Ce site utilise des cookies pour fournir nos services, optimiser les performances, pour les analyses, et (si vous n'êtes pas connecté) pour les publicités. En utilisant Librarything, vous reconnaissez avoir lu et compris nos conditions générales d'utilisation et de services. Votre utilisation du site et de ses services vaut acceptation de ces conditions et termes.
Résultats trouvés sur Google Books
Cliquer sur une vignette pour aller sur Google Books.
"An indictment of the Republican Party from one of the most successful Republican political operatives of his generation"--
Stevens spent decades electing Republicans at every level, from presidents to senators to local officials. Here he offers a devastating portrait of a party that has lost its moral and political compass. Stevens shows how Trump is the natural outcome of five decades of hypocrisy and self-delusion, dating all the way back to the civil rights legislation of the early 1960s. Racism has always lurked in the modern GOP's DNA, as has the rank hypocrisy of the party's claims to embody "family values" and fiscal responsibility. Stephen helped to create the modern party that kneels before a morally bankrupt con man-- and now he wants nothing more than to see it held accountable. -- adapted from jacket… (plus d'informations)
M_Clark: Stuart Benen's book takes the ideas of Stuart Stevens one step further with his demonstration that Republicans no longer have the ability or even the interest in governing.
▾Listes
Aucun
▾Aimerez-vous ce livre ?
Chargement...
Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre
▾Discussions (À propos des liens)
Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre.
Nothing earthshaking or new at this point. The Republican Party is a power hungry cartel that uses racism to hold its shrinking constituency: white men. But it is interesting to read an insider view and disillusionment story. Also, apparently a known truth is that the more conservative the politician the gayer the staff. Hypocrites, all.
This goes perfectly with some of the books I've read lately and it's easy to read and well written. It's even better to hear these grievances come from the Republican side of the aisle since I usually get a one-sided conversation when it comes to any political science/government book. It was just over 200 pages and took me 3 days to finish it and I never at one point wanted to put the book down and not finish it. Thats always a good indicator to me that I fully enjoyed a book. ( )
This goes perfectly with some of the books I've read lately and it's easy to read and well written. It's even better to hear these grievances come from the Republican side of the aisle since I usually get a one-sided conversation when it comes to any political science/government book. It was just over 200 pages and took me 3 days to finish it and I never at one point wanted to put the book down and not finish it. Thats always a good indicator to me that I fully enjoyed a book. ( )
A rant by an ex-campaign strategist for Republicans that outlines the hypocritical shedding of all conservative principles in order to "win" by supporting Trump. Also makes the case even before Nixon the conservative Republican movement has been about suppressing voting rights of non-whites, and particularly Blacks. He believes this will be end of the Republican party as America's demographics are changing rapidly. One intriguing fact he states: Obama was the first candidate to reject the $80M pubic campaign financing (and raised $330M). ( )
I got a couple of chapters into this and started to feel like I'd heard it before, then I realized he was treading the same ground as Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics which I read a few months back and it was a way more entertaining and better written chronicle of this topic. So I doubt this will be worth my time to finish.
Stevens traces a “direct line” connecting Nixon’s strategy to Reagan’s “more genteel prejudice” and Trump’s “white nationalism.” Reagan’s imaginary welfare queen “weaponized race and deceit in exactly the same ways” that Trump has in recent years, Stevens argues. Stevens was a consultant for Republican candidates for decades, and he formulated the very strategies and campaign ads about which he writes. His analysis goes beyond race. One chapter argues that despite its reputation for sound economic management, the Republican Party is actually “addicted to debt.” ... Many will fiercely contest Stevens’s views, but Republicans will have to grapple with this scathing message.
Stevens has little hope the GOP will save itself from Trump or rise to the challenge of adapting to an increasingly non-white America. Losing, badly, is his only hope for concentrating Republican minds to the new reality of American demographics. Absent that, his prescription is definitive: “Burn it to the ground and start over.” ... The former may happen. The latter is less predictable.
