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Gary Hart explains BKF, aka Gary Hart and I actually agree

EatLeadCommie

Tommy Elrod
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While most of you are too busy freaking out over BKF's transformation or Trump's remark du jour, I have always maintained that an enormous part of Trump's support consists of disenfranchised ex-Dems who voted for Perot and left the Dem party long ago, and that Trump's position on trade is largely in line with the Democrat Party pre-1992. As it turns out, Gary Hart sees the same thing.

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/10/gary-hart-politics

On your personal blog, you've written about the re-alignment of the Democratic and Republican parties. How do you see the shift?

This kind of re-alignment tends to happen every 20 or 30 years. It certainly happened massively in the Franklin Roosevelt era. It happened in the Johnson-Nixon era when the South, which used to be Democratic, shifted on racial issues to the Republican Party. It is largely a result of changing economics or shifting demographics, the rise of movements, the disappearance of movements; nothing really stays static forever in terms of ideologies and coalitions.

Both of our major parties in the United States are coalitions of one kind or another and the members of those groups that form those coalitions change. Whereas in some cases, people rise from poverty into the middle class, or from the middle class into wealth, they change their politics as they move. That is to say, if someone is prosperous and then suddenly—or not suddenly, but rather quickly, historically speaking—they lose that prosperity, their attitude toward politics and government changes. This happened to many blue-collar people in manufacturing jobs in the 1970s, 1980s, at the beginning of globalization.

What's fascinating is how, quite often, political leaders and those involved in managing political parties, fail to notice those shifts happening. I think that happened with the Democratic Party in the last 20 or 30 years in terms of the working-class base, which in many cases lost its economic income and became very angry at politics generally and traditional politics, in particular. And those people have been gravitating toward Donald Trump, who himself doesn’t represent any traditional Republican base that anyone can think of, but is simply opportunistic in putting together a Trump coalition.

How has the Democratic Party changed, in particular, since you were seeking the presidential nomination?

I was first elected to the Senate in 1974 and re-elected in 1980, and I began to realize that there were shifts, like tectonic plates under the surface, going on and it had to do with the beginning of globalization and the shift of the base of the economy from manufacturing to information. And with that shift, we began to see the Rust Belt, manufacturing states in the Midwest and the Northeast—Ohio, Pennsylvania, upstate New York, and other places—beginning to lose jobs, and communities beginning to decline. Whereas at the same time, you go to the West Coast and it was booming because of Silicon Valley.

This was all beginning in the 1970s. Foreign competition was beginning. Nations, which we had defeated in World War II, just 30 years before, were now exporting to us—cars and tech, and all kinds of consumer goods, which we had previously, in recent years, dominated world markets. So I began to talk about it and think about what the implications of this were. In 1984, I placed a great deal of emphasis on the long-term impacts of these shifts.

My principal competition in the Democratic primary, Vice President [Walter] Mondale, and I ended up dividing the country. I won 25 states and he won 25 states. No journalist to my knowledge ever tried to figure out if there was a pattern there, but there definitely was. I carried almost every state that was benefitting from world trade—the West Coast and other parts of the country—and he got the support of those areas in decline. So it was kind of an earthquake inside the Democratic Party as to who was winning and who was losing.
 
I get that Trump has co-opted populism, but that doesn't explain the excitement over his hateful rhetoric

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I get that Trump has co-opted populism, but that doesn't explain the excitement over his hateful rhetoric

Sent from my SM-N930T using Tapatalk

Fuck PC. I'm as sick of PC as I am of BLM, so that's another reason why I'm voting for Trump. However, I really only need one reason: He's running against Hillary Clinton.
 
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