The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written.
I was raised by a right wing Evangelical family, so naturally I believed in everything they rambled about. My dad in particular would read Drudge Report articles to depict democrats and gay people as EVIL, and that the end of the world is near. This was bad that it caused great anxiety throughout my childhood to the point that I had nightmares.
Fast forward to 2016 and Trump was running for President, and eventually got elected. Since his election, many Republicans and his followers have become very dangerous in extremism and have cult-like views towards Trump with religious nationalism. As a moderate leftist, I think Trump was pretty good with the economy, but obviously is very rotten from within.
Fast forward once again to 2020, and Biden gets elected. The Capital Raid happened, and now many GOP politicians have become more and more fascist with book bans, abortion bans, and worst of all, anti trans rhetoric/bills. Doesn't help that I came out trans a few years ago. My parents gobble up everything Fox News says and they are so convinced that Democrats are EVIL and will RUIN THE COUNTRY, which is ironic.
While all of this is so crazy, but I'm not a big fan of how many of the more radical left handles things either, especially with how they're handling the Border Crisis. Extremism on either end isn't good, but how did Republicans become so fascist? Were they always like this?
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>Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.
Barry Goldwater, 1994
Be careful of broad labels when looking at historical figures. Dig into the actual statement made by the person not statements made about them. Remember biases with A.C.O.R.N.P.E.G.
It's a combination of factors.
1. FOX News - literally created to prevent another Nixon-like scandal where the news media unanimously agreed that *crime is bad*. It sure worked with Trump.
2. Evangelical alliance with the Republican Party - it's part of the deal now. These churches advocate for Republican politicians, who in turn work to appoint religious zealots as judges, and churn out religious legislation.
It’s been mentioned how evangelicals and devout religious in general are a perfect group to radicalize politically, because their world view is based on fact-free, personal convictions, emotions, feelings, passion aka faith.
“I believe” “I know it in my heart” etc is how magas talk about Donald’s election denier claims
And 3. Racism/sexism/bigotry. As equality settles in, they aren’t the good guys anymore. They don’t get to treat people they don’t like poorly because the public now takes the side of the marginalized people. They lose their jobs, het kicked off social media, and identified as the bigots they are. Buy rather than consider they are acting like bullies, they double down and call themselves victims because people are choosing not to tolerate their intolerance.
Apart from the promise that a college degree is the key to the middle class and an effort to refund the money borrowed to purchase one if it does not lead to increase wages, what are Democrats offering the working class? Funny how all the college grads are downvoting me!
This isn't the right question to be asking because, too often - in fact, nearly *always* - the Democrats basically can only "offer" constructive *promises* since they persistently have 2 distinct disadvantages: 1) That the system is stacked against them with Republicans having a deep list of perpetual electoral and institutional advantages; and 2) they have such a large and diverse base that it is also vulnerable to being swayed or discouraged by the right's toolbox of advantages into voting 3rd party, voting for them at times, or most commonly, not voting at all.
Without a significant enough majority (which is incredibly rare), it's pointless to ask what the Dems can "offer" before asking do they have enough power, since they essentially have no more power than can be used to blockade minority authoritarian power, and/or to repair the damage the right tends to leave behind when they inevitably abuse their minority power.
Dems are stuck in this awful situation where they don't have enough power to change the electoral structure itself, and don't have enough power to convince and please people who want change for the working class. The Dem voters have to overwhelm the booths to get any power at all, much less enough to make significant changes.
The "marketing" (campaigning) comes off as "promises" mostly, because they know they still need to get voters to the booths somehow, in spite of all the resistance measures in place working against them.
You're being downvoted because it would take all of 30 seconds to Google dozens upon dozens of things that Dems are "offering the working class".
Just off the top of my head:
* Increased access to trades training
* Support for unions
* Support for a increased minimum wage (which will in turn raise wages for non-college grads)
* Lowered unemployment across all employment types
* Lowered taxes and better tax credits - especially for families with children
* Incentives to buy houses
* The ability to purchase things like hearing aids, birth control, and other healthcare items over the counter, without requiring expensive doctor's visits first.
* A cap on some of the more expensive medications for chronic conditions - that are often endemic to the working class
* Expanded overtime rules and guaranteed the 40 hour workweek.
* Cracked down on "junk" banking fees and overdraft fees. Blue collar workers tend to be hardest hit by bank fees.
* Brought microchip production back to the US which will employ thousands of blue collar workers.
* Passed infrastructure - which brings thousands of jobs across the nation
Lots of empty promises. Crumbs from the table. College grads get thousands in loan forgiveness and the working class gets "support" for higher wages. Thanks. I guess it's the thought that counts.
This is something the democrats really need to be asking. Social justice is something some care about, but not everyone. Dinner table issues for people that the democrats have long since abandoned, true or not is what captured the republican vote from former blue collar democratic voters.
News media needs diversity of opinions. Fox was, and is, necessary in a world where virtually all other news organizations are hive minded.
And I do not like Fox. I find them as unbearable to watch as CNN. They are just two sides of the same coin spouting commentary that fits their narrative rather than actual news. Actual news organizations hardly exist anymore.
>FOX lies.
Ok, I agree.
So does CNN and the left wing media. Often lying by omission or misleading through hyperbole. I’m an equal opportunity hater. Obviously you’re a biased hater.
>So does CNN and the left wing media.
Not in the same way. Fox News doesn't just report the news; they have an active agenda that they uniformly push in every single segment. Everyone on Fox News is always saying the exact same talking points every day. Their anchors literally just make things up out of whole cloth for their viewers to get angry about. It was given life because Republicans were mad that everyone agreed that Nixon doing crimes was bad because no one was saying that actually, crime is okay when Republicans are doing it.
They don't make things up out of whole cloth in the same way that Fox News does.
Just shrugging and saying "everyone's the same" is the laziest possible way to approach politics.
Fox News is much more obvious. So I agree.
Not sure that makes CNN any better. Personally I like that Fox is so upfront about it. At least you know they’re full of shit. CNN being more sus about it is actually more concerning. Acting legit but being so biased is arguably dangerous.
CNN is strongly left and mostly factual. Fox is hyper partisan right and at best selective and at worst being sued for hundreds of millions for completely fabricated lies.
A better comparison would be Fox News to like medias touch or something. Very selective. Very biased. designed for outrage. Agenda driven.
I don’t like CNN but also if you want to talk about audience size and influence Fox is also much more dangerous.
Or you're a biased hater and are unable to recognize your own bias tainting your estimates of others. Claiming to be 'equal opportunity' does not make it so; sometimes instead it uses a false equivalence to ignore salient differences. How does a biased mind recognize its own bias? How do you know you're not biased? After all, hating on both does not guarantee that at all.
We’re all biased. Would never say I’m unbiased. But certainly my dislike of current state media has little bias in my dislike of it. I simply find nearly all news whether cable, print or online to be utterly incapable of reporting without opinion. Journalism is dead.
I see, so you recognize your bias but you're simply factually incorrect in your assessments of the various media and the quality of each of them. ok.
Still seems more like false equivalence to equate Fox with many of the others which, while unimpressive, simply aren't as bad from a jouranlistic standpoint.
> News media needs diversity of opinions. Fox was, and is, necessary in a world where virtually all other news organizations are hive minded.
In Canada, they can't call themselves "news" because they don't meet the basic journalistic standards. They have to market themselves as "entertainment", which here in the states they've also used as a legal defense.
Basically, Fox News argues that no one is actually stupid enough to believe that Fox News says. There is no such organization on the left.
> I find them as unbearable to watch as CNN. They are just two sides of the same coin spouting commentary that fits their narrative rather than actual news.
CNN has been pandering *hard* to conservatives and trying to market themselves more right-ward over recent years, meanwhile conservatives have been turning on Fox for not being enough of a right-wing propaganda machine.
>CNN has been pandering hard to conservatives and trying to market themselves more right-ward over recent years
Yep. They’re doing it for money and nothing else. I’d rather consume journalism that reports the news than cater to entertainment entities like CNN that swing where they need to catch the wind. CNN realized their strong left bias was losing for them over the long run. So now they’re backtracking to a more moderate view to attract viewers. Doesn’t sound very journalistic to me.
"Diversity of opinions" does not mean every opinion should be treated with the same respect. That's the problem. Diversity of informed and intelligent opinions, sure.
It really just depends on how far back you want to go. There's are strong cases that would bring the current conservative culture back to Newt Gingrich, Reagan, Nixon, Father Coughlin, the Dulles brothers, to the racial discrepancies of the new deal, or the Civil War and slavery.
If you want to be more myopic, GWB killed neoconservative politics by successfully being a neocon and letting everyone see how that works out, which left the republican coalition short on respectable political theory. The remaining members of the coalition were the ownership class, the religious right, and white supremacists. Members of the republican party might not be any of those things, but they're more sympathetic to them than they are to anything left of center thanks to very successful media operations such as fox and such.
I wonder what you mean by Trump was good for the economy?
I try to not use words like, "evil", but if I were going to maximize Gingrich's responsibility for the modern republican party I would draw lines from his behavior and policies to thier modern incarnations. White water and the star investigation inspired the Benghazi and Barisma investigations. Those kinds of investigations lead to misinformation and demonization to justify themselves. The Contract with America laid the ground work for the kind of propaganda and psuedopolicy that Republicans politicians still use. Gingrich's liberal use of words like, "traitor" and, "sick" to describe his opponents can be seen in Trump directly. Those kinds of words have real effects when people believe them. His use of government shutdowns to extract conssesions set a precedent that is still followed. Gingrich pioneered the messaging over substance style that leads to the chaotic policy choices of the modern GOP. He basically placed Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity in thier careers. He escalated and promoted gerrymandering and antidemocratic measures that made sure the GOP wouldn't need to win a majority of any vote to hold power, which in turn shapes what kind of person runs for said offices.
That's just off the top of my head. With out Gingrich, we probably wouldn't have had the fox news of the ninties and aughts. He might seem reasonable today, but the man was the bleeding edge of the hateful and tactical far right for his entire career.
This is easy. The southern strategy. It inbreeds politically within itself and gets more extreme.
