Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Oil Field Anecdote: Trump Edition
I am back in the Eagle Ford Shale south of San Antonio moving Patterson 224 to its next 2 well pad. There are some unwritten rules in the oil field about things not discussed: anyone’s wife, religion, and politics.
The religion aspect is always fun/interesting to break the ice. If I am on a new rig and we are going to eat together I catch everyone looking around wondering if we are going to pray or eat and I will break the silence, me or someone else offers the Blessing, and dinner is over in about four minutes. After that it is assumed we will pray together, next thing you know the cussing has stopped, etc. It is fun to witness.
Outside of an occasional Obama joke, politics is strictly off limits and that works for me. The oil field is a break from the real world and chance to deal with real people not afraid of hard work.
Before we move the rig we have a premove meeting; usually six guys, all supervisors. I get everyone’s inputs, limitations, equipment, maintenance requirements, route restrictions, permit issues, etc., and assemble it into a plan that we execute about as long as lunch.
It is always good to see the gang again after a couple of weeks. I figured BS time would be filled with the start of football season until our trucking safety supervisor, a 26-year Army Retired Sargent Major, asked if anyone was going to watch the debate tonight. Everyone in the room stood up and roared, hell yeah, Trump is gonna kick their _, finally we have someone saying what I am thinking, etc.
We never, ever talk politics on a drilling rig and in a split-second we had an old fashioned church tent revival going and the subject was Trump. I was silent and making the stupid face. This is a non-partisan group whose life is the oil field and to a man the agreement was that Trump was a fighter and they are tired of the Republicans’ BS (there aren’t many/any democrats out here, we just don’t talk about it).
To Ricochet member King Prawn: I finally saw what you’ve been talking about. It is more real than I imagined. Whether it has legs or not remains to be seen.
Published in General
That’s a point that Mr. Balzer has been making, and I don’t know that I’ve heard it anywhere else*. Trump has been drawing people to the Republican party. I’d venture to guess that they’re blue collar white democrats who’s party has left them and they have no where else to go, but I haven’t exactly polled the idea.
*I’ve sat out most Trump threads; it may be that the King Prawn has been making this point all along and I didn’t see.
Brent, I’d venture to say that the fields are the real world, not a break from it.
It’s Perot 2.0, except he may be the GOP nominee. The question I have is if Trump gets enough protest vote in the primaries to secure the nomination, how many constitutional conservative voters will just sit on the sidelines during the general election?
That being the case, it sounds like Trump is a new Reagan who also brought disaffected Democrats to vote Republican. However Reagan’s bona fides were that he had become a real conservative and nothing yet signifies that Trump has made that move.
We’ve seen with Barry the consideration that where he leads there are a lot of us who don’t follow. Could Trump follow that course? Time will tell.
I saw the same dynamic when I heard him speak in Nashville. There were a lot if everyday folks who don’t follow politics closely there and they loved him. He had amazing charisma in person.
He’s certainly not conservative enough to get my primary votes, but he is going to get a lot of votes, maybe enough to win.
The Wild Card? Will these new to the GOP supporters actually register and show up to vote?
Very good perspective.
King Prawn has definitely been making this point. I’ve just not witnessed it first hand. It was striking and will stick with me.
It is kind of funny to watch the people who have been telling everybody to shut up and color for 25+ years, suddenly have the tables turned on them.
My guess is very few by the time the general election actually rolls around. They would grumble but take something. I do not believe Trump means what he says now on the campaign trail, but many do. Trump is not my choice for nominee, although I like what he is doing in the race, by shaking things up. I hope this is the beginning of the end of the PC culture. However, there is no one that the Democrats are likely to put forward who would be better, and many who would be far worse. Sitting out an election is a vote for the other side. So if Trump is the nominee I will vote for him and probably end up donating to the campaign.
Its uncouth to say but the Republican Party has 3 critical success factors:
1.) Keep the democrats from stripping the soil. (AKA not screw business too much)
2.) Keep the hate-based ethno-nationalist alliance of convenience from screwing poor white people too much. As long as white people can solipistically pretend that their values are universal and therefore have no group interests themselves everybody wins. Screwing poor white people too much pierces the fiction, which will likely not turn out well.
3.) Keep the pace of social change to a moderate and absorbable rate.
The republicans have taken 1 to mean keep financiers rich at everybody else’s expense, they want to get in on the democrats action on 2, and just plain failed at 3.
So failure to achieve their CSFs has led to trump.
The zeitgeist is being driven by:
1.) The fundamental change of the democratic party into an ethnonationalist alliance of convenience, with a few other radical interests attached to it, and some rich white people who hope to make off with the nations silver before it all goes bad.
2.) The resulting collapse of the egalitarian world view
3.) The increasing erosion of social trust.
Nothing conservatives believe in can exist without widespread belief in egalitarianism, and high social trust.
The future for the right will be starting from the world as it is and rebuilding egalitarianism and social trust. Pretending the world is other than it is, is not helpful.
Brent – I think your oil field buddies are representative of a lot of really angry people out there. Sort of the blue-collar version of Peter Finch in Network: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it any longer.”
We have Trump because of a perfect storm of Obama, reality TV, and sheer anger.
If the other GOP candidates don’t acknowledge their anger as a legit response to the feckless leadership of the past 20+ years, Trump could well take the nomination.
The GOPe should be happy. Someone finally figured out how to get the mushy middle involved in the process and voting R.
Brent, next step in the experiment is to talk to the most informed and nominally conservative of the group. Point out some of Trump’s heresies. Brace yourself for what happens next.
KP, I did inquire briefly about issues. The things that were repeated: immigration, immigration, national defense, and veteran’s affairs and immigration. You know Texas and know what this area is like and the demographic cross section and then consider Trump’s position on immigration.
