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the republicans are in quite a pickle.
their coalition appears to be as much a problem as an advantage and the language that the right developed to integrate the myriad right-to-extreme right groups that were of it has entirely fallen apart. what's worse, the economic ideology that was a lynchpin for not only the hard-right version of the republican coalition that took shape under clinton, but the entire conservative movement since the middle 1970s has been pretty thoroughly pulverized--but there's not a clear alternative at this point, so functionally i think it's still operative as condensed onto schemata that folk use to order information and comportments, so is in myriad fragments....one of the problems that's created by the fact that there still hasn't been a serious discursive break with the bad old days of cowboy capitalism is the difficulties the obama administration seems to have in talking about longer-term objectives and the roles that the state can play in furthering them. which is not good.
anyway, i don't see any obvious way out of this situation for the republicans...they've lost control over what once was a pretty well-oiled ideological system--so the dissociative fox news operates in lunatic mode because, well, they have to...if they don't want to abandon their reactionary business model---so limbaugh, so all of it.
worst thing that could happen to the republicans now would be for more prominent moderates to leave the party, because that would send them tumbling into an abyss nationally.
so they're in real trouble.
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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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