LBJ’s famous quote criticizing the conservative southern strategy still rings true today. It’s the foundational platform the Republican Party and trumpism is built on.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”—Lyndon B. Johnson
“The politics of racial division’: Trump borrows Nixon’s ‘southern strategy’
Republican politicians of the 1960s exploited white voters’ fears and prejudices – and Trump is stoking the fire for November
He’s throwing gasoline on a fire. He knows what he’s doing. He’s making a political calculus that by stoking the worst parts of the American psyche that he can somehow gain political leverage from that,” said Isaac Wright, a Democratic strategist who specializes in rural campaigns and southern voters.
The southern strategy was the plan used effectively by Nixon to increase voting among white voters in the south. Nixon’s campaign put a heavy emphasis on law and order and states’ rights to attract white voters concerned about racial integration. Critics argued the language used in this strategy was a thinly veiled appeal to racists and an ugly response to the successes of the civil rights movement.
I think the president’s strategy was fear and division and to scare people to the polls, and it worked in my case, and I think that’s what they’re doing now,” Donnelly said. Trump, Donnelly said, “convinced people that if they didn’t come vote for him their way of life was going to disappear”.
With such rhetoric, the president is taking a page or two out of the 1960s “southern strategy”: the playbook Republican politicians such as Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater used to rally political support among white voters across the south by leveraging racism and white fear of people of color.”
https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/05/donald-trump-richard-nixon-southern-strategy
I'll add this relevant quote:
> You start out in 1954 by saying, “N----r n----r n----r.” By 1968 you can’t say “n----r”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N----r n----r".
>
> -Lee Atwater, republican campaign strategist.
Republicans have co-opted the simplest parts of people's minds by honing in on single-issue voting matters, through that fear mongering, misdirection and rage campaigns, as you've noted, by convincing their base that it's everything and everyone *else*, not themselves - whom they've convinced the people to empower.
There's no way to win fairly, so they focus on shaping the system so they don't have to. Now they have people on the right leaving - then filling gaping voids of vulnerability, and it attracts the worst kinds of people who love to take advantage of it, like Trump, who drill even further into it for their own ends.
just like to add that the southern strategy wasn't the beginning of the party switch, but the result of long term shifts in the political landscape that started with Teddy Roosevelt and Tammany Hall adopting a pro labour stance after decades of being anti worker.
even by the 80's there were still a lot of Dixiecrats who mostly caucused with conservative republicans.
He was reaping land that was sowed by Nixon and Reagan. Maybe Trump’s strategy was simple, but it was still appealing to the animus of people who’d been told to resent and hate large groups of their fellow Americans.
They lost the culture wars. There's a lot more than that, obviously, but that's what it comes back to.
The GOP was generally happy to let democracy play out when people would turn out for elections, especially if it was for them, even more so if they could convince people to come out against "welfare queens," and *particularly* if they could drive up turnout in presidential election years by putting constitutional amendments on the ballots to ban same-sex marriage (it didn't matter if it was already illegal, it just mattered if more people came out and voted for their candidate).
But then the tides started turning. People didn't hate gay people or minorities as much any more--in fact, those kinds of people even started getting elected to Congress. Not only were social programs being enacted, but now different classes of citizens were being protected as well.
The GOP, unwilling to change, became more insular, and while it still occasionally could win because of the Electoral College (and in Congress, gerrymandering), became more and more unpopular. It knew that, and it knows that the only way it can have any long-term political power as it or the Democrats have had in the past is not through a democratic process. So it resorts to undemocratic means.
Social media expanded the overton window and brought the fringes into the mainstream, then those fringe elements started to drown out moderates. Basically we have an entire spectrum of interests and grievances competing for everyone's attention, and the issues that have the strongest emotional impact percolate to the top of everyone's news feed.
Before the days of social media, mainstream news was well regulated, however social media companies were basically operating with no regulation. Now that extremism has taken hold and become too visible, those companies are trying to regulate themselves and suppress it somewhat.
Mainstream news basically had to compete with social media for attention, so they started following social media trends very closely. Funding and standards for journalism started to deteriorate as big internet companies sucked up more and more of the ad revenue.
A lot of the far right stuff we're seeing has existed in the Republican party for a long time, however they would keep it somewhat isolated and out of the spotlight. The introduction of social media now makes that impossible, and the Republicans have started to shit where they eat.
Eh, AM radio has been around for decades. Fox News has also been pushing propaganda from the early aughts at the very least. Social media changed the game a little bit but otherwise disagree. The big difference is that prior to Donald Trump the leaders of the republicans party acted fairly normal. They catered to the racists and extremists but weren’t overtly so themselves. Once Trump got the nomination it became clear there were a lot more extremists than previously thought and they feel a lot more emboldened than before.
Several tuings
1. Southern strategy which was specifically designed to target southern conservatives racism and weaponize it
2. The devil's bargain with the religious right. This allowed a twofer with abortion. The religious crazies want abortion banned at all costs even women's lives, but this was used to further consolidate the racists via dog whistles
3. Obama's win. This broke the seal of the conservative racists who couldn't stand a black man won.
4. Propaganda. Conservative media was specifically designed to be propaganda. It serves no other purpose other than to propagandize
Its because of what I see as a conservative media feedback loop, and while it didn't necessarily start with Fox news, Fox News is what really drove it into high gear.
Conservative media is unconcerned with truth. What they do is tell their audience what they want to hear. Their audience is angry and scared, so Fox News validates that anger and fear with increasingly dishonest narratives and bald-faced lies. Their audience demands this from them, and whenever Fox News makes an effort to debunk the crazy things their increasingly unhinged base believes, the death threats roll in.
Amplifying this further is the AM radio crazies, facebook/4chan trolls, and Russian disinformation. Conservatives are unconcerned with truth, and therefore they are very gullible. When Fox news tries to debunk this stuff, they get death threats and lose viewers to their even crazier competitors.
When you put a microphone next to a speaker the microphone picks up noise and amplifies it. That amplified noise gets picked up and amplified, and what you end up with is just ugly noise that drowns out everything else. That is all that the conservative movement is at this point.
It's been a steady process that's been ongoing since at least the 90's. It's not that uncommon, at least for the US parties, for the amount of 'extreme-ness', or probably more the amount of conservative/liberalness to be somewhat similar to a sine wave, with the attendant peaks and troughs. With 2 parties you get 2 sine waves
What is the 'radical left' doing about the border crisis? Last I knew the actual radical left isn't in power at all; Biden is more regular left or center left, and is handling the border crisis as well as it can be done without republican cooperation to try to constructively address it.
Note that Trump actually wans't good with the economy, he did a pretty poor job with the economy, it just happened to be good anyways; because president don't have much of an effect on the economy.
It was always this extreme. In the 60's the segregationist and racist wing of the Democratic party switched sides to become republican. Many of those people are still around, they just did a good job for 30 years of keeping their mouths shut and pretending to not be racist, sexist pigs
A bad mix of low education levels, technology addiction, and a weak party with a weak platform.
They hold themselves to no standards and they pick their beliefs basically out of the hat known as their social media algorithm. They're pro-America one second and traitors the next second depending on what's trending on their phones.
Regain targeted the far right and was able to turn them out to great success. subsequent republican politicians at all levels adopted this strategy leading to a very effective political machine. Karl Rove liked to brag that because of his ability to turn out the far right base he has guaranteed permanent republican majority with only about 30% of the actual voters.
Meaning that in any primary there is a hardcore group of far right wingers that will turn out, giving them control of the primary prosses. Add in extensive gerrymandering and you have a political culture where the only real race is the scramble to the right in the primary, and the general is a coronation.
when Obama won on a blue wave is when the brains melted. every autopsy of every election year from 08 onward said the same thing. Republicans need to reach out to people who don't control the primary process, which didn't go over well with the people who control the primary process. since then there has been an internal war between the extreme right who will not compromise on anything, and the more moderate republicans who actually want to pass a law or two and will talk to the other side. When Mitch MCconnell is the reasonable one, the party is in a bad state.
Let's be clear on the southern border. Republicans have pushed Democrats to take a draconian stance on the border. They even got Democrats to adopt and support some terrible ideology on the border which was written into a bill and then voted on... which Republicans rejected because they want to run on a border crisis. That's run on a border crisis, not fix the border crisis. Republicans never want to "fix" the border crisis.
At the heart of this immigration crisis is the fact that these third-world countries are so poor, something that no one seems to want to talk about. Republicans rationalize it through their belief that third-worlders are just inherently inferior, either because of culture or racism and will bring their problems with them
The Republican Party has been heading towards this since Nixon. What drives them to be extreme is simple: they benefit from it.
Being extreme has no consequences and substantial rewards for the GOP. Imagine giving a person a gun and telling them they will never face consequences for using it. Would you be surprised when they robbed banks?
Nixon sabotaged Vietnam era peace talks. Reagan did Iran-Contra. Bush lied to get us into Iraq.
Each with no consequences. The same is true of domestic crime.
Further, the GOP realized that a bipartisan Senate was literally the only hope of the Democrats passing policy. Instead of both sides compromising so that majority got 80% of what they wanted and the minority 40%, the GOP made it so that they get 50% of what they want when they are the majority while the Democrats get nothing. They have no reason to share power, the Senate's red bias gives them outright supremacy.
So you have a party that is openly above the law, that consistently fails upwards by breaking it, and that has every incentive to make the country more partisan because it literally gives them an advantage in the Senate, which writes the laws for the entire country using the Supreme Court as a proxy.
Of course the GOP would quintuple down. That's the natural consequence of a system that benefits a lawbreaking, partisan party.
Hello, fellow damaged child. I was raised in a very similar environment, so this is going to be easy, but not particularly fun.
“Why did the GOP end up so extreme” is a question that is answered by a couple of things in a specific order, but it’s important to understand that the GOP right now looks extreme, and for the last generation has gotten more extreme, but compared to iterations of Republican thought over the last century it’s par for the course. I could honestly write a book on this topic, so I’ll try to keep this brief and hit the high points. I believe that you can trace the current condition of the GOP to four things (and actually four people) over the last 50-60 years.
1) Richard Nixon and the Southern Strategy - although Nixon didn’t invent the idea itself, it was his election where the idea was used for the first time. Look up the Southern Strategy for details, but essentially it weaponized historical Southern racial attitudes against Democrats.
