The Daily 202: Marco Rubio thinks Catholic social doctrine can save capitalism

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Well, certainly if states, under the pressure of Trump, refuse to even have primary elections. Talk about undemocratic, Trump has used the GOP to establish a new establishment that should be anathema to republicans.

But, even saying you are correct, a good debate among the GOP would be a good thing. Both party’s are utterly broken right now. The democrats because they are allowing the far left base to control the party as never before. The GOP because they have all fallen lock-step inline with Donald Trump.
It is a political myth that a party has to be united through the primaries to when the general election.
Trump has only demonstrated he can win a presidential election when all of the stars line up exactly right. Any objective analysis of the 2016 election indicates that Hillary lost the election by running an extraordinarily stupid campaign. She literally assumed the Midwest states would go for her and she did not even campaign in them. On top of that, she was seen by many as one of the most corrupt candidates ever, certainly in our lifetime. Yet she almost won, Trump had to draw to an inside straight to win the electoral college.
Now, he did so because he was a populist candidate. People supported him who had never been consistent voters or politically active in the past. But that can work both ways. The democrats are certainly taking a populist approach. And Trump’s two big issues: immigration and trade. Well, it appears those may not be big differentiators this time, certainly not trade. I don’t head any of the democratic candidates campaigning on a free trade platform.

OTOH, the democrats are likely to nominate a far left candidate and as such may once again give the election to Trump. That is his only hope.

To go back to the beginning, regardless of the general election politics, the GOP needs a healthy debate though a primary process. And republicans are only united because quite a few, such as I, have gotten fed up and have left the party. At this point in time, I fully expect to vote a write in candidate in November of 2020.
 
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tafan2 said:
Well, certainly if states, under the pressure of Trump, refuse to even have primary elections. Talk about undemocratic, Trump has used the GOP to establish a new establishment that should be anathema to republicans.
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I haven’t looked it up myself, but can you point to any examples in the last 30-50 years of a sitting President who got primaried by someone from his own party when he went for a second term? No serious challenge is coming to mind.
 
Oh, it happens, and because the last couple of incumbents (Bush and Carter and Ford) who were challenged lost, everyone thinks it is bad in the general election. Ford was facing a serious uphill battle as the GOP was very damaged by Nixon. Indeed, it was almost impossible for him to win. Reagan challenging him did not hurt him, one can make a very strong case that it made him a stronger candidate and he came closer to winning because the Reagan challenge.

1980 was a turning of the tide in politics, Ronald Reagan was successfully ushering a conservative era, and Carter was likely doomed. Certainly Kennedy’s challenge did not cause him to lose.

Buchanan was never a serious challenger to Bush in 1992, he did not cost Bush the election. Ross Perot cost Bush the election.
 
midori said:
but can you point to any examples in the last 30-50 years
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https://www.quora.com/Has-anyone-fr...sitting-President-in-his-second-term-election

Has anyone from a President’s own party ever run against a sitting President in his second term election?

1968: Sen. Eugene McCarthy and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy opposed President Lyndon Johnson’s re-nomination. Shortly after the New Hampshire Primary, Johnson quit the race. Several months later, Robert Kennedy was assassinated, and the party turned to Vice President Humphrey who was defeated by Richard Nixon in the general election.

1976: Former Governor Ronald Reagan opposed Gerald Ford’s efforts to win nomination for a full term. (Recall he had taken office as a result of Nixon’s resignation.)Â Although it was a close contest, Ford prevailed and went on to lose in the general election to former Governor Jimmy Carter.

1980: Senator Edward Kennedy opposed Jimmy Carter’s re-nomination. Carter won re-nomination but was defeated in the general election by former Governor Ronald Reagan.

1992: Former Nixon adviser and television commentator Patrick Buchanan opposed President George HW Bush’s re-nomination. Bush won re-nomination but was defeated in the general election by former Governor Bill Clinton.

Note that each time an incumbent President faced a serious primary challenge, it left his party so divided that he (or in the case of 1968, his Vice President) lost in the general election.
 
whatistrue said:
Note that each time an incumbent President faced a serious primary challenge, it left his party so divided that he (or in the case of 1968, his Vice President) lost in the general election.
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In each of the instances you mentioned, that is way too simplistic of a summary. See my post above. I would argue, in none of those elections was the primary challenger the cause of the general election defeat. The fact there was a primary challenger was a symptom of the same problems which led to the general election defeat. Correlation does not imply causation. The cause of the defeat and the existence of a challenger was the same in every case, with the exception of 1992. The cause of that defeat was very simple, it had absolutlely nothing to do with Buchanan or the challenge, it was very simple, too many people fell under the spell of Ross Perot.
 
tafan2 said:
See my post above
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Are you under the impression that I argued otherwise? Everything in my post was a quote - I added nothing, only edited for readability and it was in response to a request for examples of a sitting president being challenged within his party for reelection. Nothing more was intended.
 
