Sort of What I'd Been Thinking

Digby writes about the crack-up of the GOP. This part stuck out:

Weirdly, Tyrrell's analysis of the crack-up from way back when seems to have been premature rather than outright wrong which lends credence to the notion that this has been happening in slow motion for quite a while. He saw a movement that was in love with its own voice and thought it had all the answers:

Throughout the Reagan years the conservatives have been off pursuing their one way to save the Republic; The Seminar! The Commemorative Banquet! Fund raisers! The narrowness of America's conservatives is a mystery.I have seen it retard fuddy-duddies like Russell Kirk and the libertarians, who can become violent at the first departure from orthodoxy. But it also overcomes conservatism's new recruits the noconservative who gave up on Liberalism when its utopianism became intolerable Th neoconservatives too adopt on way to save the world: The Quarterly Journal! The News Letter! Anti-Communism! Economic Growth!

The result is a conservatism composed of conservatives who do not integrate their narrow values into the broad range of human experience. Their views are sound enough but each is only one recipe on life's menu. Coq au vin is delicious and good for you but man cannot live by squiffed chicken alone. Too often conservatives have insisted that only their favorite dish leads to good health. In this they are as bizarre as vegetarians and as unwholesome.

This hits a lot of places. First, and the part that stuck out, is Digby's comment about it happening in slow motion for "quite a while." Historical trends take their own time. History also runs in cycles (like the rest of the universe): as societies move toward a more "liberal" outlook -- social welfare, concern for individual rights, rejection of authoritarian rule -- they generate their own backlash: conservatives want to maintain the status quo ante. So it goes back and forth: the '60s gave us, ultimately, Ronald Reagan (whom I consider the first symptom of the Republican debacle). It was Reagan, remember who gave us the religious right, figuring he could use them as a power base. We've seen how that worked out: when you put the likes of Tony Perkins on your platform committee -- well, you've heard of the tail wagging the dog.

Fast forward thirty years, and you have the teabaggers -- the money wing's answer to the Moral Majority (with a good dose of racism thrown in). Their first exercise was to oppose the ACA, in most cases against their own self-interest, but that's what the Republicans rely on.

This is not to say that the bible-thumpers have disappeared -- the spate of anti-gay, and especially now, anti-trans laws coming from state legislatures is evidence enough of that. The smokescreen is "public safety." That's bullshit, as I may have noted before. John Cole nails it:

I’m also sick of the argument that liberals are trying to “normalize” X, where X is whatever the reich wing jeebus freaks have decided is the target du jour, whether it be homosexuality, transgenders, etc. Homosexuality and transgender individuals are normal. It happens naturally. It’s not something that happens as commonly as heterosexuality, but it is quite normal.

When these jackasses say they don’t want something like homosexuality normalized, what they mean is that they don’t want to have to stop brutalizing homosexuals and transgenders both physically and emotionally and socially. They want them back in the closet, so they don’t have to confuse their pretty little heads with something that scares them or that they don’t understand. What they really mean is not that they don’t want homosexuality “normalized,” what they mean is that they want to continue to treat normal people like shit for no reason or because Jeebus told them to. Or because it makes them feel superior or because they see political gain. Or because they are sociopaths. Or because they themselves are having feelings for the same sex or are confused about their gender identity and it scares the living shit out of them because they are surrounded by people like them who have spent their entire lives telling that that is wrong. Or some combination of all of the above.

The GOP has practically made an art form out of combing mutually antagonistic ideologies into a whole -- not a unified whole, but when you're more interested in power than philosophies, it's good enough.

And now Trump. Really, what did anyone expect? And the GOP Establishment is having kittens, although I'm pretty sure they'll fall into line. (TPM is tracking the support; it's no surprise that so many of them -- so far -- are teabaggers -- what's interesting is how many have pledged to "support the nominee.")

No,the GOP is not going to disappear, any more than the Democrats disappeared after the McGovern disaster. But it's going to have to reinvent itself.