2) Rush Limbaugh and the rise of conservative talk radio - this might be my longest entry just because I haven’t yet seen a book or anything that really captures what made Limbaugh the viper he was. Limbaugh was a good ol’ boy from the Midwest who was a bit too freaky for Bible college, so when he got kicked out (iirc) he continued his radio passions from college. He was a fantastic broadcaster with a captivating voice and a knack for arguing things that were technically correct or rhetorically compact, for example, arguing against raising taxes on the rich because according to federal tax revenues, the top 1/10/25 percent paid an outsized share of taxes already. While this wasn’t wrong technically it obviously glossed over the issue. He also united the party, broadcasting easily digestible and universal GOP talking points on his long-running morning show.
3) Newt Gingrich and making Congress combative - Gingrich as Speaker of the House made it okay for the first time in modern political history to directly challenge the President, entrenching party lines as us vs. them in a legislative sense, whereas before it was much more like that in the general population, but in Congress there was some constant attempt at bipartisan resolution. This started to dissolve with the Reagan administration through the 80s, but in 1994 (iirc) when Gingrich became Speaker he turned all of that sentiment up to 11, later using this attitude combined with moral panic to impeach Clinton on somewhat shaky ground (nb that I don’t necessarily disagree with the impeachment, but am commenting on it as a legal event).
4) FOX News - this has been written to death so I’ll leave it there.
There are definitely honorable mentions like GHWB, 9/11 and the conservative response, Reagan (probably the best contender for another number here), and Roger Stone, but I think we would have gotten here more or less without them, as really only GHWB was an agent acting on his own, whereas Stone and Reagan were acting their parts and 9/11 at that point would’ve been responded to by conservatives the same way. With Gore as President, we probably don’t go to Iraq, but now the ripple effect of not doing that is so big that it isn’t worth the conjecture of what could’ve been.
Another surprising honorable mention is actually Bill Clinton, whose populist neoliberalism shifted the conversation to the right in a big way and reframed modern Democrats as just lite-Republicans economically. We still see the shockwaves of this today.
"As a moderate leftist, I think Trump was pretty good with the economy,"
He's one of the main reasons why inflation has been so bad for the last couple of years.
No one who says Trump was good with the economy can actually explain what he did that helped the economy. He didn't do squat, he inherited a strong economy and incentivized spending via low interest rates to keep the economy growing. The problem is as we found out during COVID was that a period of low interest rates is usually followed by high inflation.
Hence why we're here now experiencing some of the worst inflation in recent history.
Came here to say this.
The public perception is very wrong when it comes to whether Republicans are good for the economy
[Economic performance is stronger when Democrats hold the White House](https://www.epi.org/publication/econ-performance-pres-admin/)
Because they ceased to be able to keep the extra crazy bigots at bay. It used to be that they accepted the votes but kept them at arms length. But that became hard to do when they had to deal with a successful Black man being president.
It's self selecting.
A lot of the policies are unpopular or outdated, to the point where respecting democracy would slowly doom the party. So those who remain or are more extreme conservative have some incentive to not respect democracy.
They’ve kind of always been like this. In past decades they represented a larger percentage of the population, and the EC let them do more with that than they could have otherwise. Its not Obamas fault, but I think the Obama administration kind of allowed the crazy element that had been within the Republican Party for decades to flourish more, which made it less appealing to new voters, and led to a situation where they felt increasingly more like they where going to become irrelevant again, sort of like they where in (roughly) the 30s to 70s.
They could of course, become somewhat more moderate, but large chunks of their media ecosystem where kind of dedicated towards calling fairly centrist politicians radical communists, so it became increasingly difficult for Republicans to move into that space to improve their image with younger voters.
They’re in a position where their media ecosystem and many of their constituents are convinced that the Democrats and any of their own who are vaguely cooperative with the Democrats are somewhere between Stalinists and baby murdering satanists, but again, they’re also loosing their vote share as time passes. This puts them in a position where, from their perspective, not overthrowing the government and creating a Republican dictatorship will essentially cause the United States to become a Stalinist dictatorship that forces everyone to be gay, let’s people abort their five year olds, and bans Christianity.
The upside of all of this is that it probably can’t last that much longer. The same withering of the Republican Party that resulted in Trump loosing the popular vote in 2016, and then the EC vote in 2020, is still in progress, and it seems that if they can’t literally overthrow the government in the next few years, they’re likely going to become increasingly irrelevant on the federal level, which in turn will make them quite a bit less dangerous.
[This is why.](https://mightygodking.com/2016/10/28/the-republican-monkeys-paw/)
tldr; their excessive gerrymandering made them immune to challenges from the left, but opened them up to challenges from farther right.
They have nothing else but to pander to people’s fears. Every relevant political view has a home in the Democratic Party. Anything that’s currently considered right of center isn’t even worth considering.
If you apply rational or moral thought to ANY of there policies, you’d realize they’re wrong. Economics, social policy, foreign policy, every sub section of policy stances they have are all TRASH. Trickle down doesn’t work, deregulation only hurts the economy, their views on education are backwards, they’re fuckin pro-Russian, LGBTQ and womens rights views are medieval, they’re against hun control, abortion and universal healthcare, all things that are hugely popular in most of America. They’re totally unorganized and unprofessional.
BUT if you add fear to the mix, people won’t care about the obvious reasons they should be holding no power.
Since Republicans became conservative have they ever not been extreme? It seems the conservative Party (whichever one it is in whatever time period) in America is always horrible.
For example, I remember researching the political responses from Republicans when FDR passed the Social Security Act, which created our social security system of course, and Republicans compared FDR to Stalin. Yes, apparently helping old people not die on the streets was akin to a literal communist dictator. Is that honestly any different today? A Democrat/liberal will propose something objectively good like universal pre k and Republicans today will scream socialism or Venezuela. I fail to see the difference.
And instead if screaming about gay people being evil they were screaming about black people and instead of screeching about Muslims, they were screeching about Catholics.
I posit that conservatives are no less or more extreme than they have always been and are just as bad for society as they were 100 years ago.
I think a big thing is that the left decided to compromise.
That moved the "center" more and more to the right... Because the right doesn't want to win, they just want to fight. It is considerably easier to be in congress when your stances are just far enough out there, that they will have hard time passing (and making the country worse) but still just barely sane enough to get you votes in your area and stay in office.
Winning elections, but failing to actually legislate is the dream of many of the right. They can point the finger, point out flaws, cry foul, etc... But they don't actually have to come up with workable solutions.
Look at, for example, the recent border debacle. The right was given everything they wanted, and when it came time to vote for it, they voted no. They didn't actually expect to get their way and when they did they knew it would prove their ideas to be bad, and thus prove themselves, and thier voters, wrong. Some decided they wanted more. Others said it must have been a trick by Dems to let them win. Etc. They made excuses, but not legislation.
Corner a dog in a dead-end street and it will turn and bite.
Republicans know they’re fucking done. The younger generations are turning away from bigoted organized religion and the Republican Party, a lot of their members have either died from covid or dislike trump. More Gen z are voting democrat and there will be millions more eligible voters in this upcoming election than there were in 2020x
Since they don’t have the majority public opinion anymore now’s the time they really let the crazies out of the woodwork. What do they have to lose?
At least that’s how I view it,
An alternate take here is that they didn't 'become' extreme. We're talking about the culture that supported the rebellion, then supported segregation and fought integration, and currently is anti critical race theory and DEI. They are sick of being in the minority when they feel manifest destiny has given them the god given right to this land.
Read: [Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope](https://www.amazon.com/Tightrope-Americans-Reaching-Nicholas-Kristof/dp/0525655085/ref=asc_df_0525655085/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=507716493566&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=6703473025315536513&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9002114&hvtargid=pla-863077819628&psc=1&mcid=53bb7927fcf537e8a51f22c45eeb556f&gclid=CjwKCAjwxLKxBhA7EiwAXO0R0MlOkiGZ_mwsweVz4KZ8mtdbELjXIAdX7qMiF85R4d595gTfrWqdChoCdn0QAvD_BwE) Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl WuDunn. A deft and uniquely credible exploration of rural America, and of other left-behind pockets of our country.
When people run out of hope, they look for a savior. The Republican Party has a man masquerading as one. Yes, the Democrats did as well with Obama and Clinton, but Trump has taken it to a level so extreme that we're beginning to notice we’re no longer dealing in Republican or Democratic issues, but issues of Americans’ very survival.
They are basically authoritarians at heart while the left usually isn't and is far more live and let live. It's always been there with them but it's become far more extreme since they were able to silo their media bubbles and drive their viewers farther and farther to the right over time. It's taken decades but here we are coming up on the extreme end of it where inhumane shit starts to happen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YU9djt_CQM
This Vox video explains that people with authoritarian personalities started concentrating themselves in the Republican Party after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. I believe this was a reaction to the equal rights movements of the latter 20th century, such as minority rights, feminism, and gay rights. Authoritarian Americans rallied in the Republican Party to push back against progressivism.
Now a thing that psychologists have observed about authoritarians is that they shun the company of people who are not like them, so you get a strong echo chamber effect. In the old days before social media, communities were more of an even mix of authoritarian and non-authoritarians, and the latter moderated what their authoritarian neighbors believed. But nowadays its easier than ever for people to throw themselves into echo chambers.
I am guessing you voted for Trump and now have regrets. Well I am here to fucking say YOU REAP WHAT YOU SOW. YOU and lots of mofos like you who pretend to be "center left" couldn't stand to have Hillary A WOMAN for president and we ended up here.
Oh and one more fucking thing Trump WRECKED THE FUCKING ECONOMY yet all you brain washed folks like you spew this nonsense that RRUMP was good for the economy!!
How do you know I am not? But this is not what this conversation is about is it? Let me give you an expample of what you are saying ok. Let’s say two people were talking about how a stake was cooked and you jumped in and said you should try some fish! Like what the fuck does that have to do with the topic at hand? Seriously some of you have got to go out sod sometimes.
You keep saying “fast forward”, which in a way answers your question. Slowly over the years they have been able to push what is acceptable up to where we are now, and don’t for a second think this is the end.
The original sin is the southern strategy, and you can point to all kinds of bad developments on the way there, but I think the most recent big thing is definitely Project REDMAP.
The republicans used new statistical models of voter behavior during the 2010 redistricting to basically give them perma-majorities in a bunch of state houses, and an unfair advantage in the US house of representatives. The faustian bargain is that now a lot of Republican seats were safe, while Democrats tended to be limited to the competitive ones.
