Poor Jeb is right for once: His brand of conservatism is dead — and he’s partly to blame
Jeb Bush is bummed that the con he's played on Republicans for decades has finally collapsed on itself
by Gary LeGum at Salon
http://www.salon.com/2016/07/13/poor_jeb_is_right_for_once_his_brand_of_conservatism_is_dead_and_hes_partly_to_blame/
"SNIP.............
When people talk about “white privilege,” you have to think Bush’s actions are a prime example. In an election when poor people around the country, a disproportionate number of whom are minorities, are being denied the right to vote thanks to voter ID and other laws pushed by Republican governors and legislatures in an effort to suppress mostly Democratic voters, here is a member of perhaps the most visible wealthy Republican family in America saying he will not vote in the election because his choices make him too sad.
But the big takeaway from this interview was this admission.
Conservatism is temporarily dead. I mean, if you look at it, we have two candidates. Donald Trump is barely a Republican. He’s certainly not a conservative.
No, Trump may not be a conservative in the sense that Bush thinks of the term. But he is a conservative as the word relates to the way the Republican Party has evolved over the last couple of decades, and particularly during the Obama administration. The GOP has become a white reactionary party, paranoid and delusional, jumping at the shadows of Muslim terrorists, gay activists, and angry black people it sees around every corner. Trump is the culmination of years of the party tolerating and even encouraging these sorts of fears.
.................
Under the leadership of Bush and his generation, conservatism continued its long devolution from a set of principles invoking smaller government into a Madoff-like scheme of shoveling money from one set of accounts into another through legislative maneuvers like tax cuts. Meanwhile, on social issues, conservatives abandoned any principle of limiting government interference in people’s lives by attacking, among other issues, the rights of gay people to participate fully in civic life by enjoying the benefits our society gives to married couples, and by attacking the rights of women to choose what to do with their own bodies.
................SNIP"
= new reply since forum marked as read
Lee L. Mercer, Jr. 2008.
