washington, dc

The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Pre-Christmas Final Exam — Current Events

Before closing our textbooks for the semester, please answer the following question:

Consider the following description of a political formation:

1. The political formation does not have majority support on a national level and cannot control the entire country but has impregnable strongholds in certain rural, less populated areas and specific geographic regions of the country.
2. Within these secure redoubts the leaders of the political formation are more directly threatened by hyper-extreme elements championing even more intense hardline policies than their own than they are threatened by challenges issued by any less extreme elements.
3. The political formation does not conceptualize “politics” as governance but as warfare. It has a warrior ethic that accepts the inevitability of continual battles that may extend over decades or generations.
4. The political formation is unresponsive to normal “carrots and sticks” as they are perceived in traditional western political life nor do they engage in what traditional political science calculus would consider rational cost-benefit analysis.

For 10 credit points, class, is this political formation:

a. The U.S. Republican Party
b. The Afghan Taliban
c. All of the above

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