The only way these guys are going to listen to someone else is if they are more strident on immigration.
I do know the area, and I also know that a lot of the strident feelings on immigration are not based on love of America but on less pure motivations. Not all, but much of the rage really is against “the dirty brown people.”
I will, for one.
This is where I’m conflicted. With the idiot dems we at least know what kind of stupid [expletive] they will try. With Trump we really don’t know, which might actually make him more dangerous than the lefties.
Trump may well be saving the GOP from itself.
The classic GOP approach is to nominate an “adult” who has just enough conservative background to satisfy conservatives, and the same guy being friendly to Wall St. and K street, with the stamp of approval from the pundit class of George Will, Krauthammer and Chris Wallace and Brit Hume, etc. Then they proceed to lose because they can’t manage the coalition and at the same time attack Democrats. Too many of their donors and “friends” are Democrats.
One of the arguments for candidates like Romney and McCain and Bush III is that they are moderates who won’t scare Democrats and can get some Dems to actually vote for them, being so nice and all. These candidates embody a cautious mushy middle that Americans viscerally reject.
Trump is attracting Democrats, but for them, he’s attracting the wrong kind of Democrats – the hard-scrabble underside, not the Upper-West Side Manhattan elites.
If Trump were President and he proposed some hair-brained left-wing solution, I can see the Republican Congress actually fighting him. They might even be able to summon up a right wing defense of their position! Trump could actually make Congress more conservative.
It’s a sweet irony that this time, the Establishment may be the ones who are presented the lesser-of-two-evils dilemma.
For quite a few of these supposed conservatives, they will opt for Hillary, because stability is what they crave most.
Does your mother know you work in the oil patch? I left the patch decades ago when things went bust in the 80’s. I recall a bumper sticker, “Don’t tell my mother I work in the oil patch. She thinks I’m a piano player in a whore house”
Conservatives voting for Hillary. I did note that you used the word “supposed” to qualify conservatives.
I have voted Republican since my political conversion, starting with my first Reagan vote. I haven’t always been happy about who I was voting for, but have believed every time that the Republican was the less of two evils, which is a pretty minimal standard for voting for the president.
Hillary is as bad as Barry. Duplicitous. Dishonest. Ready to sell the country out [albeit that one does it for a misguided principle and the other for filthy lucre]. Ready to blame the innocent and extoll the guilty. Any lie will do in service of their drives.
If it came down to Trump, who is not a conservative, and Hillary, I would have to think long and hard. I cannot vote for Hillary. Can I vote for Trump? That is the question for me and I don’t have to answer it yet.
Guruforhire: #10 “The republicans have taken 1 to mean keep financiers rich at everybody else’s expense”
I think if one looks, one will find that the professional Democrats and the Republicans, who crave funding for re-election, both lick the toe jam of big business assiduously. I would also suggest that a great many of the hyper wealthy are Democrats, big contributors to the Democrat Party, and are willing to be used to push Democrat positions and candidates.
Any more, the Republicans are the party of the middle class for voting purposes. The Democrats have the very wealthy, the very poor, and the aggrieved.
That’s the same dilemma I had in 2008.
McCain is/was not conservative, perhaps even less-so than Trump. Didn’t seem to be a problem for our betters in the GOP.
I didn’t vote that year. I thought McCain would destroy the Republican Party.
I don’t think The Donald could do that. First, he’s not really a Republican and everyone knows it. It could actually help him (and is helping him now) to have the GOP insiders all aghast.
I’m not sure if Trump isn’t, at heart, conservative. He has proposed some policies which are certainly not reflective of conservative thought, but then, our last two nominees did the same. We also know that rock-ribbed conservatives get squeezed out of the race by the mainstream GOPers, so backing one of them is perilous.
So it’s kind of a wash as far as I can see it, with the added bonus of making the GOPe watch the voters they expect to fall into their lap walk out.
But wait! We are conservative! Wait, we are severely conservative!
Until the generals are replaced, I will not follow them into combat.
I’m more concerned with him damaging the nation than the party. It’s not like the GOP needs any help on that front.
Mom know’s I am out here. This stuff is in my blood.
Someone needs to oppose, stop – even walk back – the socialist agenda of the Democrats. If that is not done, America will become a chaotic third-world country in 20 years.
The Republican Party needs to step up and fight. If they don’t, then America is doomed.
If the opposing party is destroyed or nullified, we all lose. That’s my thinking here – not party over country.
I don’t know how to reconcile this with Trump’s love of single payer or redistribution through taxation. He may be right on some stuff, but where he is wrong are enormous red flags.
It would be interesting to know Jesse Ventura’s private thoughts about now. He must be kicking himself for not running for president this cycle. Besides being just as loud and politically incorrect, Ventura has even proven that he can win elections.
I think predictability or rationality would be a better word for it than stability.
I watched some of Trump’s most recent speech (Dallas?)–I saw a very happy laughing audience.
My husband and I both are guessing he is going to be the next president.
His description of John Kerry was fantastic to listen to. I must admit, I enjoyed it too.
His rise in popularity reminds me a lot of the early years of Rush Limbaugh. It’s a similar demographic that he is reaching.
He is also more ideologically consistent, though (or perhaps therefore?) less likely to call himself a Republican or conservative.
Though I did hear that he mentioned he wouldn’t mind serving as Trump’s running mate on some radio show or podcast.
That’s right, Ventura isn’t a Republican. He ran as an independent when he won the governorship of Minnesota. I didn’t vote for him, by the way. He hates both parties. He seems to have disdain for a lot of people. But the qualities that many people admire in Donald Trump exist in Jesse Ventura. Although I disagree with Ventura on many issues and dislike his personality, he seems to have put more thought into the issues than Mr. Trump.