The Underwoods have made me think of the Clintons all along, which I'm sure is not an uncommon thought.

When my friends and I are out at the pub and this subject comes up, I tend to zone out, despite that little voice whispering in my ear, tempting me to interrupt loudly with "Who *&*%$@!! cares?!!!"

"the consequences (such as they are) will hit you later"

A) I have no control over that, and B) the consequences portend to be equally bad, at least potentially, no matter who wins. Why waste time and energy paying undue attention?

My comparison was to the sensation, not to the significance of the events. But regarding the event, as Rob says, it looks like we are in trouble no matter who wins.

It's funny, I'm encountering your sentiment, Janet, about turning our backs to the City of Man, or variations of it, but also, in response to the exact same situation, people saying that the most urgent thing is to work toward the temporal kingship of Christ. One thing for sure is that the first is achievable in the fairly short run, but the second is not.

I tend to agree about the collapse. Some of the people who talk about the temporal kingship make me uneasy because they sound like they would like to try to impose it on a mostly unwilling population, and I think that would be a disaster. You first have to have a culture in which the faith is widely accepted.

I am praying for all sorts of miracles lately, none involving the election!

Re: civilizational collapse, I read this from Whittaker Chambers recently:

"I no longer believe that political solutions are possible for us. I am baffled by the way people still speak of the West as if it were at least a cultural unity against Communism though it is divided not only by a political, but by an invisible cleavage. On one side are the voiceless masses with their own subdivisions and fractures. On the other side is the enlightened, articulate elite which, to one degree or another, has rejected the religious roots of the civilization--the roots without which it is no longer Western civilization, but a new order of beliefs, attitudes and mandates...That is the real confrontation of forces. The enemy--he is ourselves. That is why it is idle to talk about preventing the wreck of Western civilization. It is already a wreck from within."

The more that we in the West cut our roots to Christendom, the more we move towards collapse. We will have something, but it won't be "the West" as traditionally understood.

Do you mean you think it ended when Trump got the nomination? Or at some point in the past?

When I talk about the end of the Republican party, I mean it fairly literally, as in there is no such thing anymore, or there is such a thing but its presence is reduced to something like that of the Libertarian party. I thought a few months ago that that might really happen, but it seems a lot less likely now. If for no other reason, the inertia of the two-party system will probably keep it going for a long time.

There were a number of 20th c writers who saw collapse in the sense Chambers describes as a more or less fait accompli. Christendom is pretty clearly gone and has been for a while. As with the end of the Republican party, what I meant when I referred to collapse earlier was something more--a pretty thorough disintegration and transformation of the existing political and social order, something like what happened when the Roman Empire slowly decayed into nothingness. I would not be at all surprised if by the end of this century the USA had split apart.

Other options, of course, are big cataclysms like widespread nuclear war that would lead to a really thorough collapse of the kind featured in post-apocalyptic novels and movies, in which most of our advanced technology is lost, etc.

I don't think he would have been able to get it if the Republican party could have offered a decent candidate.

There was a raft of decent candidates. Republican voters didn't want them (in some measure because they equivocated on a non-negotiable issue).

Yes, but even more fundamentally than that, the whole way things work is geared toward having two large parties. That could change but it would be a slow process.

I agree about the decent candidates. I'm not sure who's to blame for the fact that there were so many and it took so long for some of them to give up that the anti-Trump vote was divided until it was too late.

I would have agreed completely with that until very recently. Now I'm not so sure. Marco Rubio just won his primary overwhelmingly. Maybe Trump is more of a fluke than we think. I'm not at all sure whether the party is going to be dominated by Trumpism now. Not that I ever though very highly of it.

Sorry!

I agree about the decent candidates. I'm not sure who's to blame for the fact that there were so many and it took so long for some of them to give up that the anti-Trump vote was divided until it was too late.

Five of the 17 Republican candidates left the race before a single ballot was cast. Three more left after the Iowa caucuses, three after the New Hampshire primary, and two after a couple more contests. About 94% of the popular ballots cast were cast for the four leading candidates. After each departure from the race, there was a resorting among the remainder. Had Messrs. Kasich and Rubio departed earlier, their support would have been divided between Trump and Cruz. Trump won more than twice as many popular votes as Ted Cruz and ultimately won a share of popular ballots equal to that won by John McCain in 2008. John Kasich was the candidate of business-as-usual, and John Boehner speaking for the Capitol Hill / K Street nexus made clear they all loathe Ted Cruz.

I do not see an alternate scenario which gives someone else the nomination.

y'all keep answering what I didn't say, or what I didn't mean or something, so I give up.

I answered what you said Janet.

