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this is the up and down side of pitching a political ideology around a sense of identity---us/them, classic evangelical protestant stuff---anyway, you generate positive and negative reinforcement points--negative in that the center of being-conservative is a sense of self-as-conservative and so moving too much in a political direction that'd run counter to this is a problem--positive in the sense that particular arguments from particular candidates give a content to this identity, help it line up.
i think this is really quite different from the way in which the democratic party works--it benefits from the reversal of this (i am sure that many folk modulate their politics by not wanting to drift into conservativeland)--but it (identity) is not at the center of the official party ideology.
at the same time, this identity politics is only central to a particular region of the republican coalition--it just happens to be a region over-represented here.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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