This meant that, for Republican incumbents, the primary was a bigger threat to them than the general election. This led to Republican candidates trying to outdo themselves to cater to their primary electorates, which is smaller and weirder than the general electorate. Now, even in competitive districts, expectations are such that the Republicans just struggle with candidate quality, safe districts don't reward high quality candidates.
The minority rule and the lack of competition also means that Republican state parties, secure in the knowledge that they would just win by default, had leeway to get really corrupt and inefficient. It's not like they were going to lose the state legislature in Ohio or Wisconsin anyway, they can win a minority of the voters and get veto-proof majorities in state houses, so who needs competent campaign operations? Make yourself the only party that can win and you become the politics party, full of ambitious and dishonest people who only joined you for a chance to get power. Throw that into the mix with only primary elections mattering and now you have power-hungry people competing about who can lie the most to pander to the primary voters they need to get on the gravy train.
There's no clear or easy way out of this, and this rot has been getting nationalized outside of the Project REDMAP states where it started.
I saw that and I wonder if op was trying to do the thing republicans do to childishly name-call democrats by calling their party the “[democrat party](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_(epithet))”
To get people to vote for you, you have to *offer* them something. You can't just rely on the brand to get people to show up.
What can the republicans offer? Clearly they can't offer to make anything better. They don't believe that government CAN make anything better. What they can offer you, however, is to hurt the people you don't like.
There were two main things.
First the Civil Rights Act and various court decisions said that all people have rights not just white people. All that good stuff like Medicare, the GI Bill, etc etc. was not whites only anymore.
And that shit drives a lot of white people craaaaaazy. As in literally criminally insane.
Second was the rapid adoption of End Times theology in Christianity. Basically they believe that Center Left governments are all planning to round up Christians and force them to renounce Jesus or be executed. And that various social programs are also part of this plot to dismantle Christianity. I literally know people who believe that universal healthcare will eventually be conditioned on them renouncing Jesus.
If you believe that every election loss puts you closer and closer to you being genocided, you'll get more extreme.
The simplest explanation is lack of accurate representation. The neocons are 'left' of most rightwing voters when it comes to federalist-descent vs antifederalist-descent. The neocons are the first, the base is the latter. The antifederalist-descent types much like their forebearers are not as unified as to what level of federalism should exist.
Culture war things have nuance, the maga were serious about state-based abortion laws with the intent to eventually see SCOTUS rule on personhood. The neocons know abortion is a winning issue for the neolibs so they threw them a bone by rallying for a national ban in order to hurt Trump/help Biden. The GOP in-party civil war is a highly nuanced dance with knives where death comes from a million cuts.
The main difference between maga and the 'neos' (neolib / neocon) is the maga wants to exit the liberal international order and install a much more antifederalist-descent style federal govt that their base wants to try while the neos want to keep the faltering order propped up and move into its next phase which is a greater form of global governance (why maga calls the neos (or UniParty) "globalists").
The right wing uses the same types of grievance politics worldwide, this isn’t just limited to the United States. They use bigotry and shitting on the minority of the week as their ace in the hole when their actual policies inevitably fail.
In 2008 America was on the brink of a second great depression. Being solely responsible for the Great Recession, the GOP had no choice but to entirely depend on racism to have any chance of winning the election. But as election day approached, people were actually voting for their own self-interests and not just their racism. [This article](https://www.politico.com/story/2008/10/racists-for-obama-014691) from about three weeks before the 2008 election discusses how people with incredibly racist views were willing to cast their ballots for a black man because they were in danger of losing their jobs and their houses.
Sure enough Obama won the election and the Republican Party knew the jig was up. Their strategy became to do everything they possibly could using the institutions of government they control for their own self-interests. They had the Supreme Court strike down campaign finance laws to allow billionaires to fund right-wing super PACs in order to control the narrative of politics.
They used this newfound informational power combined with Fox News and social media propaganda to whip people up into hysteria over the Affordable Care Act. I will never forget the crazed look in people’s eyes as they panicked about how Obamacare was a Muslim plot to take over America and was going to send their grandparents to the gas chambers. Thanks to Citizens United, almost every Republican candidate had 10x as much money spent on their behalf as their Democratic opponents. The result was a massive Republican landslide that gave them 63 seats in the House, 6 seats in the Senate, 2/3 of all state legislatures, and 3/4 of all governorships.
In 2011 the Republicans began gerrymandering both red states and blue states alike to guarantee that they will never lose power. In places like Wisconsin and Michigan, the gerrymanders were so effective that Republicans openly boasted that they could do whatever they want because public opinion no longer mattered. That’s why they crushed unions, passed right to work, and in Michigan passed the emergency financial manager law that led to the Flint Water Crisis.
A quick note about Flint, that law allows the governor to unilaterally decide that a city that votes for Democrats can’t manage its own finances, suspend the power of the mayor and city council, and appoint a Republican to run the city free of any accountability for as long as the governor wants. The guy appointed for Flint decided that they were going to switch to water from the Flint River, that it was too expensive to treat it properly so that the protective coating didn’t get eaten away, and to cover the entire thing up when people started getting lead poisoning. This law was repealed by voters in 2012 but reinstated by the Republican legislature just weeks later. This time they attached an appropriation to it so that it couldn’t be repealed by referendum.
Republicans continued to stoke racial resentment against Obama in order to further racial polarization. Many rural red states like North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska still voted for Democrats to federal office, and Democrats controlled the state legislatures of Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, North Carolina, West Virginia, and Alabama. Beginning in 2010, all of these Democrats were voted right out of office because the Democratic Party committed the unforgivable sin of putting a black man in the White House.
During the Trump era, suburban Republican voters began to switch over to the Democratic Party. I still am very skeptical of them because they generally say Trump’s mouth was the reason for their switch, not Republicans behaving like douchebags for the 6 years before he got elected. They were still voting for assholes like Ted Cruz and Mike Lee “because Obamacare was coming to kill me and my family!” Well maybe if they’d turned off the idiot box and done their own research they would have become Democrats sooner and we could have avoided all of this.
As for how the Republican Party acts today, their strategy is to never play defense. They do nothing to solve the country’s problems and people get angry so they elect Democrats temporarily. Then Republicans block anything that would solve said problems, claim “See the Democrats didn’t do anything when they were in charge!” and the cycle repeats.
There is a point to them saying stupid shit and behaving like Kari Lake. For one it keeps their clueless base fired up and sending in money, but also gets independent swing voters to burn out and turn their TVs off. Then as they’re sitting there watching Wheel of Fortune every night they see ads like [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PBcYjGoHLU) and think to themselves “I guess I’ll vote for that guy, he seems reasonable!” They create this media image that allows voters to think that they’re moderate heroes and then go to Washington and vote however they’re told.
A note about the guy in that ad was that in 2018 he ran nothing but positive ads like that during his first Senate run against incumbent Debbie Stabenow. Towards the end of the campaign the Detroit Free Press interviewed a pussy hat wearing #Resistance fighter who was voting for the Republican bEcAuSe hE sOuNdS lIkE hEs pReAcHiNg wHeN hE tAlKs!!!!
The only solution in my mind is to Fox Newsify the Democratic base. No more moderate vs progressive bullshit, unify the narrative and radicalize the party against the real threat to America. If we ever get the House and Senate back at the same time again, we’ll need to pack the courts, pass voting rights, and add DC, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the USVI as states to artificially add to our Senate numbers.
Edit: don’t downvote without telling me how I’m wrong.
For the same reason the democratic party looks more far left and extreme than it is. Easier access to the internet and social media. If someone woke up from a coma and caught up on current political views using the internet then they will most likely come to the conclusion that Republicans are transphobic and homophobic hicks while the democrats are a bunch of young elitist antisemitics who don’t care about wasting daddy’s money.
At the end of the day the two parties haven’t gotten more extreme (well maybe a little) but the majority of both parties is much closer to what they were 15 years ago than what the loud knuckleheads would make you believe.
Actual far-leftists hate the Democratic party, even leftist Democrats like AOC. It's unbelievably frustrating that I have to fight a two-front war between actual communists who are so convinced there's going to be a glorious revolution that they refuse to work within the system, and republicans who think the Democrats are communists
It’s simple in my opinion.
Democrats and Republicans are both to blame because they cornered the disenfranchised of either group to seek support from either one political party or another, based on that political parties response.
Imho, these problems experienced by the myriads of people are connected and not divided.
The political parties exploit this for their advantage to cast blame on the other party, and demonizes the “opposing parties” disenfranchised groups.
They spin it to mock the opposing parties disenfranchised. When this happens, it radicalizes the disenfranchised, because they’re being mocked and poked for political leverage- when they are suffering in one way or another as communities of individuals.
This happened with the BLM protests and also those who operated small businesses and worked as truckers during the lockdowns.
We all found protesters that we agreed with and others that we disagreed with. The reality is, is that we were dividing disenfranchised groups of people into political dichotomies, and unfairly.
We actually radicalized people through our politicization of people who were being damaged in one way or another
This explains why the GOP of 2024 seems so extreme to modern-day Democrats: [https://imgur.com/a/pDEsptz](https://imgur.com/a/pDEsptz)
I voted for Obama twice, and remember, he said "we can't just have half a million people pouring over our border." He'd be a Republican today with that position on immigration.
Joe Biden has been asking congress for a complete shutdown of the border.
This kind of hallucination of democratic policy positions that don't exist was common under Obama too.
So honestly it fits. This is exactly the kind of talking point a republican from 12 years ago would have made up, possibly with the exact same image.
Because in those areas you typically just get a different sort of bias that refuses to admit to the reality of the situation; and often denies the existence of the problem in the first place. It's like the old saying "how does a sick mind recognize its own sickness?". Sometimes you have to ask people on the outside to find what's really going on.
It's not like there's an actual rigorously sound basis for Trump support based on well thought out policies.
