This discussion is a little ambiguous about "winning the nomination" vs. "winning the general election" but it is fun to see Keith Olbermann again. He states here that he is coming out of retirement.
Olbermann correctly points out something I think a lot of people don't know or understand. A political party is an independent private entity (though there are some regulations and they must operate within the law). One of the first things they will do at the convention is to vote on rules. At that point, they can make any rule they want, pretty much. The rule could be "no nomination for Donald Trump."
Would the rule be supported by the delegates in the room? Probably not. But it doesn't matter, because they can make a rule about that too, in a sense. Like this:
That was at the last GOP convention, in which then House Speaker John Boehner pushing through rule changes that gave more power to the upper end of the party, taking it away from the "grass roots" which had, at that point, been infected with the pernicious fungus known as Rand Paul.
For more on this, watch very interesting bit from Rachel Maddow:
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The GOP is trapped. If they finagle Trump out, then they will have ensured their own irrelevance. If they let him win, they become the American Ba'ath Party.
Either way, they're going to take a Baath
If the "GOP" trumps Trump, will there be riots of angry white racists rampaging through the streets burning down grocery stores and police cars?
If Trump gets nomination it will cause the destruction of the GOP! GOP will lose general election, Senate, and Supreme Court will tilt to left for decades by more than 2 justices. Good riddance as GOP let.the tea party and religious right yahoo's destroy their party from within. Trump will be no match for Hillary as she is much more qualified to be POTUS. Economic metrics are good and ISIS on the run in Syria and Iraq. Bye bye Republican party political relevance. Screw y'all! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Probably.
In 1930, IIRC, Hitler got only 30% of the votes in the German presidential election. A solid majority of the electorate found him dislikable or too radical. Within a few years everyone was sieg-heiling him and putting up his picture in their homes - many of them sincerely. Olbermann thinks that because Trump is plainly a ridiculous nut, Trump can't win. I wish I shared that confidence.
jane: " Within a few years everyone was sieg-heiling him and putting up his picture in their homes – many of them sincerely."
Many Germans fled the country as it was turning fascist. There comes a point when hatred and fear cannot be successfully opposed by the majority.
Those who choose to remain ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it?
Which begs the question: Do the neo-revisionists of history believe that if they continue their attempts to rewrite history the way they wish it had happened, that they are actually being the agents that cause those revisions to become our doomed future?
In other words, if they believe the old saw that the ignorami are dooming us to relive the consequences of the poor policies of their political forebears, do they then believe that they can lead us into the doom of their current poor policies by lying to the ignorami about the history they're ignoring?
Should we revise the old saw to read, "Those who choose to remain ignorant of lessons of history are doomed to relive a false history of revisionists who prey on them?"
Not sure about that, but I will posit that it would be blamed on President Obama.
"pernicious fungus"
I like that.
Total delegates amassed so far on Republican side: 1335 (per the New York Times)
Right now Trump has 738 (55%), Cruz 463 (35%), and Kasich 160 (12%). Those percentages could well shift to put Trump below 50 percent. Of a certainty the GOP will try to make it so. If not, as you say they could make the rules to prevent Trump from getting the nomination.
The next question is who they would propose in his place. Cruz? Kasich? Rubio? Romney? Someone else? I have no idea.
jane: the last presidential elections in the Weimar Republic were held in 1932.
In the second run, having become necessary because no one got the majority in the first, Hitler got 36.8%.
Later that year, the NSDAP got over 38%, their best result in fair elections. Their result on March 5, 1933 was 44%, plus 8% for their coalition partner DNVP. But this election was not fair at all.
I second your notion that it is possible to take over (and destroy) a country on amere plurality of votes.
a mere
Sorry about the mis-stated date. Desertphile, for complete accuracy I could have said "everyone who was left was...." - because those who wouldn't bow their heads had either fled, as some did, or been imprisoned or murdered. Either way, the upshot was that there was virtually no open dissent against the tyrannical rule of a man who had not so long ago been considered too extreme to be electable. Fascism or something similar is not an uncommon stage in the collapse of an empire. I think this is one of the most dangerous moments in our country's history.
Who shall be our Louis and Marie?
Winter #11,
Kasich. There is no downside for the establishment Republicans.
If the Dem nominee is Sanders, Kasich wins.
If it is Clinton, Kasich has a shot. Even if he loses, the down-ticket negative effects are minimized: "See, we're the party of compassionate conservatism, not extremes."
Where exactly will the Trump supporters go? Most of them will probably find the prospect of having a woman president so disconcerting that they will forget all about the "betrayal" and vote anyway.
What matters to the Republicans is SCOTUS. This is their best shot to make it even more conservative or at least keep control of the Senate to continue obstruction.
As reprehensible as Trump is, suggesting that he's an American Hitler is absolutely absurd.
Despite its problems, the U.S. of 2016 is not similar to the 1933 Weimar Republic.
Sorry, it's not absurd. What distinguishes Trump is not his virulent fearmongering against a minority religious group - which is typical of today's Republicans - but the combination of demagoguery and Fuhrerprinzip. Firstly, he tells his disaffected audiences, which include an unusual number of white supremacists, that he can make them better off by making those menacing or conniving nonwhites worse off.
