
Митт Ромни оказался единственным республиканским сенатором, который нашел в себе мужество проголосовать за отставку Трампа. Политтехнолог Стюарт Стивенс, руководитель избирательный кампании Ромни-2012, идет дальше и кается в тупиковом пути, на который, при его участии, свернула республиканская партия. Война с образованием и пренебрежение наукой и эспертами в правительстве аукнулись некомпетентностью и человеческими жертвами во время нынешнего фиаско с коронавирусом.
"The Republican Party has gone from admiring William F. Buckley Jr., an Ivy League intellectual, to viewing higher education as a left-wing conspiracy to indoctrinate the young. In retribution, we started defunding education. Never mind that Republican leaders are among the most highly educated on the planet; it’s just that they now feel compelled to embrace ignorance as a cost of doing business. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, as an example, denounces “coastal elites” while holding degrees from Princeton University and Harvard Law School and having served as a Supreme Court clerk.
The GOP’s relationship with science has resembled some kind of Frankenstein experiment: Let’s see what happens when we play with the chemistry set! Conservatives have spent years trying to cut funds for basic science and research, lamenting government seed money for nearly every budding technology and then hoping for the best. In the weeks ahead, it’s not some fiery, anti-Washington populist with an XM radio gig who is going to save folks’ lives; it is more likely to be someone who has been studying this stuff for decades, almost certainly at some point with federal help or outright patronage.
Finally, there is the populist GOP distrust and dislike of the other, the foreign. Yes, it is annoying that the Chinese didn’t come clean and explain everything to us from the start. But it appears that a Swiss company is helping to jump-start us in testing; and it is a German company that American officials reportedly tried to lure to the United States recently to help develop a vaccine for the virus. We talk about how we need to be independent even as we do all kinds of things that prove we aren’t.
What is happening now is the inevitable result of a party that embraced fear, weaponized xenophobia and regarded facts as dangerous, left-wing landmines that must be avoided."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/18/elections-have-consequences-slow-response-virus-is-one-them/
Political strategist Stuart Stevens,who led Romney down the tubes in what should have been an easy victory,has terrible political instincts!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 5, 2015
Новая книжка Стивенса называется "It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump".
"I can’t keep lying to myself to ward off the depressing reality that I had been lying to myself for decades. There is nothing strange or unexpected about Donald Trump. He is the logical conclusion of what the Republican Party became over the last fifty or so years, a natural product of the seeds of race, self-deception, and anger that became the essence of the Republican Party. Trump isn’t an aberration of the Republican Party; he is the Republican Party in a purified form."
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/opinion/trump-republicans-racism.html
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