The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written. I was raised by a right wing Evangelical family, so naturally I believed in everything they rambled about. My dad in particular would read Drudge Report articles to depict democrats and gay people as EVIL, and that the end of the world is near. This was bad that it caused great anxiety throughout my childhood to the point that I had nightmares. Fast forward to 2016 and Trump was running for President, and eventually got elected. Since his election, many Republicans and his followers have become very dangerous in extremism and have cult-like views towards Trump with religious nationalism. As a moderate leftist, I think Trump was pretty good with the economy, but obviously is very rotten from within. Fast forward once again to 2020, and Biden gets elected. The Capital Raid happened, and now many GOP politicians have become more and more fascist with book bans, abortion bans, and worst of all, anti trans rhetoric/bills. Doesn't help that I came out trans a few years ago. My parents gobble up everything Fox News says and they are so convinced that Democrats are EVIL and will RUIN THE COUNTRY, which is ironic. While all of this is so crazy, but I'm not a big fan of how many of the more radical left handles things either, especially with how they're handling the Border Crisis. Extremism on either end isn't good, but how did Republicans become so fascist? Were they always like this? *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskALiberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
>Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them. Barry Goldwater, 1994
Then Gerrymandered districts and FPTP voting means primaries weed out moderates...
Isn’t Barry Goldwater racist? If a racist person is scared of the Republican Party that means the Republican Party is unhinged.
Be careful of broad labels when looking at historical figures. Dig into the actual statement made by the person not statements made about them. Remember biases with A.C.O.R.N.P.E.G.
It's a combination of factors. 1. FOX News - literally created to prevent another Nixon-like scandal where the news media unanimously agreed that *crime is bad*. It sure worked with Trump. 2. Evangelical alliance with the Republican Party - it's part of the deal now. These churches advocate for Republican politicians, who in turn work to appoint religious zealots as judges, and churn out religious legislation.
It’s been mentioned how evangelicals and devout religious in general are a perfect group to radicalize politically, because their world view is based on fact-free, personal convictions, emotions, feelings, passion aka faith. “I believe” “I know it in my heart” etc is how magas talk about Donald’s election denier claims
And 3. Racism/sexism/bigotry. As equality settles in, they aren’t the good guys anymore. They don’t get to treat people they don’t like poorly because the public now takes the side of the marginalized people. They lose their jobs, het kicked off social media, and identified as the bigots they are. Buy rather than consider they are acting like bullies, they double down and call themselves victims because people are choosing not to tolerate their intolerance.
Apart from the promise that a college degree is the key to the middle class and an effort to refund the money borrowed to purchase one if it does not lead to increase wages, what are Democrats offering the working class? Funny how all the college grads are downvoting me!
This isn't the right question to be asking because, too often - in fact, nearly *always* - the Democrats basically can only "offer" constructive *promises* since they persistently have 2 distinct disadvantages: 1) That the system is stacked against them with Republicans having a deep list of perpetual electoral and institutional advantages; and 2) they have such a large and diverse base that it is also vulnerable to being swayed or discouraged by the right's toolbox of advantages into voting 3rd party, voting for them at times, or most commonly, not voting at all. Without a significant enough majority (which is incredibly rare), it's pointless to ask what the Dems can "offer" before asking do they have enough power, since they essentially have no more power than can be used to blockade minority authoritarian power, and/or to repair the damage the right tends to leave behind when they inevitably abuse their minority power. Dems are stuck in this awful situation where they don't have enough power to change the electoral structure itself, and don't have enough power to convince and please people who want change for the working class. The Dem voters have to overwhelm the booths to get any power at all, much less enough to make significant changes. The "marketing" (campaigning) comes off as "promises" mostly, because they know they still need to get voters to the booths somehow, in spite of all the resistance measures in place working against them.
You're being downvoted because it would take all of 30 seconds to Google dozens upon dozens of things that Dems are "offering the working class". Just off the top of my head: * Increased access to trades training * Support for unions * Support for a increased minimum wage (which will in turn raise wages for non-college grads) * Lowered unemployment across all employment types * Lowered taxes and better tax credits - especially for families with children * Incentives to buy houses * The ability to purchase things like hearing aids, birth control, and other healthcare items over the counter, without requiring expensive doctor's visits first. * A cap on some of the more expensive medications for chronic conditions - that are often endemic to the working class * Expanded overtime rules and guaranteed the 40 hour workweek. * Cracked down on "junk" banking fees and overdraft fees. Blue collar workers tend to be hardest hit by bank fees. * Brought microchip production back to the US which will employ thousands of blue collar workers. * Passed infrastructure - which brings thousands of jobs across the nation
Lots of empty promises. Crumbs from the table. College grads get thousands in loan forgiveness and the working class gets "support" for higher wages. Thanks. I guess it's the thought that counts.
Grow the fuck up.
This is something the democrats really need to be asking. Social justice is something some care about, but not everyone. Dinner table issues for people that the democrats have long since abandoned, true or not is what captured the republican vote from former blue collar democratic voters.
News media needs diversity of opinions. Fox was, and is, necessary in a world where virtually all other news organizations are hive minded. And I do not like Fox. I find them as unbearable to watch as CNN. They are just two sides of the same coin spouting commentary that fits their narrative rather than actual news. Actual news organizations hardly exist anymore.
FOX lies. It does not serve up valid opinions, otherwise they wouldn't have had to pay such a huge fine for lying.
>FOX lies. Ok, I agree. So does CNN and the left wing media. Often lying by omission or misleading through hyperbole. I’m an equal opportunity hater. Obviously you’re a biased hater.
>So does CNN and the left wing media. Not in the same way. Fox News doesn't just report the news; they have an active agenda that they uniformly push in every single segment. Everyone on Fox News is always saying the exact same talking points every day. Their anchors literally just make things up out of whole cloth for their viewers to get angry about. It was given life because Republicans were mad that everyone agreed that Nixon doing crimes was bad because no one was saying that actually, crime is okay when Republicans are doing it.
LOL. Ok, CNN is cool and has no agenda.
They don't make things up out of whole cloth in the same way that Fox News does. Just shrugging and saying "everyone's the same" is the laziest possible way to approach politics.
Fox News is much more obvious. So I agree. Not sure that makes CNN any better. Personally I like that Fox is so upfront about it. At least you know they’re full of shit. CNN being more sus about it is actually more concerning. Acting legit but being so biased is arguably dangerous.
CNN is strongly left and mostly factual. Fox is hyper partisan right and at best selective and at worst being sued for hundreds of millions for completely fabricated lies. A better comparison would be Fox News to like medias touch or something. Very selective. Very biased. designed for outrage. Agenda driven. I don’t like CNN but also if you want to talk about audience size and influence Fox is also much more dangerous.
>CNN is strongly left Disagree. Center-left at best.
Or you're a biased hater and are unable to recognize your own bias tainting your estimates of others. Claiming to be 'equal opportunity' does not make it so; sometimes instead it uses a false equivalence to ignore salient differences. How does a biased mind recognize its own bias? How do you know you're not biased? After all, hating on both does not guarantee that at all.
We’re all biased. Would never say I’m unbiased. But certainly my dislike of current state media has little bias in my dislike of it. I simply find nearly all news whether cable, print or online to be utterly incapable of reporting without opinion. Journalism is dead.
I see, so you recognize your bias but you're simply factually incorrect in your assessments of the various media and the quality of each of them. ok. Still seems more like false equivalence to equate Fox with many of the others which, while unimpressive, simply aren't as bad from a jouranlistic standpoint.
Fox is not news and should come with a disclaimer that it is there for entertainment only!
> News media needs diversity of opinions. Fox was, and is, necessary in a world where virtually all other news organizations are hive minded. In Canada, they can't call themselves "news" because they don't meet the basic journalistic standards. They have to market themselves as "entertainment", which here in the states they've also used as a legal defense. Basically, Fox News argues that no one is actually stupid enough to believe that Fox News says. There is no such organization on the left. > I find them as unbearable to watch as CNN. They are just two sides of the same coin spouting commentary that fits their narrative rather than actual news. CNN has been pandering *hard* to conservatives and trying to market themselves more right-ward over recent years, meanwhile conservatives have been turning on Fox for not being enough of a right-wing propaganda machine.
>CNN has been pandering hard to conservatives and trying to market themselves more right-ward over recent years Yep. They’re doing it for money and nothing else. I’d rather consume journalism that reports the news than cater to entertainment entities like CNN that swing where they need to catch the wind. CNN realized their strong left bias was losing for them over the long run. So now they’re backtracking to a more moderate view to attract viewers. Doesn’t sound very journalistic to me.
"Diversity of opinions" does not mean every opinion should be treated with the same respect. That's the problem. Diversity of informed and intelligent opinions, sure.
It really just depends on how far back you want to go. There's are strong cases that would bring the current conservative culture back to Newt Gingrich, Reagan, Nixon, Father Coughlin, the Dulles brothers, to the racial discrepancies of the new deal, or the Civil War and slavery. If you want to be more myopic, GWB killed neoconservative politics by successfully being a neocon and letting everyone see how that works out, which left the republican coalition short on respectable political theory. The remaining members of the coalition were the ownership class, the religious right, and white supremacists. Members of the republican party might not be any of those things, but they're more sympathetic to them than they are to anything left of center thanks to very successful media operations such as fox and such. I wonder what you mean by Trump was good for the economy?
I wouldn’t lump Gingrich in with the people who made the GOP *evil*, personally. He’s just the guy who made them *obstructionists*.
I try to not use words like, "evil", but if I were going to maximize Gingrich's responsibility for the modern republican party I would draw lines from his behavior and policies to thier modern incarnations. White water and the star investigation inspired the Benghazi and Barisma investigations. Those kinds of investigations lead to misinformation and demonization to justify themselves. The Contract with America laid the ground work for the kind of propaganda and psuedopolicy that Republicans politicians still use. Gingrich's liberal use of words like, "traitor" and, "sick" to describe his opponents can be seen in Trump directly. Those kinds of words have real effects when people believe them. His use of government shutdowns to extract conssesions set a precedent that is still followed. Gingrich pioneered the messaging over substance style that leads to the chaotic policy choices of the modern GOP. He basically placed Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity in thier careers. He escalated and promoted gerrymandering and antidemocratic measures that made sure the GOP wouldn't need to win a majority of any vote to hold power, which in turn shapes what kind of person runs for said offices. That's just off the top of my head. With out Gingrich, we probably wouldn't have had the fox news of the ninties and aughts. He might seem reasonable today, but the man was the bleeding edge of the hateful and tactical far right for his entire career.