Second, he does not explain how that will work, except through the fact that he will be in charge, and he is more capable than any other man of making Good Deals happen. When it is pointed out that things he proposes are illegal, he is dismissive: he will just change that law. Perhaps unilaterally, one gets the hint. There are some war crimes our military would not commit? That will change when The Donald gives the order! "Strong" leadership is not the means to achieving policy ends; leadership is the plan in itself. That is a component of fascism.
As for the situation of the U.S. now, we as a nation aren't laboring under a Treaty of Versailles, but a large fraction of our working class might as well be.
#18
Trump has no coherent ideology. He has no program to replace American democracy as we know it with an authoritarian system. His backers have not been organized into a mass movement to enable this. His statements are so opportunistic and confused that you can find evidence of different tendencies within the same paragraph. I don't think you can find one statement that expresses programmatic racism, or xenophobia, or misogyny. Don't confuse The Art of the Deal with Mein Kampf.
“Firstly, he tells his disaffected audiences, which include an unusual number of white supremacists, that he can make them better off by making those menacing or conniving nonwhites worse off.”
Please provide proof. I believe that Trump has argued that illegal immigration is also harmful to legal immigrants.
“There are some war crimes our military would not commit? That will change when The Donald gives the order!”
You're misinformed. Trump has already backed down on this. There are limits to a president's power, so a President Trump would not be able to do whatever he wanted.
“ 'Strong' leadership is not the means to achieving policy ends; leadership is the plan in itself.”
Leadership without policy is meaningless. He has some unachievable policy aims, like building a wall that Mexico will pay for. His “leadership” is based on Trump as dealmaker, and on the willingness of others to accept the deals Trump is proposing.
“As for the situation of the U.S. now, we as a nation aren’t laboring under a Treaty of Versailles, but a large fraction of our working class might as well be.”
If this is meant to show that the U.S. today is undergoing the same crisis as the Weimar Republic and is subject to comparable strains, you haven't succeeded.
Trump has no coherent ideology.
This is one of the reasons why the establishment doesn't like him, why they are afraid of him. Not because he embraces a neo-Nazi ideology, but because he has no ideology.
Without an ideology, he has what to their minds are two fantastic and scary flaws: They can't predict him, and they can't control him.
To the oligarchs, that's probably worse than his being another modern-day Hitler.
Agree. The only people we should identify with Nazis are other Nazis.
With as many wild statements as he has made this campaign, and as different as many of them are from things he's said in years past, you have to wonder what, if anything, he really believes and what he knows he would try if elected? (I have no desire to find out the answer to the second part.)
A warning..
In the UK in 2005, the Labour party won the general election with an apparently comfortable majority. However, some pointed out that winning 35% of the vote on a of a 65% turnout hardly constituted a popular mandate. They were roundly ignored with all sorts of justifications, including from those who should have known better.
Now, of course, since 2015 we've had a highly reactionary government installed in very similar circumstances. Perhaps 23% of the total voter population actually voted for them.
The message being that if a set of rules happens to give the result that you want this time, this does not make them good rules. Deposing a candidate who was democratically elected on the grounds of his being a fruitcake sets a terrible, terrible precedent.
But we don't do that in the US. Here, a win is a win, three wins by one vote is three times better than one win by a million votes along with two losses by one vote each. We don't break our numbers down to more than two candidates, and when we do it is a total disaster. Both the politics and math are too hard. Etc!
Sure there are legal limits to a president's power, but there are also all sorts of ways, legal and illegal, for a president to get around them. Consider, in our last major national crisis period, how FDR coerced the Supreme Court into accepting New Deal programs and regulations (down to restrictions on growing one's own food) and beguiled them into accepting the race-based caging of innocent civilians in concentration camps. Or consider the way that the Cheney-Bush administration just declared that as a "unitary executive" they could ignore laws against torture. If you acknowledge that Trump is either more vicious, or more soullessly willing to advance himself by catering to the most vicious among us, than Roosevelt or Bush, you have to fear what he might do in that office.
Nope, obviously this isn't "the same crisis" as faced by the Weimar Republic, which had already lost its empire and gotten its butt kicked by the last batch of foreigners it tried to oppress. Those things are still in our future. However, our working class no longer benefits from empire. When Hitler took power, there had been over a decade of high unemployment and low wages. That's the case for much of the U.S. today, in regions that increasingly look like "less developed nations." Just because you and I are doing okay doesn't mean that the country is.
Dean - Those who don't learn from history are condemned to repeat it. One can be "not a Nazi" and yet be Nazi-like in one's desire to bring the government's jackboot down on some scapegoat group. The purpose of remembering the Holocaust should be to enable future generations to recognize such poisonous ideologies at an early stage, so we can fight or undermine them before people are being hauled away in boxcars to slave labor camps. Yes, sometimes people will claim parallels to early Nazism that don't exist, or are exaggerated through bias; but if nobody is allowed to comment on such parallels until the trains are actually rolling, it's too late.