The Convention showed what the GOP is Longing for
John Gallagher wrote the story below on Queerty July 22, 2016. I wanted to publish his writing because he feels the same way I do while listening to the GOP Convention. It seemed they were dying or missing something they no longer had.
Everybody seemed to be yearning for something they had but lost. They believe their country is not great (if not great then what?) and is not number one (What number is it, if not number one what number and in what particular area?). When asked those questions they refuse to answer it except by quoting a slogan or just saying they feel bad, betrayed, lied to. After you get away from the “Hillary did it” nonsense it seems they like how (at t least the older ones ) they seemed to miss the way things were during their grandparents or the 1950’s. For the newer republicans they were not born during those times and even the older ones don’t know how things were when they were just babies. Yes, things were great for me when I was a baby and for most babies in the US. For younger republicans would say they like Trump because he **is normal, a patriot, blue collar. talks like them. **We know he has never been blue collar, he was born white collar to a lot of money. He never served the military nor he did anything to make him a patriot or a hero, on the contrary he makes nice with our enemies [Putin and Kim Joung-un]. He talks like Trump and not like anyone else. He doesn’t smile, he talks a lot and is his talk is his. He uses situations like the courts, law suits, veterans and non profit causes to make a profit.
So what is the problem? You have to take this people at their word and one has to go back to those times and see what they are really talking about: No human rights voices, McCarthyism in which you were no allowed to belong to the political party you wanted to or express what these republicans are saying now without loosing their jobs or having other repercussions. No gay rights, NO Gays! period. Gays were closeted and the only gays people knew where the ones with fem mannerisms which got lumped all together as gays even if they were not. Those that looked different left themselves open to be ostracized, beaten and hiding. I can’t see anything else that we had in those times that we are lacking now. We had people coming over legally and illegally. The young TV media did not report on people coming over the border or through airplanes, boats etc (no terror watch then) so nobody worried about that. Even before Trump, No one was talking about this in the terms they are now. Besides there have always been jobs americans don want to do while there are others that will endanger their lives to come here and take them. Other things we have today like terror and more nations with nukes, those are things that are the price of advance transportation, communications and science and mistakes made by both political parties in the way foreign policy is conducted. A double standard that what we say is not what we do as a nation.
Classified military tools used in the 1980’s are used today to get us from one point to another. Advance in technology and the problems those things bring is non stoppable. The message I got from these people in the convention and their nominee is that they want this nation to turn back and to put the blacks, women, gays minorities were they were and have the white minority be in total control again. White? Did I just say that? Yes I picked it up from the convention in which the Nominees number crunchers where saying that being aware they can’t get the black or hispanic vote they need to concentrate of what they can win and the white states in contention (except FL). Concentrate on the white vote they said and convince more whites on the states that are contested to vote Trump. They believe they can win the presidency with the white vote alone if they keep the low numbers they got in the blacks before (maybe 1%) and the hispanics and get more white voters to make up the difference.
I understand fully what they are saying now. This is a racial thing and turning back the clock to what we were. It would be like Germans missing the nazi days. Instead they see it as a bad past and they have outgrown that. This is how this nation saw the killing of blacks and whites that supported being equal. Mention that word [ Equality ] to one of those delegates and it was like showing daylight to Dracula.
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The Republican National Convention has started out as one of the biggest political disasters since, well, since Donald Trump clinched the nomination. Really, what can you say about an event that starts with a floor fight and ends with plagiarism by the would-be First Lady? And that was just the first night. The succeeding nights weren’t any better.
As tempting as it is to have a good laugh at the amateurish antics on display in Cleveland, the more appropriate response would be to worry. Because what is happening at the convention is very, very bad. And very, very dangerous.
Don’t be distracted by Donald Trump’s acceptance speech, in which he promised to “protect our LGBTQ citizens” against Isis. Trump may not harbor the kind of strong disdain against us that the party base does, but he couched his support in the kind of language the right has been using to pit the gay community against Muslims. Even Ted Cruz uses that reasoning. Progress, it isn’t.
There are three elements combining to form a sickly brew among the Republicans. The first is a sense of loss. Speaker after speaker has been yearning for something that is gone–a sense of security, a feeling for what America once was, or, in the case of weaponized grief, a loved one killed in combat. The overall picture it paints is of an America that has gone off the rails and is in danger of disappearing altogether. Some of this is nostalgia for a time that never really existed, but that doesn’t make the feeling any weaker.
The second element is anger. From Rudy Giuliani’s spittle-flecked speech to the calls to jail Hillary Clinton, the Cleveland attendees are seething with fury. This is not the sunny optimism of Reagan’s morning in America. This is a rage against the dying of the light. It signals a willingness to forgo the usual niceties of a constitutional democracy for an authoritarian figure who is willing to break the rules. What was once a fringe sentiment has now become the heart of the GOP. The party leadership, which coyly tried to harness this anger instead of squashing it, no longer has any control over it.
The final, and the deadliest, element is the party platform, the most antigay ever. Normally, platforms don’t count for much, but Trump doesn’t bother his pretty little bouffant about policy. So the furthest extremes of the party base seized the opportunity to craft a platform that is anti-marriage, anti-trans, and pro-conversion therapy. The worst of the worst homophobes had a hand in putting the platform together, discredited “historian” David Barton and Family Research Council head Tony Perkins chief among them.
The platform is going to be the cudgel that the far right will use to beat candidates after Trump’s likely (but far from guaranteed) loss in November. Instead of breaking the swamp fever, the party will find the extremists insisting that Trump lost because he wasn’t conservative enough. The platform is the agenda that the far right will pursue through the next election cycles.
And instead of being on the sidelines, the crazies will now be at the center of the party. They are the base, after all, and they are finally calling the shots.
Unfortunately, a lot of those shots are aimed at us.
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