Without Romney’s defeat, no Trump takeover. And no Republican other than Utah’s freshman senator himself had more to do with the fateful outcome on that Election Day than Mitt Romney’s sole campaign strategist in 2012, principal advertising consultant, and convention speechwriter, Stuart Stevens. Strange, then, to pick up Stevens’s new book, It Was All a Lie, to find him accusing Republican voters of all manner of sins, failures of judgment, and squandered opportunities, as if they were due the harsh accounting and he was the one left disappointed.... A quiet disengagement from the 2020 scene, taking his j’accuse with him, would be sufficient, leaving others to guide a vital 166-year-old institution that has been and remains an irreplaceable force for good in this country and this world.
Stevens, who claims to have amassed “the best win-loss record of anyone in my business,” admits to having been duped by Republican candidates who professed conservative principles but abandoned them in order to “embrac[e] a racist unprepared to be president”—a confessional quality that distinguishes this account from others by center-right figures. Readers hoping that the post-Trump GOP charts a new path will savor this thoughtful exposé.
Stevens writes that it’s nearly impossible to imagine a GOP that adheres to the values of “compassionate conservatism” advanced only two decades ago by George W. Bush or one that will stand up to a resurgent Russia. He closes by predicting that Republicans who have given Trump free rein will one day “look back on this period of their lives with a mixture of shame, sadness, and regret,” holding some dim hope for a return to the values of old by virtue of moderate Republican governors and state legislators.... An epitaph, of interest to all politics junkies, for a formerly venerable party by a champion-turned-gravedigger.
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
Sometimes party loyalty asks too much. -President John Kennedy
Dédicace
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
To the Deep States patriots who are defending America.
Premiers mots
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
Prologue: I have no one to blame but myself. I believed.
Chapter 1: You start out in 1954 by saying "Nigger, nigger, nigger." But 1968 you can't say "nigger" - that hurts you. Backfires. For you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. - Lee Atwater, 1981
Citations
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
There is nothing strange or unexpected about Donald Trump. He is the logical conclusion of what the Republican Party became over the last fifty or so years, a natural product of the seeds of race, self-deception, and anger that became the essence of the Republican Party. Trump isn’t an aberration of the Republican Party; he is the Republican Party in a purified form.
What happens if you spend decades focused on appealing to white voters and treating nonwhite voters with, at best, benign neglect? You get good at doing what it takes to appeal to white voters. That is the truth that led to what is famously called “the southern strategy.” That is the path that leads you to becoming what the Republican Party now proudly embraces: a white grievance party.
The fact that the Republican establishment is so invested in the myth that their problems are a matter of language is revealing and self-damning. At the root of it is a deep condescension that they—the de facto White Party of America—know what is best for black folks, and it’s unfortunate these black folks don’t seem to get it but, you know, they are different and we have to talk to them in a language they can understand.
As much as many of us—yes, I include myself in this group—would like to, even need to, separate Reagan from Trump, the welfare-queen theme weaponized race and deceit in exactly the same ways employed by Donald Trump. There is a small kernel of truth in it—the woman used four, not eighty names, and the total fraud was $8,000—but when four becomes eighty and $8,000 total becomes $150,000 a year, Reagan is just lying. The majority of all welfare goes to white Americans and always has, but the specificity of a woman in Chicago makes the racial appeal clear.
The modern Democratic Party has fought for civil rights and believes government has a moral role in helping to create racial equality in America. The modern Republican Party has fought civil rights and is very hesitant to assert government has a role in equality of any sort, including racial.
...the inadequacy of legislation supported by Democrats is far different from a calculated effort to appeal to white voters by manipulating the race issue. One is a failure of policy. The other is a moral failure.
One of the common traits of the Republican Party, which the media seems to often accept and imitate, is the discussion of “the working class” as if it were the white working class. It reduces African Americans and other nonwhites to invisible and nonexistent and is a perfect example of the casual racism of so much of conservative politics.
There is nothing new about Donald Trump. He hasn’t invented a new politics or executed a brilliant and novel strategy. Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and even Ronald Reagan played the same race-based politics of resentment. It is precisely Trump’s predictability and, alas, inevitability that is so depressing.