A few years ago I read a book written by a doctor who worked with the poor in Calcutta. He asserted that most of the people who lived in the truly dreadful conditions there had fled even worse conditions in the countryside. Working at virtual slave labor in Calcutta gained a little money while in the countryside backbreaking labor often brought nothing.

It’s a fact that during the Industrial Revolution, the populations in the countries undergoing it exploded. Why? Because as bad as they were, health conditions were better, food was easier to come by, clothing was cheaper, and death rates were lower. I recall reading in another source that the introduction of cheap cotton clothing alone lowered the death rate.

It seems harsh to think that it takes a period of difficult development for a society to emerge from primitivism to one that will comfortably support far larger populations. But it might be true. How many children in, say, jungle societies, actually make it to adulthood, and how does that compare with the rates in the barrios of that same country?

None of that excuses terrible working conditions or poverty. But it’s imaginable that living with the poverty in Calcutta, for instance is better than living under palm branches in a jungle.

Having said that, I am a firm believer in the message of Rerum Novarum in which Pope Leo XIII advocated for wide distribution of productive, inheritable, individual and family assets.
 
whatistrue said:
Are you under the impression that I argued otherwise?
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Most certainly I was under that impression You stated:
whatistrue said:
Note that each time an incumbent President faced a serious primary challenge, it left his party so divided that he (or in the case of 1968, his Vice President) lost in the general election.
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I interpreted this to mean he lost the general election because his party was divided and that was because of the challenge. This is causation.
 
Sorry, I did not read your link. I did not realize at all it was a quote. In my further defense, you quoted a statement that stated the primary challenge was the cause of the election loss and I simply quoted that statement with the forums quote function which did attribute it to you (since it was not in a quote itself).

Apologies for the misunderstanding.
 
tafan2 said:
Apologies for the misunderstanding.
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I have been at least as guilty as anyone else of not fully reading a post before replying, so it would be hypocritical of me to hold it against you. And in all fairness, I probably should have left the summary out of the quote and just included the examples.
 
Very interesting. One could say the same thing happened in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century. Lots of people were moving from rural areas to the cities and entered into virtual slave labor conditions. Urban wealth disparity in the industrial US was very large. Even more intriguing is that rural America of the late 19th and early 20th century was probably closer to a distributionism model than any other time or place in history. Yet there were people who had nothing, as farming became more mechanized, work became too scarce. They had to move.
 
Sorry. Yes, I was trying to explain that this Governor of the Bank of India (quite a high ranking position with a lot of power and likely a rich person) that he, being a powerful and rich man, knows that if he can undermine confidence in capitalism to promote other forms of government such as socialism that further the divide between the rich and the poor, this only helps him become more rich and more powerful He has every reason to destroy capitalism because this would benefit him. Capitalism isn’t starting to fail but if he can make people believe that… well…
 
The problem is that capitalism does have some major hurdles to get over, chief amongst which is income disparity and the climate crisis. Failure of governments to effectively regulate corporations will lead to tragedy on a massive scale, the current issues at Boeing and the FAA show where ineffective regulations and regulators leads.
 
HomeschoolDad said:
OK, I was thinking in terms of the two survey courses that I took in college. Medieval philosophy, IIRC, was lumped in with “ancient”. Bottom line, students need to know the whole history of philosophy, from Aristotle and Plato, to more recent ones such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Marx (yes, Marx). Students need to know both how to defend truth, and how to refute error.
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True.

And you canot effectively refute the errors and evils of modernism on an intellectual level if you don’t understand where they come from, the chain of philosophical errors that led to the Frankfurt School for example and the resulting damage that has caused to the sense of right and wrong in society. As Catholic intellectuals, we cannot bury our heads in the sand and pretend all that never happened while we just talk about the nice philosophers.
 
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HomeschoolDad said:
they don’t compromise, and they never give up
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“it’s political suicide to concede any point or find any compromise…” 05:56
The Alt-Right Playbook: Control the Conversation - YouTube
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Compromise is never the best solution for either party. I as a Catholic don’t want conservatives to compromise on abortion. I as a human don’t want Democrats to compromise on global warming by signing non-legally-binding climate treaties that we could pull out at any moment.
 
HumbleIOughtToBe said:
Yea, more debt. That is what I went to college for.
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Student debt shouldn’t exist. I fully understand that students who are having to go into massive debt to be able to go to college at all, are going to balk at taking additional classes that don’t contribute anything concrete towards getting a good job to pay back that debt. This is a national tragedy. Sadly, indebted college students need to put practical career education first and foremost, to the sacrificing of anything else. It is terrible that we ever got to this state of affairs.

I would reform the educational system to reduce the cost of getting a degree, while at the same time broadening the curriculum to include a solid core of liberal arts, regardless of major. The most important thing anyone can learn in college is how to think, and to sharpen their intellect so that they can be regarded as truly educated people.
 
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