Sorry: "may NO longer resemble..."

I think Trump was a fluke.

one that had abandoned even its shaky support for socially conservative ideas. And maybe its already weak resistance to the expansion of the federal government.

An interest in dismantling dysfunctional and/or abusive federal agencies ceased for the Republican caucus leadership when Dr. Newton LeRoy Gingrich resigned from Congress. Defenders of the House Republican caucus as they were during the period running from 1999 to 2007 contended that the usual dance was that the House would pass some piece of reform legislation that the Senate would proceed to ignore.

As for 'social conservatism', see the worthless Mr. McConnell's response to the whole 'gay' 'marriage' fan dance. The adulterous and exhibitionistic Mr. Trump is better for you than the cretins currently leading the Republican caucus in Congress because he's willing to tell the media and the grievance industry to get stuffed, something the craven Mr. Ryan will not do.

Recall the most recent blowup between Sen. Cruz and the Senate Republican 'leadership': Cruz' public protest against McConnell's scamming around to revive a shizzy corporate welfare outfit called the 'Export-Import Bank'. Allowing it to expire was a no-brainer.

Yeah. As a lot of people keep saying, no matter who wins, we lose.

I'm not sure what your point is, Art. That the Republicans have changed, or that they have not?

I'm not sure what your point is, Art. That the Republicans have changed, or that they have not?

I'm not referring to what's up in state capitals or among local authorities.

My point is not whether the Republicans have 'changed' or not. The Washington establishment of all stripes isn't making any secret of their distress, so I get that things may change for them. I am suggesting that we've been living in a sty, Donald Trump enters the room, and the Trump-detractors complain it stinks in here.

My suspicion is that about 1/3 of the Congressional Republican caucus are who they claim to be and believe what they claim to believe, and that the rest are careerists responsive to characters like Donohue of the Chamber of Commerce (and, in any case, indifferent to the concerns and welfare of their working-class constituents). Fully 70% of the ballots in the concluded primary and caucus contests went to candidates to which the Capitol Hill nexus is hostile; another increment (about 3%) went to candidates like Ben Carson and Rand Paul, who certainly have a set of concerns divergent from business-as-usual. So, how does Paul Ryan or AM McConnell react to such a rebuke? My guess is that their learning curve is flat. As long as they're their and their buds like Eric Cantor land 6-figure lobbying gigs when they're voted out of office, the world's OK for them.

What Marianne said. Well, more: I have my doubts as to whether Trump is even altogether sane.

I'm not much interested in discussing him.

Yes, but that's always been true--I mean there's always been a significant chunk of the party that was not interested (or worse) in social/religious conservatism. The big change would be for the party to more or less officially turn its back.

I'm never quite sure what people mean by neo-liberalism. As I understand the term, it seems to describe one aspect of what the Republican party has always been. Seems to me that it's more the Democratic party that's changing in that direction. Or has changed.

As I understand the term, it seems to describe one aspect of what the Republican party has always been. Seems to me that it's more the Democratic party that's changing in that direction. Or has changed.

What we call 'social conservatism' was prior to 1965 pretty much a consensus in public life for anyone this side of Hugh Hefner and fragments of the legal profession and mental-health trade.

Consider the evolution of divorce law after 1966. Period public opinion polling indicated that people favoring more lax standards therein were balanced by people favoring more stringent standards, with most of the public roughly satisfied with what counted as grounds in divorce suits. What happens? Universal no-fault divorce. Public policy tends to reflect the prejudices of professional-managerial types, lawyers in particular.

Another example would be the research James Q. Wilson was doing (with a colleague whose name I've forgotten) in Boston in 1966. Wilson was taking door to door surveys to gauge public sentiment while also interviewing officialdom. What he and his colleagues discovered was that there was a total disconnect between the city hall agenda and the street agenda. Officials of the Collins administration were yammering about 'poverty' while the priority for the public was something the Mayor's staff didn't care about: street crime. If you look at period social statistics, you can see that measures of material deprivation were declining and measures of public disorder rapidly increasing, but the apparat of the local Democratic Party and the welfare agencies just didn't notice or care.

You can see that today with the "Black Lives Matter" discourse. Most rank and file blacks are skeptical when polled, only about 2% of all blacks dying by homicide are killed by police officers, and the number of dubious cases so few that the grievance industry keeps offering up examples which fall apart on inspection. The whole business is an idiot set of social fictions promoted with George Soros' money.

Enjoy your movie.

"As I understand the term, it seems to describe one aspect of what the Republican party has always been. Seems to me that it's more the Democratic party that's changing in that direction. Or has changed."