Donald Trump was able to win the Electoral College with the same percentage of the white vote as Romney, but for the first time in twenty years African American turnout actually decreased; third-party voting also increased over 2012. So Trump wins the White House with 46.1 percent of the popular vote, and Romney loses with 47.2 percent.
nowhere in the autopsy was there an acknowledgment or even consideration that the reason Republicans were failing with nonwhite voters was policy based, not just a question of demonstrating sincerity or failure to engage minorities. Nor is there any indication of the moral imperative of a political party that aspires to lead a ...country to be more inclusive and better reflect the country it seeks to represent. Perhaps that’s too much to ask of a report commissioned by a political party to determine the political failures of that party. But I think it is telling that the Republican focus on the need to broaden the party has been driven by an instinct for survival and no real sense of a larger purpose.
How do you abandon deeply held beliefs about character, personal responsibility, foreign policy, and the national debt in a matter of months? You don’t. The obvious answer is those beliefs weren’t deeply held. In the end, the Republican Party rallied behind Donald Trump because if that was the deal needed to regain power, what was the problem? Because it had always been about power.
The entire modern Republican definition of the conservative movement is about efforts to define itself as “normal” and everything else as “not normal.”
The Christian right would like the world to believe it was the political arm of Jesus Christ, come to life to save a sinful America. In practice it operates more like a Christian-related super PAC for a white America. The professional politicization of Christianity as a right-wing force was always more about the acquisition of power than a commitment to Christianity.
...whenever I hear the loonies on the right asserting that God wanted Trump to win, I always wonder why it didn’t occur to them that if God really was involved, he probably could have won the popular vote for Trump. And done it without the Russians’ helping.
Neither of these men could win a primary for president in the current Republican Party. Decency, kindness, humility, compassion—all touchstones of a Christian faith—have no value in today’s Republican Party. All his life, Donald Trump has believed these to be weaknesses, and now that is the view of the party he leads.
Falwell, Graham, and others are providing religious cover for moral squalor—winking at trashy behavior and encouraging the unraveling of social restraints. Instead of defending their convictions, they are providing preemptive absolution for their political favorites.
Trump was running a scam on investors, and the Republican Party has been running a similar scam on voters. Trump claims to be a great businessman who was wildly successful, while in fact he was one of the greatest failures in modern American business history. The Republican Party claims to be a party that understands the need to run government efficiently, managing debt and balancing a budget. In truth the modern Republican Party is the equivalent of Donald Trump: addicted to debt and selling a false image of success.
For all their bluster about the federal government and states’ rights, the most conservative states in the country are far and away the most dependent on federal aid.... For every dollar Mississippians pay in federal income tax, the state receives just over $3 back from the federal government. More than 40 percent of Mississippi’s entire budget comes from Washington. Who pays for that? Those evil states like California and New York, where the good citizens pay a dollar in taxes and get less back from the government. Every time a New Yorker or Californian goes to work, he or she is helping build roads, hospitals, and schools in Mississippi.
At the end of the day, Mississippi Republicans, as conservative a bunch of voters as you will find in America, came down on the side of supporting a man who could help deliver more dollars to their state. And had no problem still insisting that federal spending was out of control.
There’s a language war here that Republicans have been winning for decades. “Welfare” is what the poor get because they are, well, poor, and being poor is a choice because in America anyone can succeed. Or something close to that. But “grants,” “tax breaks,” and “incentives” are the language businesses use to describe the corporate welfare they demand in exchange for doing what they usually have to do or want to do anyway, like build a new data center or factory or, in the case of sports, a new stadium.
At any given game, Arthur Blank’s suite at the Falcons’ new stadium will be graced with happy politicians from both parties who feel so special they are invited to the inner sanctum of the billionaire their constituents worked hard to support.
Republicans have decided there is a direct correlation between the size of a patriotic heart and the size of the defense budget.
