xepherys,
I predict that it will be difficult to attract much participation in a discussion on this topic....I'm not really sure whether you want a discussion concerning today's "status quo"....the result of a power "imbalance" that has taken place because of interpretation of congressional election results, beginning in 1994,
as well as the results of the 2000 and 2004, presidential races.
Confining it's subject matter to examining why Kansans overwhelmingly vote republican, the 2004 book "What's the Matter With Kansas?", pondered the question of how and why "have nots", support candidates financed by wealthy conservatives and corporations:
Quote:
Downwardly mobile and picking up speed
Once-radical flyover country now votes against its own interests, Frank says
Reviewed by Paul Buhle
Sunday, June 20, 2004
What's the Matter With Kansas?
How Conservatives Won the Heart of America
......Today's Mr. and Mrs. Block are downwardly mobile but eager to enshrine the very right-wingers who are ruining their public institutions, their environment and their children's futures.
Why do they do it? Frank spends a great deal of time in close observation of repackaged reality, from congressional offices to public displays to the private lives of the faithful. In the inner ring of suburbs and fading factory towns where the American Dream grows steadily out of reach, he pinpoints the "plent-T-plaint." This "curious amassing of petty, unrelated beefs with the world" neatly combines assorted gripes about the obscenity, disrespect and immorality of a supposed liberalism run rampant. No combination of enhanced tax benefits for the wealthy, no increase in military weaponry, no assault on abortion rights or local victory against Darwinism can calm this orchestrated road rage. ......
Paul Buhle teaches at Brown University, and his latest book is "From the Lower East Side to Hollywood: Jews in American Popular Culture."
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The U.S. has experienced political shifts, beginning with the the "great depression" in the 1932 elections, that transferred the presidency to a democrat.......and democrats dominated in the executive and legislative branches, with the exception of the 8 year Eisenhower presidency, for the next 36 years. Compared to later republican presidents, Eisenhower could be described as a "centrist".
Today on a webpage at the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation site, (Milton was the late younger brother of republican president Dwight Eisenhower,) the following is displayed:
Quote:
http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache...s&ct=clnk&cd=5
.......With an eye to Thomas Jefferson's warning against the antidemocratic "aristocracy of our moneyed corporations," the United States needs to return corporate taxes to the levels in force during the Eisenhower administration. We also need to increase the top marginal tax rate for the super-rich to about 50 percent. This would still be far below the top marginal income tax rate of 91 percent during the Eisenhower administration.
Repealing the tax cuts given to the super-rich would return more than $85 bilomglion per year from the richest 5 percent of the population. Returning to corporate tax rates in force during the Eisenhower administration could increase tax revenues by roughly $110 billion more per year. Returning to a 50 percent top marginal inomgcome tax rate far below the top rate in the Eisenhower administration could capture as much as $90 billion more per year from the richest 2 percent of the population.
At the same time, we should provide tax cuts to the 150 million hard-working workers who are struggling because they can't afford to buy all they need. Millionomgaires don't need additional spending money. Workers, middle-class Americans, and the poor do. Their spending will stimulate the economy more effectively, help busiomgnesses, and be more fair to the Americans who need fairness the most. There is amomgple economic evidence that putting money in the pockets of average Americans stimulates the economy much more than further lining the pockets of the rich........
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In 1964, republican candidate Barry Goldwater suffered a lopsided defeat in his bid for the presidency against Lyndon Johnson. Republican fortunes changed in 1968 when republican Nixon made his second bid for the presidency, after losing to JFK by a small margin (if he even legitimately lost, at all, in that contested 1960 election.)
IMO, the shift to eventual republican control of the entire federal government, came about because of the "Southern Stratedy" that first saw results with Nixon's election, and because of the decline of unionism; the financial fuel for democratic candidates. Falling contributions to democrats was a result of a decline in unionized manufacturing jobs, and because republican strategists used the courts to obtain favorable rulings that ended the power of union leaders to direct revenue that was sourced from the proceeds of union dues, to almost exclusively democratic party candidates.
