I have a problem with Republicans thinking like this. If you study history (reality) the U.S. was really only a nice place to live during the 1950s through the 1990s. 9-11 basically ended the U.S. being a great place to live. In a sense the Republican president Bush played into Osama bin laden's hand by so overreacting to what he did that it eventually almost drove the U.S. into bankruptcy during the Great Recession which was a direct reaction to defense overspending in similar ways to how we overspent during the Viet Nam war.
So, thinking we are going back to the 1950s through the 1970s isn't really going to happen ever again. So, this is just pandering to people who haven't studied history. The incredible wealth and buying power that the average American had between the 1950s to the 1970s likely won't ever come again (at least not like that). It was the result of a World War that decimated all the other big countries on earth but the U.S. So, the U.S. made money loaning money and selling goods to countries that likely would have starved to death without the U.S. infrastructure and productive capacity then. Thinking we can go back there is pandering to people who haven't studied history and are therefore living in a kind of fantasy about things in this world. So, Republicans are pandering to unrealistic feelings of mostly uneducated people in the way they talk in this article.
Because now "The World is Flat" Globalization of productivity has taken the power out of the Ameican Heartland to sell things to the world at a good price. Is what we make of better quality? Yes.
Is it more expensive. Yes.
Now how many people can afford this extra money to spend on what we make?
Only the top 10% of the world. This is the real problem but Republicans aren't addressing this dynamic because most people really don't understand this anywhere on earth.
Is the U.S. becoming a 3rd world nation? Some parts of the U.S. are sort of like living in Mexico or further south already. So, it all depends upon where you live in the U.S. However, other parts are much like they were in the 1950s. So, is the U.S. becoming a 3rd world nation? I would say, "Most parts are not like a 3rd world nation and aren't likely to become that way."
Gloomy Republican Campaigns Leave Behind Reagan Cheer
To listen to the way some Republicans tell it, America is a pretty awful place these days. “A hell hole,” as Donald J. Trump has put it.
New York Times - 5 hours ago
Different Tones on the State of America
A look at the language some
Republican candidates are using to describe the country as they seek
their party’s nomination for president.
By AARON BYRD and QUYNHANH DO on Publish Date September 12, 2015.
Photo by Aaron Byrd.
Watch in Times Video »
To listen to the way some Republicans tell it, America is a pretty awful place these days.
“A hell hole,” as Donald J. Trump has put it. Our leaders are “babies” who are “so stupid” they can only watch helplessly as we become “a third-world country.”
Senator Ted Cruz
of Texas sees evil menacing America not just from within, like the
“tyranny” and “lawlessness” of jailing a county clerk in Kentucky who
refused to issue same-sex marriage
licenses, but from the outside as well. As he condemned the Obama
administration’s nuclear pact with Iran last week, Mr. Cruz warned, “Americans will die.”
These
dark diagnoses of the country’s condition have become an especially
powerful part of the message sounded by several Republicans seeking
their party’s nomination for presidency this election cycle.
Their
damning assessments — that the country is diminished and
unrecognizable, imperiled by forces foreign and domestic — seem to
resonate with voters already feeling angry, alienated and under threat.
Appeals
to voters’ insecurities and anxieties have always been part of
politics. But what is striking about the current dynamic inside the Republican Party is how pervasive the sense has become that the country is slipping, and maybe irretrievably so.
“You’ve
got elements of all the different branches of the Republican Party that
see darkness now,” said David Gergen, a former adviser to Presidents
Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan
and Bill Clinton. “Social conservatives have been at the forefront of
that for a long time. But now the foreign policy and economic types feel
like we face serious risk of decline.”
The
mood of the country is certainly grim. About two-thirds of Americans
believe the country is adrift, according to recent public opinion
surveys from a variety of news organizations and independent firms. That
sentiment has remained stubbornly high for most of the Obama
presidency, with strong majorities of Americans consistently saying the
country is on the wrong track for the last five years, according to
polling by The New York Times and CBS News.
After
years of slow economic growth, stagnant incomes, political dysfunction
and worsening threats from abroad, many Republican pollsters and
analysts are asking themselves whether there has been a fundamental
change in how Americans, historically an optimistic people, now see
themselves. And they are wondering whether, as a consequence, 2016 will
be a year when voters turn to someone whose message is mainly focused on
what is wrong with the country.
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“Today,
conservatism is much more meanspirited, angry, not optimistic and much
more viscerally divisive,” said Matthew Dowd, a former top strategist
for President George W. Bush.