...for many in the Reagan circle, that their love of Ayn Rand was unrequited did not preclude their emotional attachment to her vision of strong men fighting against the burdensome yoke of collectivism and government oppression. Ayn Rand defined her beliefs in the context of her native Russia gone mad with Communism, but the Reagan crowd harnessed their inner John Galt to believe they had a moral duty to cut taxes, particularly for the wealthy, who were the most deserving because they were, well, wealthy and had proven themselves superior to those of lesser means.
Any pretense that the Republican Party, if only given complete control of all three chambers of power, would focus on the deficit was just one of the myths shattered in the first two years of the Trump presidency.
A constant crowd-pleasing refrain of Ronald Reagan’s sums it up: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’ ” For most white Americans of the middle class, that strikes them as both funny and poignant. (It is also a practice of the white middle class to be completely blind to the vast help they get from the government in all aspects of their lives.) But how does a black person hear these same words, knowing that it took thirty thousand federal troops to force the University of Mississippi to accept one African American?
Today the intellectual leaders of the Republican Party are the paranoids, kooks, know-nothings, and bigots who once could be heard only on late-night talk shows, the stations you listened to on long drives because it was hard to fall asleep while laughing. When any political movement loses all sense of self and has no unifying theory of government, it ceases to function as a collective rooted in thought and becomes more like fans of a sports team.
Republicans are allowing Trump to equate conservatism with conspiracy, and the long-term success is predicated on stupidity becoming an airborne viral plague that will sweep the country like the walking dead.
He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see. —Ayn Rand
To promote a world viewpoint distinct from that shared by the majority, it was critical to assert that everyone else simply didn’t have the correct information on which to base decisions.
In Trump’s world, the internal forces conspiring against the country are the Deep State, not the Communists, but it is a vision of the world through a heavy fog of paranoia and fear. The steady conservatism of Eisenhower is unmasked not as governance that brought peace and prosperity to a postwar America but as a naive breeding ground that allows the rest of the world to take advantage of our too-generous benevolence.
Broadcast operated under the FCC’s fairness doctrine, whose core requirements were that broadcasters cover matters of public importance and that they do so fairly, mostly in the sense that they air competing positions. The doctrine was often associated with a right of reply for politicians who were subject to personal attack and other elements of the broader “public trustee” doctrine that held that private broadcasters holding licenses to public airwaves should act in managing those airwaves as a trustee for the real owners—the American people.
That you know and love people who voted for Trump only proves that you know and love people who voted for Trump. The irony of this is that while the Mueller Report did not charge Trump or his campaign with criminal conspiracy, it did uncover the largest effort in American history by a hostile foreign power to influence the selection of our commander in chief. That was the actual “information campaign,” and it is a profound and deeply troubling revelation that is ignored by those eager to celebrate that Donald Trump was not indicted.
The purpose of much of conservative media is to lie to their audience. It is fitting that at the heart of the Trump presidency itself is a lie: Almost every Republican elected official in Washington knows Donald Trump is unfit to be president. They knew it on November 9 at 7:00 p.m. when they were planning on how to rebuild the party from the disaster of nominating a know-nothing racist for president, and they knew it at midnight, when they were all frantically calling the oddballs and kooks Trump had assembled into a campaign to lavishly praise their brilliance.
The American political process with its deep dependence on the need to raise money is a system designed not for the best governance but for the selection of the person who can put up with being humiliated the longest.
The transition of the National Rifle Association is a perfect parable: over a couple of decades, it evolved from a gun-safety education organization to a thuggish gang that rewards those at the top with millions of dollars based on proven ability to muscle elected officials into doing what they mostly know is wrong.
The combination of high ideological stakes and intense competition for party control of the national government has all but eliminated the incentives for significant bipartisan cooperation on important national problems. Consequently, polarization has reduced congressional capacity to govern.
it isn’t really the power of money that gave right-wing special interests so much power over Republican politicians; it’s the ability of those groups to mobilize voters.
Most Republican politicians are not stupid and are aware on some level that committing to not raising taxes for the entirety of their careers greatly limits their and their party’s basic ability to govern and deal with a chaotic and unpredictable world. Some indeed refuse to sign the pledge. But few if any Republican politicians will even broach the possibility of a tax increase. The result of this weakness will be generations forced to pay off the debt and interest resulting from the simpleminded conspiracy of silence that is a central tenet of Republican politics.