Republican strategists also observed that democrats depended on contributions from trial lawyers, and thus, a successful strategy of "tort reform" was launched by republicans to "lighten" the financial resources of trial lawyers, as well as their incentive to contribute to democrats. Once tort reform was passed into law, democrats could not attract contributions with promises to the lawyers that they could prevent tort "reform" from happening.
Elections are won on the margins, and the republican, "Southern Stratedy", was so successful in persudaing white southerners to change from voting for democratic party candidates, to republicans, that in 1980:
Quote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater
.......Atwater on the Southern Strategy
As a member of the Reagan administration in 1981, Atwater gave an anonymous interview to historian Alexander P. Lamis. Part of this interview was printed in Lamis' book The Two-Party South, then reprinted in Southern Politics in the 1990s with Atwater's name revealed. Bob Herbert reported on the interview in the October 6, 2005 edition of the New York Times. Atwater talked about the GOP's Southern Strategy and Ronald Reagan's version of it:
Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn’t have to do that. <b>All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he’s campaigned on since 1964… and that’s fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster…</b>
Questioner: But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps…?
Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, 'N-word, N-word, N-word.' By 1968 you can't say 'N-word' - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me - because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'N-word, n-word.'
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The terms "sun belt", and "Southern strategy", were coined, in 1969, by a 27 year old Harvard law grad and Nixon politcal advisor, Kevin Phillips. Phillips wrote the 1969 classic, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0870000586/sr=1-1/qid=1155024748/ref=sr_1_1/104-1219604-5159909?ie=UTF8&s=books">The emerging Republican majority,</a> and correctly predicted then, that the southern states would dominate American politics, and if California is included, no one has been elected POTUS since 1964, who was not born or residing in a southern state. Kevin Phillips later renounced the "new republican party" that he had advised so successfully. Here is an excerpt from comments by convicted Nixon watergate co-conspirator, Chuck Colson, who "found God" while serving jail time for his watergate crime conviction. Colson is trying to run "damage control" against the perceived impact of Kevin Phillips' new book,
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/067003486X/sr=1-1/qid=1155024479/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-1219604-5159909?ie=UTF8&s=books">American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21stCentury</a>
Quote:
http://www.christianpost.com/article/20060805/23511.htm
The 'Threat' of Theocracy
Somebody Take a Chill Pill
By Chuck Colson
Christian Post Guest Columnist
Sat, Aug. 05 2006 10:04 AM ET
.....Whatever the exact terminology, the “threat” they describe is basically the same. Like my old White House colleague, the somewhat erratic Kevin Phillips, they fear an end to the separation of church and state and its replacement by a government directly based on biblical laws.
In Phillips’s account, biblical laws will not only decide social issues like abortion and same-sex “marriage” but also matters like economics, the environment, and foreign policy. His most lurid fear is that the United States, under the sway of “theocrats,” will take actions in the Middle East to hasten the second coming of Christ.
As I said, Phillips is hardly alone in his fears. In a new book Kingdom Coming, journalist Michelle Goldberg writes about what she calls “Christian nationalism.” This “nationalism,” which Goldberg characterizes as “quasi-fascist,” believes that “godly men have the responsibility to take over every aspect of society.”....
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It is amusing to read Colson's description of a political prodigy, accomplished and prolific author, and noted historian, as <b>"my old White House colleague, the somewhat erratic Kevin Phillips"</b>, when Colson is a convicted felon who "found Jesus", and now wants to persuade us that:
Quote:
.....And there are some Christians who do talk about a Christian takeover of America. The real question, as Ross Douthat asks in the latest issue of First Things, is whether they are representative of Christians as a whole.
The answer is a resounding “no!”—maybe one percent.....
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....anybody who has read the documentation that I've provided in other threads on this forum, or who keeps up on current events and has not been
"taken in" by their pastor's political directives, knows that Colson is full of shit, with his "one percent" description......