Right, but it should be fairly clear that the GOP is moving in that direction as well. They've been lackluster on the social issues over the past 35 years, but at least the talk was there. Now even the talk is veering away towards a more "progressive" take on social issues.

"Rob G is using it in an entirely idiosyncratic way (so it communicates nothing)."

Au contraire, I'm using it in the way that it's been used by self-identified neo-liberals that I've had discussions with on other sites.

The term broadly describes an outlook which holds both economic classical liberalism (capitalism) and modern "progressive" social liberalism to be basically correct. Globalism is thus generally seen as a good, in that both economic and social "progress" tend to result from it.

In a nutshell, it's Christopher Lasch in reverse.

I was puzzled, for instance, by the Wikipedia article, which I only skimmed, but which seems to focus exclusively on free-market-ism. Basically I've just been puzzled by the need for the term.

Amusingly, neoconservatism seems to mean more or less the same thing in a lot of people's minds.

I started to give you my half-baked impression, but Wikipedia is probably better. The first couple of paragprahs fit with said impression, for what that's worth.

The US election campaigns are insanely long.

Presidential elections are insanely long. That does not apply to lower-rung contests. Prior to around June (sometimes later), the campaigning in lower-rung contests consists of lining up donors and campaign labor and carrying petitions. It's very low profile activity and even back in the day when you had much more vigorous newspaper coverage, you might see one article 'ere September about a campaign which didn't feature a disagreeable contested primary. (My frame of reference is New York. Things are not done quite the same way other places)

We do not have anything analogous to a shadow cabinet here or to a standing party champion. Also, there are many more discretionary appointments in the federal administration (and, I'd wager) lower down than is the case in Britain, where you replace the minister and the parliamentary undersecretary (and usually have a candidate lined up for both offices), and that's it. Also, procedures for designating parliamentary candidates are more cumbersome here, for reasons good and bad. Each stage of the process requires more time than the corresponding stage in Britain or Canada.

There are some easy fixes you could imagine, but nobody with the wherewithall to make it happen ever does. You could say that as well about the dysfunctions of Congress.

At the core of it all, too much consequence and discretion are lodged with the central government and the president is excessively important within the central government. The president acquires his consequence in large measure because Congress is incompetent. Various elected bodies are frustrated also because the judiciary is so meddlesome.

Au contraire, I'm using it in the way that it's been used by self-identified neo-liberals that I've had discussions with on other sites.

Who, Rob? The term in a domestic political context was coined by Charles Peters about 35 years ago to refer to a subtype of mainline Democrat. It was a terminological flash in the pan which has hardly been used in opinion journalism for more than 20 years. "Neoliberal" meant Paul Tsongas or Gary Hart. As a term of distinction, it made sense only with regard to certain evanescent policy disputes of that era.

You should read the Wikipedia article on neoliberalism, Art.

"Who, Rob?"

There are several that post frequently on TAC, and who often refer to current articles and publications. Other than that I don't keep track.

"The term in a domestic political context was coined by Charles Peters about 35 years ago..."

Terms change meaning over time. "Neo-conservative" certainly has. Why not neo-liberalism?

"Lasch was a critic of regnant notions and phenomena. He had no very well-developed conceptions of what alternatives to those phenomena might look like."

He wrote in criticism of both types of liberalism, so a person who writes in favor of both types of liberalism would be his opposite, generally speaking.

Terms change meaning over time. "Neo-conservative" certainly has. Why not neo-liberalism?

"Neo-conservatism" is an epithet that oscillates between silly and grotesque in its usage. It is properly retired.

In the domestic setting, people have been using 'libertarian' for decades, as well as 'liberaltarian' in the last 8 years. No need to borrow a corrupted term from red-haze discourse about economic development or from Charles Peters old editorials.

Of course, the problem with faculty libertarians you run into is that they're perfectly at home with the diversity regime at their institutions and the use of state power to impose that on private enterprise to boot. They're perfectly uninterested in the liberty of people who do not resemble them socially or culturally (when such people are not members of liberal mascot groups). Gary Johnson's the same type.

The diagnosis of a problem doesn't necessarily bring with it knowledge of the best treatment.

I don't want to be too critical of Lasch, who was a good person in addition to being an engaging critic (and an honest man). Some of his writing did give one the impression that he was chronically and omniverously dissatisfied, at least when contemplating public affairs. That may have kept him from being conscripted into party politics. (He was, at the end of his life, a rather astringent critic of Hillary Clinton).

Lasch's father-in-law was a history professor (of a very different bent than was he). Three of his four children are college teachers. Two have interests very unlike their father and the writings of the third certainly have a different texture.