The power a small group of right-wing zealots has over the Republican Party will continue until one of two events occurs: either a critical mass of Republican politicians stands together and stands up to their power, or the party changes such that it is not a white party but a party that looks more like America. As a point of reference, at some point in the future the sun will collapse as a red star and consume the earth. I’d call it a toss-up as to which of these three events is likely to happen first.
For many who didn’t particularly like Trump but couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary Clinton, there was the denial that Trump would be, as president, the same man he had been his entire life.
a set of four behavioral warning signs that can help us know an authoritarian when we see one. We should worry when a politician 1) rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game, 2) denies the legitimacy of opponents, 3) tolerates or encourages violence, or 4) indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media.
This is a view of government as nothing more than the sum total of bills passed or judges appointed, as if it were possible to assemble a human being from a collection of body parts. It completely ignores the true essence of a civil society that reflects the collective values and aspirations of a diverse country. In the Trump years, Republicans have sent a message that lying is useful and productive, racism is acceptable, the press is the enemy, and a strong-man authoritarian head of government is the ideal.
They tell themselves that the alternative is unacceptable: that if they don’t support and encourage a man who assaults women and lies instinctively, they will soon find themselves facing the red armies of socialism and the country will start to look like…Sweden. There is nothing new or particularly interesting about this deceit. Republicans are linked to a vast life-support system of lies, terrified that the truth will unplug the machine.
This was their moment to stand for something, and they chose to stand for reelection. Let us remember.
The Trump obsession with immigrants from Mexico and Central America is motivated by his own racism, but it also reflects the knowledge that every new nonwhite voter in America is a threat to the existence of the Republican Party.
Whether they had a D or an R by their name meant less than having a big W by their name, W for “white.”
In 2011, under Governor Scott Walker, the state passed a strict voter-ID law that U.S. district courts blocked. The premise for voter-ID requirements is to fight voter fraud, but those of us who work in elections know what the court concluded: there is almost no voter fraud in American elections.
Trump doesn’t seem to realize that if millions of voters were actually illegal, it would invalidate his election, because it would be impossible to know for whom they cast votes.
As a way of trying to justify voter-suppression steps, the Republican Party has invested heavily in the myth of voter fraud. The fraud is trying to convince the public there is voter fraud of any significance.
The modern political calculation of suppressing non-Republican voters is not complicated. Those at the lower end of the economic spectrum are less likely to vote Republican. And those same people are less likely to have access to the basic tools of the middle class that most of us take for granted—like easy access to a polling place or government-issued ID. Implementing stringent voter-ID laws and reducing the number of polling places and/or reducing early-voter and vote-by-mail options disproportionately target voters who are less likely to be Republicans.
The devices the Republicans used are variations on a theme going back more than 150 years. They target the socioeconomic characteristics of a people (poverty, lack of mobility, illiteracy, etc.) and then soak the new laws in “racially neutral justifications—such as administrative efficiency” or “fiscal responsibility”—to cover the discriminatory intent. Republican lawmakers then act aggrieved, shocked, and wounded that anyone would question their stated purpose for excluding millions of American citizens from the ballot box.
The common thread is fear. Fear of change, fear of the unknown, fear of losing power while forgetting the purpose of power.
Fear is at the heart of most conspiracy theories, and the current Republican Party is driven by conspiracy theories, a result of years of nutty radio mixed with nutty internet supercharged by a nutty president. When they are the stuff of midnight radio shows, wildly elaborate conspiracy theories have a certain amusingly harmless quality, but when they are driven by a president and accepted by his political party, conspiracies are a serious attack on the connective tissues of trust that hold a civil society together.
Illegal voting has long been a felony, and the idea that of all the felonies possible to commit, someone would risk the consequences of a felony conviction to vote is one of the more almost-charming absurdities imaginable. Our problem in America is getting people to vote, not stopping illegals.
