re: Axios: Nikki Haley being considered for VP

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That said, I’ve never yet seen you or anyone else be able to make the case for what traditional conservatives achieved for approximately 30-something years to earn the continued trust and support of the GOP base.

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And I've never heard any populist explain to me how responding to the Republican leadership who has failed to live up to conservative principles as much as conservative people would like by abandoning the philosophy altogether in favor of populism—which has no foundational principles except "muh Establishment"—is any kind of intelligent response.

You're pissed because you only get 60% of what you want, so you piss on 100% of it as long as you can back someone who thumbs their nose at the people who only gave you 60% of what you wanted.

What the hell kind of sense does that make? How does someone who values conservative agendas benefit from that?

The point isn't to excuse the Republican leadership's failures. The point isn't that anyone just LOVES Nikki Haley types (although to me she has no more negatives than Trump—neither would be my first choice, but either is light years better than letting Biden win again).

But like I said upthread, this response is nothing but a childish emotional response seeking revenge. It's like a girl in high school whose boyfriend didn't pay enough attention to her, so she goes and dates the biggest dufus in school just to spite him.

That's how it starts, anyway. Then you start getting people like RiverCity who buy into the conspiracies needed to support "muh Establishment" and who, as Roger The Shrubber has very astutely articulated, buy into the narrative that lifelong Democrat union workers in the 70s or 80s would have embraced, and end up thinking that they are conservatives instead of having accepted the philosophy of Democrats from 35 years ago. Literally.

They espouse the foreign policy of Jimmy Carter. The trade policies of Bernie Sanders. They admire Vladimir Putin. They are all about "The Little Guy." It's the same 'effing slogan that Democrats used to use.

Democrats have shifted to the far left and you can blame Republicans for not pushing back hard enough, but you populists aren't pushing back at all. You're pushing in the same direction as the left.

You think that you're not because you oppose illegal immigration and the trans agenda, but Democrats 40 years ago wouldn't have embraced those things either.

But decades of being all about "The Little Guy" and "Muh Establishment" ends up in a place of seeing illegal immigrants and trans people as "The Little Guy" who is beset by "Muh Establishment."

I realize you think that won't happen, but a guy working in a union in Alabama in 1975 who voted Democrat all his life because "The Little Guy" and "Muh Establishment" undoubtedly didn't think that would ever happen in his party either.

The problem with populism is that it takes the emphasis off the individual and puts it on "The System." More than anything else, that's what sets conservatism apart.

You give that up and that's when you see someone like RiverCity vowing to vote for a Democrat while simultaneously telling Roger to go vote for Democrats because that's where he belongs.

They have so faulty an understanding of the conservative principles involved in these agendas—because they've abandoned them—they don't even understand that they are the liberals. Populists are liberals from 40-50 years ago.