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Thornton Hall

The Revolution Will Be Kuhnian.

Resenting New People Does Not Go Over Well With The New People

Another pundit drifts very close to my conclusion the the GOP is going the way of the Whigs:

I've written a lot about how some people within the Republican Party, and the conservative movement more generally, find political value in fostering white resentment. Sometimes that resentment is directed at specific figures like Barack Obama, and at those times it usually reaches back to the 1960s to prey on white fears of angry black people coming to do you financial and physical harm (the best comment about Eric Holder's resignation yesterday undoubtedly came from Fox News host Andrea Tantaros, who said of Holder, "He ran the DOJ much like the Black Panthers would. That is a fact").
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You can talk all you want about "reaching out" to a more diverse electorate, but it won't happen so long as you have to spend so much time assuring that white, older base that you're still their voice. That's because being their voice means channelling those resentments and fears, and that means turning off those people who make up all the non-white bars in the Democratic half of that graph. 

I don't envy the Republican strategists who would like to find a way out of this conundrum, because it's hard to imagine what it might be.

Toward A General Theory of Wrongness: Contingent Social Organization

A Question So Obvious You'd Have To Be An Economist Not To Ask It