Monkeyboy wrote:TenuredVulture wrote:McConnell and the republicans are protecting trump because trump is a republican.
“This is how we know we’re a real family here.”
“That’s how you know that we’re tight,”
“What’s said in the family stays in the family,”
Actually, the Republican Party and the conservative/populist movement globally are working to undermine the liberal democratic enlightenment consensus that lies at the root of the American founding. The elimination of the middle class, attacks on the franchise and the legitimacy of elections generally, the attack on science, the selective application of basic civil liberties to some but not others, the celebration of law enforcement and violence, the embrace of evangelism--it's all of a piece. There are some real scuzz bucket intellectuals who serve as lap dogs to all this--Bryan Caplan for one is a guy who has explicitly argued that we should make it more difficult for people to get an education, one of the cornerstones of democracy and there are others who have always been hostile to The Enlightenment.
Now, you my think McConnell and certainly Trump are too stupid to get this (but Tom Cotton, likely under the influence is Harvey Mansfield while at Harvard isn't) but there has clearly been a ton of money spent promoting these very views, undermining our democracy.