The
dark imagery emanating from Mr. Trump and others collides with the
long-held Republican conviction that a message of optimism and uplift is
essential to winning elections and leading the country. That belief
also aligns with their view of America as a special and divinely
inspired nation, always capable of renewal.
“I
believe we’re on the verge of the greatest time to be alive,” says Jeb
Bush, the candidate who always boasts about the “joy” that infuses his
campaign and whose slogan, “Right to Rise,” implies an upward trajectory
for the American people.
Optimism and a sunny spirit came to define Reagan, and in this race, Mr. Bush, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Gov. John Kasich of Ohio are trying to channel some of that same brightness.
Mr.
Rubio often asks people what nation on earth they would trade places
with. After the answer comes back an emphatic “No one!” as it did at a
casino in northern Nevada he visited earlier this month, he offers his
own cheerful explanation. “Ours is the story of 230-some-odd years of
perpetual improvement, of a nation where each generation did what they
needed to do to leave the next better off.”
Mr.
Kasich repudiates “mad as hell” politics when he talks to voters. “If
it takes angry and mean, count me out,” he said recently in New
Hampshire.
Despite
the country’s challenges, there are signs of improvement: Job growth is
up, unemployment is down, and the economy is in vastly better shape
than it was eight years ago. Some Republicans worry that a strategy of
telling voters, in effect, that things are much worse than they thought
is a losing one. They point to how candidates like George W. Bush, who
ran in 2000 as the amiable “compassionate conservative,” were almost
always upbeat.
“Americans
like optimistic brands. We like brands that lead us into the future,”
said Alex Castellanos, a Republican messaging strategist who has offered
informal advice to several of the candidates running for president this
year. Quoting something he said George W. Bush had once told him, Mr.
Castellanos added, “Nobody ever bought a product that made them feel
worse.”
Graphic: Who’s Winning the G.O.P. Campaign?
After
the 2014 midterm elections, Mr. Castellanos commissioned research for a
project he is leading on reinventing his party’s brand called “New
Republican.” It looked at three states where Republicans took Senate
seats from Democrats and one where they lost.
In
the three winning states — Colorado, Iowa and North Carolina — voters
said they thought the Republican was the more optimistic candidate. Only
in the state Republicans lost, New Hampshire, did voters say they felt
the Republican, Scott Brown, was the more pessimistic candidate. Still,
some Republicans question the power of optimism, noting that voters
picked the candidate of hope and change in 2008 and that many are
unhappy with the results.
“I
know, everyone should be optimistic, everyone should be sunny and
cheerful,” said Bill Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly
Standard. “And there’s something weird and wrong if you’re not. But
really? Is the country on the right track or the wrong track?”
“We should all be joyous?” he added.
Indeed,
some Republicans are now debating how great the country is (or isn’t),
whether it needs to be made great again and who can best do that. And
like many debates among Republicans, this one returns to the legacy of
Reagan.
Mr.
Trump and Mr. Cruz both use old Reagan lines, and both say they model
themselves after him. Mr. Cruz often refers to his leadership style the
way Reagan once did: “raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold
colors.” But with admonitions like “The world is on fire,” which startled a little girl
in a crowd he spoke to this year, he is not always so cheery. Mr.
Trump’s campaign slogan is “Make America Great Again,” which Reagan used
in his 1980 race against Jimmy Carter.
But
Mr. Rubio has taken to criticizing Mr. Trump for using Reagan’s words
to imply the country is not great. “I would remind everyone America is
great,” he told a crowd in Nevada recently. “The issue is not that we’re
not great. The issue is whether we will remain great.”
Some
of Reagan’s former aides echo Mr. Rubio’s concern. While Mr. Reagan was
not naïve about the threats facing the United States domestically and
abroad, he was never dour about it, they say. “To appropriate Ronald
Reagan’s language and suggest that America is going to hell, those are
contradictory impulses,” said Peter Robinson, a Reagan speechwriter who
is now with the Hoover Institution.
Looking
at the presidents that most Americans would consider great leaders, Mr.
Castellanos, the Republican brand strategist, said they all shared one
theme: an optimistic vision for where the country was headed. Franklin
D. Roosevelt, the New Deal; John F. Kennedy, the New Frontier; Reagan,
the “rendezvous with destiny”; Bill Clinton, “Don’t Stop Thinking About
Tomorrow.”
“There
are different ways to win the nomination,” Mr. Castellanos added. “One
is to go small and say, ‘I’m going to take up this aggrieved section of
the party and cobble it together with this other angry section of the
party.”
“But the risk of that,” he continued, “is you make yourself dark and too small to be president.”
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