, well, that’s how hacks always respond when called on their hackery.
One thing all of this makes clear is that the sickness of American politics didn’t begin with Donald Trump, any more than the sickness of the Roman Republic began with Caesar. The erosion of democratic foundations has been underway for decades, and there’s no guarantee that we will ever be able to recover.
But if there is any hope of redemption, it will have to begin with a clear recognition of how bad things are. American democracy is very much on the edge.
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