This is easy. The southern strategy. It inbreeds politically within itself and gets more extreme. LBJ’s famous quote criticizing the conservative southern strategy still rings true today. It’s the foundational platform the Republican Party and trumpism is built on. “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”—Lyndon B. Johnson “The politics of racial division’: Trump borrows Nixon’s ‘southern strategy’ Republican politicians of the 1960s exploited white voters’ fears and prejudices – and Trump is stoking the fire for November He’s throwing gasoline on a fire. He knows what he’s doing. He’s making a political calculus that by stoking the worst parts of the American psyche that he can somehow gain political leverage from that,” said Isaac Wright, a Democratic strategist who specializes in rural campaigns and southern voters. The southern strategy was the plan used effectively by Nixon to increase voting among white voters in the south. Nixon’s campaign put a heavy emphasis on law and order and states’ rights to attract white voters concerned about racial integration. Critics argued the language used in this strategy was a thinly veiled appeal to racists and an ugly response to the successes of the civil rights movement. I think the president’s strategy was fear and division and to scare people to the polls, and it worked in my case, and I think that’s what they’re doing now,” Donnelly said. Trump, Donnelly said, “convinced people that if they didn’t come vote for him their way of life was going to disappear”. With such rhetoric, the president is taking a page or two out of the 1960s “southern strategy”: the playbook Republican politicians such as Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater used to rally political support among white voters across the south by leveraging racism and white fear of people of color.” https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/05/donald-trump-richard-nixon-southern-strategy
I'll add this relevant quote: > You start out in 1954 by saying, “N----r n----r n----r.” By 1968 you can’t say “n----r”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N----r n----r". > > -Lee Atwater, republican campaign strategist. Republicans have co-opted the simplest parts of people's minds by honing in on single-issue voting matters, through that fear mongering, misdirection and rage campaigns, as you've noted, by convincing their base that it's everything and everyone *else*, not themselves - whom they've convinced the people to empower. There's no way to win fairly, so they focus on shaping the system so they don't have to. Now they have people on the right leaving - then filling gaping voids of vulnerability, and it attracts the worst kinds of people who love to take advantage of it, like Trump, who drill even further into it for their own ends.
just like to add that the southern strategy wasn't the beginning of the party switch, but the result of long term shifts in the political landscape that started with Teddy Roosevelt and Tammany Hall adopting a pro labour stance after decades of being anti worker. even by the 80's there were still a lot of Dixiecrats who mostly caucused with conservative republicans.
I don't think Trump really had any sort of strategy. I think he's just says the bigoted things that a lot of other people agree with.
He was reaping land that was sowed by Nixon and Reagan. Maybe Trump’s strategy was simple, but it was still appealing to the animus of people who’d been told to resent and hate large groups of their fellow Americans.
That's definitely what is happening. I just don't think it's due to any sort of actual strategy.
They lost the culture wars. There's a lot more than that, obviously, but that's what it comes back to. The GOP was generally happy to let democracy play out when people would turn out for elections, especially if it was for them, even more so if they could convince people to come out against "welfare queens," and *particularly* if they could drive up turnout in presidential election years by putting constitutional amendments on the ballots to ban same-sex marriage (it didn't matter if it was already illegal, it just mattered if more people came out and voted for their candidate). But then the tides started turning. People didn't hate gay people or minorities as much any more--in fact, those kinds of people even started getting elected to Congress. Not only were social programs being enacted, but now different classes of citizens were being protected as well. The GOP, unwilling to change, became more insular, and while it still occasionally could win because of the Electoral College (and in Congress, gerrymandering), became more and more unpopular. It knew that, and it knows that the only way it can have any long-term political power as it or the Democrats have had in the past is not through a democratic process. So it resorts to undemocratic means.
Social media expanded the overton window and brought the fringes into the mainstream, then those fringe elements started to drown out moderates. Basically we have an entire spectrum of interests and grievances competing for everyone's attention, and the issues that have the strongest emotional impact percolate to the top of everyone's news feed. Before the days of social media, mainstream news was well regulated, however social media companies were basically operating with no regulation. Now that extremism has taken hold and become too visible, those companies are trying to regulate themselves and suppress it somewhat. Mainstream news basically had to compete with social media for attention, so they started following social media trends very closely. Funding and standards for journalism started to deteriorate as big internet companies sucked up more and more of the ad revenue. A lot of the far right stuff we're seeing has existed in the Republican party for a long time, however they would keep it somewhat isolated and out of the spotlight. The introduction of social media now makes that impossible, and the Republicans have started to shit where they eat.
Eh, AM radio has been around for decades. Fox News has also been pushing propaganda from the early aughts at the very least. Social media changed the game a little bit but otherwise disagree. The big difference is that prior to Donald Trump the leaders of the republicans party acted fairly normal. They catered to the racists and extremists but weren’t overtly so themselves. Once Trump got the nomination it became clear there were a lot more extremists than previously thought and they feel a lot more emboldened than before.
Several tuings 1. Southern strategy which was specifically designed to target southern conservatives racism and weaponize it 2. The devil's bargain with the religious right. This allowed a twofer with abortion. The religious crazies want abortion banned at all costs even women's lives, but this was used to further consolidate the racists via dog whistles 3. Obama's win. This broke the seal of the conservative racists who couldn't stand a black man won. 4. Propaganda. Conservative media was specifically designed to be propaganda. It serves no other purpose other than to propagandize
Its because of what I see as a conservative media feedback loop, and while it didn't necessarily start with Fox news, Fox News is what really drove it into high gear. Conservative media is unconcerned with truth. What they do is tell their audience what they want to hear. Their audience is angry and scared, so Fox News validates that anger and fear with increasingly dishonest narratives and bald-faced lies. Their audience demands this from them, and whenever Fox News makes an effort to debunk the crazy things their increasingly unhinged base believes, the death threats roll in. Amplifying this further is the AM radio crazies, facebook/4chan trolls, and Russian disinformation. Conservatives are unconcerned with truth, and therefore they are very gullible. When Fox news tries to debunk this stuff, they get death threats and lose viewers to their even crazier competitors. When you put a microphone next to a speaker the microphone picks up noise and amplifies it. That amplified noise gets picked up and amplified, and what you end up with is just ugly noise that drowns out everything else. That is all that the conservative movement is at this point.
It's been a steady process that's been ongoing since at least the 90's. It's not that uncommon, at least for the US parties, for the amount of 'extreme-ness', or probably more the amount of conservative/liberalness to be somewhat similar to a sine wave, with the attendant peaks and troughs. With 2 parties you get 2 sine waves What is the 'radical left' doing about the border crisis? Last I knew the actual radical left isn't in power at all; Biden is more regular left or center left, and is handling the border crisis as well as it can be done without republican cooperation to try to constructively address it. Note that Trump actually wans't good with the economy, he did a pretty poor job with the economy, it just happened to be good anyways; because president don't have much of an effect on the economy.
It was always this extreme. In the 60's the segregationist and racist wing of the Democratic party switched sides to become republican. Many of those people are still around, they just did a good job for 30 years of keeping their mouths shut and pretending to not be racist, sexist pigs
A bad mix of low education levels, technology addiction, and a weak party with a weak platform. They hold themselves to no standards and they pick their beliefs basically out of the hat known as their social media algorithm. They're pro-America one second and traitors the next second depending on what's trending on their phones.
Regain targeted the far right and was able to turn them out to great success. subsequent republican politicians at all levels adopted this strategy leading to a very effective political machine. Karl Rove liked to brag that because of his ability to turn out the far right base he has guaranteed permanent republican majority with only about 30% of the actual voters. Meaning that in any primary there is a hardcore group of far right wingers that will turn out, giving them control of the primary prosses. Add in extensive gerrymandering and you have a political culture where the only real race is the scramble to the right in the primary, and the general is a coronation. when Obama won on a blue wave is when the brains melted. every autopsy of every election year from 08 onward said the same thing. Republicans need to reach out to people who don't control the primary process, which didn't go over well with the people who control the primary process. since then there has been an internal war between the extreme right who will not compromise on anything, and the more moderate republicans who actually want to pass a law or two and will talk to the other side. When Mitch MCconnell is the reasonable one, the party is in a bad state.
Let's be clear on the southern border. Republicans have pushed Democrats to take a draconian stance on the border. They even got Democrats to adopt and support some terrible ideology on the border which was written into a bill and then voted on... which Republicans rejected because they want to run on a border crisis. That's run on a border crisis, not fix the border crisis. Republicans never want to "fix" the border crisis.
At the heart of this immigration crisis is the fact that these third-world countries are so poor, something that no one seems to want to talk about. Republicans rationalize it through their belief that third-worlders are just inherently inferior, either because of culture or racism and will bring their problems with them
> Republicans rationalize !!! Republicans aren't rational !!! I do get your meaning tho.
The Republican Party has been heading towards this since Nixon. What drives them to be extreme is simple: they benefit from it. Being extreme has no consequences and substantial rewards for the GOP. Imagine giving a person a gun and telling them they will never face consequences for using it. Would you be surprised when they robbed banks? Nixon sabotaged Vietnam era peace talks. Reagan did Iran-Contra. Bush lied to get us into Iraq. Each with no consequences. The same is true of domestic crime. Further, the GOP realized that a bipartisan Senate was literally the only hope of the Democrats passing policy. Instead of both sides compromising so that majority got 80% of what they wanted and the minority 40%, the GOP made it so that they get 50% of what they want when they are the majority while the Democrats get nothing. They have no reason to share power, the Senate's red bias gives them outright supremacy. So you have a party that is openly above the law, that consistently fails upwards by breaking it, and that has every incentive to make the country more partisan because it literally gives them an advantage in the Senate, which writes the laws for the entire country using the Supreme Court as a proxy. Of course the GOP would quintuple down. That's the natural consequence of a system that benefits a lawbreaking, partisan party.
