A fairly lengthy article by Digby at DAME magazine on how Republicans got that way:
The article is pretty much in line with my thinking: Trump is merely a visible sign of where the GOP has been going for a couple of generations, if not longer. I suspect, however, that the roots are far deeper than Nixon (not to discount his cynical misuse of power to further his own ends): There's an element of retrograde "conservatism" -- racist, isolationist, jingoist, religious extremist, authoritarian -- that goes back to the founding of this country. The GOP has quite deliberately aligned itself with that element as a means of gaining and maintaining power -- the much-touted "permanent majority" -- by an means necessary.
At any rate, read it. It's Digby at her best.
Conventional wisdom says that Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States is a gift to the rabidly anti-abortion conservative evangelicals who have revealed themselves to be the most coldly cynical transactional voters in the country, throwing their loyalty behind the crude, fascist brute in the White House. It’s tempting to see this nihilistic lust for power as a symptom of Trumpism. But this goes much further back than that. Trump’s 2016 victory has simply brought GOP officials and the conservative movement leadership out in the open, and forced them to admit that they are not organized on the basis of a long intellectual tradition, but are, instead, a cynical political faction that uses propaganda and unscrupulous tactics to obtain and hold power.
Conservatives have long insisted on a fatuous conceit that they are “the party of ideas” driven by an intellectually rigorous adherence to a strict set of principles metaphorically defined as resting on an ideological three-legged stool of family values, small government, and patriotism. They used this framework to justify state-mandated conservative religious morality and patriarchy, laissez-faire economics to uphold white supremacy and an ever-growing global military empire. Academics and writers worked through these issues and they were quite successful in creating an ideological schema that politicians honed into poll-tested catchphrases and symbols designed to signal tribal affinity to American voters.
The article is pretty much in line with my thinking: Trump is merely a visible sign of where the GOP has been going for a couple of generations, if not longer. I suspect, however, that the roots are far deeper than Nixon (not to discount his cynical misuse of power to further his own ends): There's an element of retrograde "conservatism" -- racist, isolationist, jingoist, religious extremist, authoritarian -- that goes back to the founding of this country. The GOP has quite deliberately aligned itself with that element as a means of gaining and maintaining power -- the much-touted "permanent majority" -- by an means necessary.
At any rate, read it. It's Digby at her best.
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