No longer is to be born in America to win life’s lottery and know you are among the luckiest on earth; in the Trump Republican view, Americans are suckers, victims, the mark for a hostile world. Everyone is out to get America, from the Canadians to the Chinese. Anger has replaced gratitude.
The same people who have no problem mandating reproductive choices for women cite personal freedom as an opposition to registering voters.
It has become a fundamental tenet of the modern Republican Party to hate California, which is extraordinarily revealing. Something is deeply disturbed about a political party if it considers the most populous state part of the long list of “otherness” that Republicans see as separating the true America from something dangerous and anti-American. How did this happen? How did the state that gave us Ronald Reagan, the state that defined for the world what it was to be an American, the state with the largest number of military bases and the greatest farms of America, the state that built the world’s first great post-automobile city, the state with the industries that changed the world, from Apple to Hollywood—how did that become for Republicans an alien place to be scorned and ridiculed?
Let’s say our Republican overlords can convince us that these were just personal quirks of a “black swan” leader who kept us from the horror of…a former secretary of state, U.S. senator, and First Lady becoming president. To avoid the nightmare of having a president who had actually spent decades preparing for the job, it was necessary to nominate a reality-TV figure who talked openly of his desire to have sex with his own daughter and lectured Republican members of Congress on Article XII of the Constitution, which exists only in his mind.
... a few held firm, but in a nation that claims to value heroism under battle, the Armies of the Right fled in terror from…a tweet.
Even if Donald Trump loses in 2020, the Republican Party has legitimized bigotry and hate as an organizing principle for a major political party in a country with a unique role in the world.
These are the new segregationists, who have convinced themselves they are fighting a just war to defend the values of “our way of life.” They are unified by a shared vision of America not as a just force to help equalize the worst impulses of society but rather as a heavy mace they can use to club the future into submission.
George W. Bush would be crushed by a Sean Hannity, whose growing body and seemingly enlarging head respond to lies like Pinocchio’s nose.
There will be a role for a white party for a long time in America, but it will soon not be a party that can win national elections, and perhaps that will force the party to adapt. But that will take a long time, and history tells us that once those in power legitimize hate, it is difficult to manage.
Donald Trump did not change the Republican Party as much as he gave the party permission to reveal its true self. The Lindsey Grahams of the world have not changed. We are only now seeing who they always were, freed from any need to pretend.
The proper perspective in contemplating the future of the Republican Party is not that of the Whigs or the Bull Moose Party but rather that of a colonial power in a foreign land.
Without moral legitimacy, a center-right party becomes a soufflé of grievances and anger that exists to settle scores, not solve problems. A political party without a higher purpose is nothing more than a cartel, a syndicate. No one asks what is the greater good OPEC is trying to achieve. Its purpose is to sell oil at the highest prices possible. So it is with today’s Republican Party. It is a cartel that exists to elect Republicans. There is no organized, coherent purpose other than the acquisition and maintenance of power.
Better than most, I know the seductive lure of believing what you prefer to believe and ignoring the obvious truth.
Derniers mots
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
I'd like to say I believe the party I spent so many years fighting for could rise to that challenge. But that would be a lie, and there have been too many lies for too long.
Références à cette œuvre sur des ressources externes.
Wikipédia en anglais
Aucun
▾Descriptions de livres
"An indictment of the Republican Party from one of the most successful Republican political operatives of his generation"--
Stevens spent decades electing Republicans at every level, from presidents to senators to local officials. Here he offers a devastating portrait of a party that has lost its moral and political compass. Stevens shows how Trump is the natural outcome of five decades of hypocrisy and self-delusion, dating all the way back to the civil rights legislation of the early 1960s. Racism has always lurked in the modern GOP's DNA, as has the rank hypocrisy of the party's claims to embody "family values" and fiscal responsibility. Stephen helped to create the modern party that kneels before a morally bankrupt con man-- and now he wants nothing more than to see it held accountable. -- adapted from jacket
▾Descriptions provenant de bibliothèques
Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque
▾Description selon les utilisateurs de LibraryThing
)
)
Google Books — Chargement...
(3.96)
1