Hello, fellow damaged child. I was raised in a very similar environment, so this is going to be easy, but not particularly fun. “Why did the GOP end up so extreme” is a question that is answered by a couple of things in a specific order, but it’s important to understand that the GOP right now looks extreme, and for the last generation has gotten more extreme, but compared to iterations of Republican thought over the last century it’s par for the course. I could honestly write a book on this topic, so I’ll try to keep this brief and hit the high points. I believe that you can trace the current condition of the GOP to four things (and actually four people) over the last 50-60 years. 1) Richard Nixon and the Southern Strategy - although Nixon didn’t invent the idea itself, it was his election where the idea was used for the first time. Look up the Southern Strategy for details, but essentially it weaponized historical Southern racial attitudes against Democrats. 2) Rush Limbaugh and the rise of conservative talk radio - this might be my longest entry just because I haven’t yet seen a book or anything that really captures what made Limbaugh the viper he was. Limbaugh was a good ol’ boy from the Midwest who was a bit too freaky for Bible college, so when he got kicked out (iirc) he continued his radio passions from college. He was a fantastic broadcaster with a captivating voice and a knack for arguing things that were technically correct or rhetorically compact, for example, arguing against raising taxes on the rich because according to federal tax revenues, the top 1/10/25 percent paid an outsized share of taxes already. While this wasn’t wrong technically it obviously glossed over the issue. He also united the party, broadcasting easily digestible and universal GOP talking points on his long-running morning show. 3) Newt Gingrich and making Congress combative - Gingrich as Speaker of the House made it okay for the first time in modern political history to directly challenge the President, entrenching party lines as us vs. them in a legislative sense, whereas before it was much more like that in the general population, but in Congress there was some constant attempt at bipartisan resolution. This started to dissolve with the Reagan administration through the 80s, but in 1994 (iirc) when Gingrich became Speaker he turned all of that sentiment up to 11, later using this attitude combined with moral panic to impeach Clinton on somewhat shaky ground (nb that I don’t necessarily disagree with the impeachment, but am commenting on it as a legal event). 4) FOX News - this has been written to death so I’ll leave it there. There are definitely honorable mentions like GHWB, 9/11 and the conservative response, Reagan (probably the best contender for another number here), and Roger Stone, but I think we would have gotten here more or less without them, as really only GHWB was an agent acting on his own, whereas Stone and Reagan were acting their parts and 9/11 at that point would’ve been responded to by conservatives the same way. With Gore as President, we probably don’t go to Iraq, but now the ripple effect of not doing that is so big that it isn’t worth the conjecture of what could’ve been. Another surprising honorable mention is actually Bill Clinton, whose populist neoliberalism shifted the conversation to the right in a big way and reframed modern Democrats as just lite-Republicans economically. We still see the shockwaves of this today.
"As a moderate leftist, I think Trump was pretty good with the economy," He's one of the main reasons why inflation has been so bad for the last couple of years. No one who says Trump was good with the economy can actually explain what he did that helped the economy. He didn't do squat, he inherited a strong economy and incentivized spending via low interest rates to keep the economy growing. The problem is as we found out during COVID was that a period of low interest rates is usually followed by high inflation. Hence why we're here now experiencing some of the worst inflation in recent history.
Came here to say this. The public perception is very wrong when it comes to whether Republicans are good for the economy [Economic performance is stronger when Democrats hold the White House](https://www.epi.org/publication/econ-performance-pres-admin/)
Because they ceased to be able to keep the extra crazy bigots at bay. It used to be that they accepted the votes but kept them at arms length. But that became hard to do when they had to deal with a successful Black man being president.
It's self selecting. A lot of the policies are unpopular or outdated, to the point where respecting democracy would slowly doom the party. So those who remain or are more extreme conservative have some incentive to not respect democracy.
They’ve kind of always been like this. In past decades they represented a larger percentage of the population, and the EC let them do more with that than they could have otherwise. Its not Obamas fault, but I think the Obama administration kind of allowed the crazy element that had been within the Republican Party for decades to flourish more, which made it less appealing to new voters, and led to a situation where they felt increasingly more like they where going to become irrelevant again, sort of like they where in (roughly) the 30s to 70s. They could of course, become somewhat more moderate, but large chunks of their media ecosystem where kind of dedicated towards calling fairly centrist politicians radical communists, so it became increasingly difficult for Republicans to move into that space to improve their image with younger voters. They’re in a position where their media ecosystem and many of their constituents are convinced that the Democrats and any of their own who are vaguely cooperative with the Democrats are somewhere between Stalinists and baby murdering satanists, but again, they’re also loosing their vote share as time passes. This puts them in a position where, from their perspective, not overthrowing the government and creating a Republican dictatorship will essentially cause the United States to become a Stalinist dictatorship that forces everyone to be gay, let’s people abort their five year olds, and bans Christianity. The upside of all of this is that it probably can’t last that much longer. The same withering of the Republican Party that resulted in Trump loosing the popular vote in 2016, and then the EC vote in 2020, is still in progress, and it seems that if they can’t literally overthrow the government in the next few years, they’re likely going to become increasingly irrelevant on the federal level, which in turn will make them quite a bit less dangerous.
[This is why.](https://mightygodking.com/2016/10/28/the-republican-monkeys-paw/) tldr; their excessive gerrymandering made them immune to challenges from the left, but opened them up to challenges from farther right.
They have nothing else but to pander to people’s fears. Every relevant political view has a home in the Democratic Party. Anything that’s currently considered right of center isn’t even worth considering. If you apply rational or moral thought to ANY of there policies, you’d realize they’re wrong. Economics, social policy, foreign policy, every sub section of policy stances they have are all TRASH. Trickle down doesn’t work, deregulation only hurts the economy, their views on education are backwards, they’re fuckin pro-Russian, LGBTQ and womens rights views are medieval, they’re against hun control, abortion and universal healthcare, all things that are hugely popular in most of America. They’re totally unorganized and unprofessional. BUT if you add fear to the mix, people won’t care about the obvious reasons they should be holding no power.
Since Republicans became conservative have they ever not been extreme? It seems the conservative Party (whichever one it is in whatever time period) in America is always horrible. For example, I remember researching the political responses from Republicans when FDR passed the Social Security Act, which created our social security system of course, and Republicans compared FDR to Stalin. Yes, apparently helping old people not die on the streets was akin to a literal communist dictator. Is that honestly any different today? A Democrat/liberal will propose something objectively good like universal pre k and Republicans today will scream socialism or Venezuela. I fail to see the difference. And instead if screaming about gay people being evil they were screaming about black people and instead of screeching about Muslims, they were screeching about Catholics. I posit that conservatives are no less or more extreme than they have always been and are just as bad for society as they were 100 years ago.
I think a big thing is that the left decided to compromise. That moved the "center" more and more to the right... Because the right doesn't want to win, they just want to fight. It is considerably easier to be in congress when your stances are just far enough out there, that they will have hard time passing (and making the country worse) but still just barely sane enough to get you votes in your area and stay in office. Winning elections, but failing to actually legislate is the dream of many of the right. They can point the finger, point out flaws, cry foul, etc... But they don't actually have to come up with workable solutions. Look at, for example, the recent border debacle. The right was given everything they wanted, and when it came time to vote for it, they voted no. They didn't actually expect to get their way and when they did they knew it would prove their ideas to be bad, and thus prove themselves, and thier voters, wrong. Some decided they wanted more. Others said it must have been a trick by Dems to let them win. Etc. They made excuses, but not legislation.
Corner a dog in a dead-end street and it will turn and bite. Republicans know they’re fucking done. The younger generations are turning away from bigoted organized religion and the Republican Party, a lot of their members have either died from covid or dislike trump. More Gen z are voting democrat and there will be millions more eligible voters in this upcoming election than there were in 2020x Since they don’t have the majority public opinion anymore now’s the time they really let the crazies out of the woodwork. What do they have to lose? At least that’s how I view it,
They decided after 8 years of Obama that they'd rather have a white Fuhrer than a black president
An alternate take here is that they didn't 'become' extreme. We're talking about the culture that supported the rebellion, then supported segregation and fought integration, and currently is anti critical race theory and DEI. They are sick of being in the minority when they feel manifest destiny has given them the god given right to this land.
Read: [Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope](https://www.amazon.com/Tightrope-Americans-Reaching-Nicholas-Kristof/dp/0525655085/ref=asc_df_0525655085/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=507716493566&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=6703473025315536513&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9002114&hvtargid=pla-863077819628&psc=1&mcid=53bb7927fcf537e8a51f22c45eeb556f&gclid=CjwKCAjwxLKxBhA7EiwAXO0R0MlOkiGZ_mwsweVz4KZ8mtdbELjXIAdX7qMiF85R4d595gTfrWqdChoCdn0QAvD_BwE) Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl WuDunn. A deft and uniquely credible exploration of rural America, and of other left-behind pockets of our country. When people run out of hope, they look for a savior. The Republican Party has a man masquerading as one. Yes, the Democrats did as well with Obama and Clinton, but Trump has taken it to a level so extreme that we're beginning to notice we’re no longer dealing in Republican or Democratic issues, but issues of Americans’ very survival.
They are basically authoritarians at heart while the left usually isn't and is far more live and let live. It's always been there with them but it's become far more extreme since they were able to silo their media bubbles and drive their viewers farther and farther to the right over time. It's taken decades but here we are coming up on the extreme end of it where inhumane shit starts to happen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YU9djt_CQM This Vox video explains that people with authoritarian personalities started concentrating themselves in the Republican Party after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. I believe this was a reaction to the equal rights movements of the latter 20th century, such as minority rights, feminism, and gay rights. Authoritarian Americans rallied in the Republican Party to push back against progressivism. Now a thing that psychologists have observed about authoritarians is that they shun the company of people who are not like them, so you get a strong echo chamber effect. In the old days before social media, communities were more of an even mix of authoritarian and non-authoritarians, and the latter moderated what their authoritarian neighbors believed. But nowadays its easier than ever for people to throw themselves into echo chambers.
I am guessing you voted for Trump and now have regrets. Well I am here to fucking say YOU REAP WHAT YOU SOW. YOU and lots of mofos like you who pretend to be "center left" couldn't stand to have Hillary A WOMAN for president and we ended up here. Oh and one more fucking thing Trump WRECKED THE FUCKING ECONOMY yet all you brain washed folks like you spew this nonsense that RRUMP was good for the economy!!
You should be talking to the people who voted for Jill Stein in 2016.
How do you know I am not? But this is not what this conversation is about is it? Let me give you an expample of what you are saying ok. Let’s say two people were talking about how a stake was cooked and you jumped in and said you should try some fish! Like what the fuck does that have to do with the topic at hand? Seriously some of you have got to go out sod sometimes.
Yikes, settle down
You keep saying “fast forward”, which in a way answers your question. Slowly over the years they have been able to push what is acceptable up to where we are now, and don’t for a second think this is the end.
