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  • C

    Cathy SmithNov 28, 2019 at 11:58 pm

    With the 2020 election right around the corner our nation is divided over feelings. we should focus more on economics for our future. economicoverfeelings

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  • J

    JBSep 20, 2019 at 11:50 am

    I agree with you fundamentally that President Trump is a poor representative for conservatism. That’s why I supported Ted Cruz in the 2016 primaries and wrote-in Evan McMullin on election day. I wish there were a conservative alternative, or at least a center-left candidate in the gaggle of Democratic presidential hopefuls. I’m not optimistic of that happening if current trends continue. To me, it looks like both Democrat and Republican parties are adopting European trends with one side favoring a massive expansion on social welfare spending versus a big-government nationalist populism.

    I don’t think that the “small government, tax cutting, and budget balancing conservatives of old” have disappeared. Republicans passed tax reform a couple years ago (and I started taking home an extra $70 per month from my Trinity paycheck), they tried to get rid of Obamacare, and Paul Ryan waxed poetic for years about how he wanted entitlement reform. Despite his rhetoric, Trump has governed relatively conservatively. This will be why I (most likely) vote for him in 2020.

    There are MANY reasons posited as to “how” we got Trump. I don’t want to litigate those. However, I do agree on the whole that Trump is a reaction from the right for being called racists, sexists, white supremacists, homophobes, etc for…well, as long as I can remember. I was in college during the 2008 election. Democrats speak well of John McCain now, but back then he was a racist monster who was going to die of old age and leave a Disney Princess in the oval office. Mitt Romney was a classist stooge who hated women and homosexuals (gay marriage was a big issue in 2012 politics). Even before that, W. Bush was a dunce, Chimp-like warmonger lining the pockets of Halliburton.

    The proliferation of online news and social media has only amplified the pre-existing media echo chambers that cast moral judgments on conservatives for disagreeing with Democrats on most major issues. Anti abortion? You hate women (specifically poor black women). Welfare reform? You hate poor black people. Border security? You hate brown people. Against gay marriage? You’re a bigot. On and on it goes. When everything becomes morally problematic then “morally problematic” then nothing is morally problematic. These labels cease to mean anything beyond a constant drum-beat of insufferable self-righteousness.

    I experienced immense catharsis on election night when I witnessed a stunned silence while walking past the election party run by Trinity’s two left wing organizations in the CSI atrium. You could hear a pin drop. Finally, someone gave them all the middle finger and they have to stand there and take it! The schadenfreude was unfortunately dulled by the realization that this man is now president. It was a bizarre cognitive dissonance. I wrote a long Facebook post the next day about how I voted and what observed from those around me. One of the first responses was a gay friend trying to shame me for voting Trump (he quickly deleted the comment when another pointed out that I had not voted for him).

    There is certainly a place in the Republican party for a conservative, but that would require other Republican voters to put aside years of animus against the vocal minority of overly-judgmental Democrats. That’s a tall order. I suspect it will take 8-16 years of consecutive Democratic presidents before that’s possible.

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    • M

      MoniqueOct 11, 2019 at 9:45 pm

      So basically you had a problem with people pointing out genuine issues they had with your candidates and the positions they had y’all didn’t really rally against at the time and that you now claim you always had a problem with (except the log cabin republicans when they weren’t complete sycophants). Then to retaliate you voted for a guy who was pretty obviously a vodka to your previous Moscow mules of racism, homophobia, chicken hawking, and “all hail the rich with tax cuts”. Yeah, excuse me for not being sorry y’all did this to yourselves because y’all got laughed at for supporting some pretty odd people over the years from men who think women can swallow cameras to see their unborn baby (which mean someone is a serious cannibal) and people who’s best response to global warming is “look at this snowball” and people who seem to think that abstinence only education is somehow going to reduce the teen pregnancy rate and prevent STD transmission.

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