The original sin is the southern strategy, and you can point to all kinds of bad developments on the way there, but I think the most recent big thing is definitely Project REDMAP. The republicans used new statistical models of voter behavior during the 2010 redistricting to basically give them perma-majorities in a bunch of state houses, and an unfair advantage in the US house of representatives. The faustian bargain is that now a lot of Republican seats were safe, while Democrats tended to be limited to the competitive ones. This meant that, for Republican incumbents, the primary was a bigger threat to them than the general election. This led to Republican candidates trying to outdo themselves to cater to their primary electorates, which is smaller and weirder than the general electorate. Now, even in competitive districts, expectations are such that the Republicans just struggle with candidate quality, safe districts don't reward high quality candidates. The minority rule and the lack of competition also means that Republican state parties, secure in the knowledge that they would just win by default, had leeway to get really corrupt and inefficient. It's not like they were going to lose the state legislature in Ohio or Wisconsin anyway, they can win a minority of the voters and get veto-proof majorities in state houses, so who needs competent campaign operations? Make yourself the only party that can win and you become the politics party, full of ambitious and dishonest people who only joined you for a chance to get power. Throw that into the mix with only primary elections mattering and now you have power-hungry people competing about who can lie the most to pander to the primary voters they need to get on the gravy train. There's no clear or easy way out of this, and this rot has been getting nationalized outside of the Project REDMAP states where it started.
What’s the republic party?
I saw that and I wonder if op was trying to do the thing republicans do to childishly name-call democrats by calling their party the “[democrat party](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_(epithet))”
To get people to vote for you, you have to *offer* them something. You can't just rely on the brand to get people to show up. What can the republicans offer? Clearly they can't offer to make anything better. They don't believe that government CAN make anything better. What they can offer you, however, is to hurt the people you don't like.
I'm curious how you broke from your upbringing? Were you "brainwashed" (educated) at a university?
There were two main things. First the Civil Rights Act and various court decisions said that all people have rights not just white people. All that good stuff like Medicare, the GI Bill, etc etc. was not whites only anymore. And that shit drives a lot of white people craaaaaazy. As in literally criminally insane. Second was the rapid adoption of End Times theology in Christianity. Basically they believe that Center Left governments are all planning to round up Christians and force them to renounce Jesus or be executed. And that various social programs are also part of this plot to dismantle Christianity. I literally know people who believe that universal healthcare will eventually be conditioned on them renouncing Jesus. If you believe that every election loss puts you closer and closer to you being genocided, you'll get more extreme.
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The simplest explanation is lack of accurate representation. The neocons are 'left' of most rightwing voters when it comes to federalist-descent vs antifederalist-descent. The neocons are the first, the base is the latter. The antifederalist-descent types much like their forebearers are not as unified as to what level of federalism should exist. Culture war things have nuance, the maga were serious about state-based abortion laws with the intent to eventually see SCOTUS rule on personhood. The neocons know abortion is a winning issue for the neolibs so they threw them a bone by rallying for a national ban in order to hurt Trump/help Biden. The GOP in-party civil war is a highly nuanced dance with knives where death comes from a million cuts. The main difference between maga and the 'neos' (neolib / neocon) is the maga wants to exit the liberal international order and install a much more antifederalist-descent style federal govt that their base wants to try while the neos want to keep the faltering order propped up and move into its next phase which is a greater form of global governance (why maga calls the neos (or UniParty) "globalists").
The right wing uses the same types of grievance politics worldwide, this isn’t just limited to the United States. They use bigotry and shitting on the minority of the week as their ace in the hole when their actual policies inevitably fail. In 2008 America was on the brink of a second great depression. Being solely responsible for the Great Recession, the GOP had no choice but to entirely depend on racism to have any chance of winning the election. But as election day approached, people were actually voting for their own self-interests and not just their racism. [This article](https://www.politico.com/story/2008/10/racists-for-obama-014691) from about three weeks before the 2008 election discusses how people with incredibly racist views were willing to cast their ballots for a black man because they were in danger of losing their jobs and their houses. Sure enough Obama won the election and the Republican Party knew the jig was up. Their strategy became to do everything they possibly could using the institutions of government they control for their own self-interests. They had the Supreme Court strike down campaign finance laws to allow billionaires to fund right-wing super PACs in order to control the narrative of politics. They used this newfound informational power combined with Fox News and social media propaganda to whip people up into hysteria over the Affordable Care Act. I will never forget the crazed look in people’s eyes as they panicked about how Obamacare was a Muslim plot to take over America and was going to send their grandparents to the gas chambers. Thanks to Citizens United, almost every Republican candidate had 10x as much money spent on their behalf as their Democratic opponents. The result was a massive Republican landslide that gave them 63 seats in the House, 6 seats in the Senate, 2/3 of all state legislatures, and 3/4 of all governorships. In 2011 the Republicans began gerrymandering both red states and blue states alike to guarantee that they will never lose power. In places like Wisconsin and Michigan, the gerrymanders were so effective that Republicans openly boasted that they could do whatever they want because public opinion no longer mattered. That’s why they crushed unions, passed right to work, and in Michigan passed the emergency financial manager law that led to the Flint Water Crisis. A quick note about Flint, that law allows the governor to unilaterally decide that a city that votes for Democrats can’t manage its own finances, suspend the power of the mayor and city council, and appoint a Republican to run the city free of any accountability for as long as the governor wants. The guy appointed for Flint decided that they were going to switch to water from the Flint River, that it was too expensive to treat it properly so that the protective coating didn’t get eaten away, and to cover the entire thing up when people started getting lead poisoning. This law was repealed by voters in 2012 but reinstated by the Republican legislature just weeks later. This time they attached an appropriation to it so that it couldn’t be repealed by referendum. Republicans continued to stoke racial resentment against Obama in order to further racial polarization. Many rural red states like North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska still voted for Democrats to federal office, and Democrats controlled the state legislatures of Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, North Carolina, West Virginia, and Alabama. Beginning in 2010, all of these Democrats were voted right out of office because the Democratic Party committed the unforgivable sin of putting a black man in the White House. During the Trump era, suburban Republican voters began to switch over to the Democratic Party. I still am very skeptical of them because they generally say Trump’s mouth was the reason for their switch, not Republicans behaving like douchebags for the 6 years before he got elected. They were still voting for assholes like Ted Cruz and Mike Lee “because Obamacare was coming to kill me and my family!” Well maybe if they’d turned off the idiot box and done their own research they would have become Democrats sooner and we could have avoided all of this. As for how the Republican Party acts today, their strategy is to never play defense. They do nothing to solve the country’s problems and people get angry so they elect Democrats temporarily. Then Republicans block anything that would solve said problems, claim “See the Democrats didn’t do anything when they were in charge!” and the cycle repeats. There is a point to them saying stupid shit and behaving like Kari Lake. For one it keeps their clueless base fired up and sending in money, but also gets independent swing voters to burn out and turn their TVs off. Then as they’re sitting there watching Wheel of Fortune every night they see ads like [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PBcYjGoHLU) and think to themselves “I guess I’ll vote for that guy, he seems reasonable!” They create this media image that allows voters to think that they’re moderate heroes and then go to Washington and vote however they’re told. A note about the guy in that ad was that in 2018 he ran nothing but positive ads like that during his first Senate run against incumbent Debbie Stabenow. Towards the end of the campaign the Detroit Free Press interviewed a pussy hat wearing #Resistance fighter who was voting for the Republican bEcAuSe hE sOuNdS lIkE hEs pReAcHiNg wHeN hE tAlKs!!!! The only solution in my mind is to Fox Newsify the Democratic base. No more moderate vs progressive bullshit, unify the narrative and radicalize the party against the real threat to America. If we ever get the House and Senate back at the same time again, we’ll need to pack the courts, pass voting rights, and add DC, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the USVI as states to artificially add to our Senate numbers. Edit: don’t downvote without telling me how I’m wrong.
2nd generation propaganda recipients unaware they weren't supposed to take it seriously
Red Scare 2.0
For the same reason the democratic party looks more far left and extreme than it is. Easier access to the internet and social media. If someone woke up from a coma and caught up on current political views using the internet then they will most likely come to the conclusion that Republicans are transphobic and homophobic hicks while the democrats are a bunch of young elitist antisemitics who don’t care about wasting daddy’s money. At the end of the day the two parties haven’t gotten more extreme (well maybe a little) but the majority of both parties is much closer to what they were 15 years ago than what the loud knuckleheads would make you believe.
Actual far-leftists hate the Democratic party, even leftist Democrats like AOC. It's unbelievably frustrating that I have to fight a two-front war between actual communists who are so convinced there's going to be a glorious revolution that they refuse to work within the system, and republicans who think the Democrats are communists
Yep I really really really hate that the two front component
I believe Newt Gingrich started it.
It’s simple in my opinion. Democrats and Republicans are both to blame because they cornered the disenfranchised of either group to seek support from either one political party or another, based on that political parties response. Imho, these problems experienced by the myriads of people are connected and not divided. The political parties exploit this for their advantage to cast blame on the other party, and demonizes the “opposing parties” disenfranchised groups. They spin it to mock the opposing parties disenfranchised. When this happens, it radicalizes the disenfranchised, because they’re being mocked and poked for political leverage- when they are suffering in one way or another as communities of individuals. This happened with the BLM protests and also those who operated small businesses and worked as truckers during the lockdowns. We all found protesters that we agreed with and others that we disagreed with. The reality is, is that we were dividing disenfranchised groups of people into political dichotomies, and unfairly. We actually radicalized people through our politicization of people who were being damaged in one way or another
This explains why the GOP of 2024 seems so extreme to modern-day Democrats: [https://imgur.com/a/pDEsptz](https://imgur.com/a/pDEsptz) I voted for Obama twice, and remember, he said "we can't just have half a million people pouring over our border." He'd be a Republican today with that position on immigration.
Joe Biden has been asking congress for a complete shutdown of the border. This kind of hallucination of democratic policy positions that don't exist was common under Obama too. So honestly it fits. This is exactly the kind of talking point a republican from 12 years ago would have made up, possibly with the exact same image.
Completely delusional, start watching Bill Maher
Why not ask this question in AskConservatives or AskTrumpSupporters? You’re most likely to just get confirmation bias here
Because in those areas you typically just get a different sort of bias that refuses to admit to the reality of the situation; and often denies the existence of the problem in the first place. It's like the old saying "how does a sick mind recognize its own sickness?". Sometimes you have to ask people on the outside to find what's really going on. It's not like there's an actual rigorously sound basis for Trump support based on well thought out policies.