I know for many of you, there has never been a time that the Republican party was not fully evil. With my current political feelings, I can look back and understand your perspective. At the same time, I still think that the Republican party has become demonstrably worse in the past decade to the point that I don’t even recognize them. People who were too fringe to be the fringe are now elected Senators, and the whole thing party is just a freak show.
The same can be said of the conservative media. Even Red State used to be better than it is now. I remember writing things like this there, and while a lot of people would disagree, it was still able to be published. Compare that to today, where the leading conservative media sites are really just insane. Including Red State.
BTW- when you read that Red State piece, keep in mind this is before we all knew that the Addison/Cheney/Kristol/Wolfowitz/Yoo neocon sociopathic junta had actually introduced systemic torture. Such innocent times for yours truly.
Eric U.
I was never a Republican, and I thought Reagan was going to bring on a police state. But then he didn’t, and GHWBush was really fairly moderate. Or, at least it was pretty obvious he wanted to do what was best for the country, even if he was stupid and not that good at figuring out what that would be. Then Bush the lesser showed up, and pretty quickly showed that he was really only interested in money for his “base” The fact that every single thing they campaign on goes back to racism took me a while. I thought it was just everything but taxes, but the taxes thing is racist too. Now, they really have decided that evil and stupidity are the things they are going to hang their hat on.
schrodinger's cat
They have always been this bad, the Republicans, I mean. You just chose not to see it because you were on their team.
Two examples from not so distant past. The run up to the Iraq War and the Florida recount.
Diana
I remember! At the time, I believe, you demanded your 40 virgins. I pointed out that liberal women are not such prisoners of the patriarchy to remain virgins for long but if you wanted 40 young women you should head off to yoga class, where there are quite often 40 women to each man and where the extent of the reach of patchouli incense is exceeded only by the length of the yoginis’ stretched hamstrings….
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodinger’s cat: They’ve gotten worse in the past 20 years, but they have been awful for my whole life.
Benw
He’s an asshole, sir!
I know he’s an asshole; what’s his name?
That is his name, sir! Major Asshole!
How many assholes we got on this ship!?
YO!
I knew it, I’m surrounded by assholes!
magurakurin
@schrodinger’s cat:
No, they are worse now. As horrible of a human being as Nixon was, if you look at his policies, he would never win a GOP primary now. He created the EPA. He lowered the speed limit to 55. He instituted price controls. He proposed a health care plan, basically Obamacare but with a public option! Yeah, he also bombed Cambodia, drug out a losing effort in Vietnam, and broke the law. But, hell if you had to choose between the assholes running for the GOP now and Richard M. Nixon, tell me you wouldn’t vote for Nixon.
They are worse now.
schrodinger's cat
@Omnes Omnibus: They have been pretty bad since at least the W era, when Cole was a Republican.
JPL
I just can’t be sympathetic because the changes started decades before and you weren’t paying attention.
WereBear
It was always a struggle between the Taft wing and the Teddy Roosevelt upstarts. But once they let in the Birchers and the Xantians madness ruled.
A Ghost To Most
@Omnes Omnibus:
I would say the crazy really got started with the end of the Fairness Doctrine, and was pretty well rolling by 1995 (as you said)
Kropadope
@magurakurin:
On the other hand, can we be sure that Nixon wouldn’t perform differently in the current climate?
ETA: If what I hear about him is true, even if you drop Nixon on Earth today in his 1970s form, he’d pick up the game pretty quick.
WereBear
@magurakurin: Yes. In a choice between Trump and Nixon, W and Nixin, even Reagan and Nixon… You have to vote for Nixon.
Thus how low they have fallen. I honestly didn’t think there was anything lower than Nixon.
DH
Well, I like to think that I am an old fashioned New Deal Liberal, so I don’t think there has been that much devolution of the Republican Party. The racist Southern Strategy was implemented after Goldwater was their nominee in 1964. I happen to live in Dade County Fl, so I drive every day on the Ronald Reagan Turnpike back and forth to work. It brings a smile to my face every day to think I am meting out justice by running over Reagan, so to speak
Sourmash
Even back then, the respectable conservatives were happy to take the votes of the nutjobs with a wink and a nod. The democrats were as well, but eventually we made a decision to throw out the racists. Too slow to be sure, but we did it and they’re all republicans now.
Chris
I haven’t been around for long enough to remember when there were actually good Republicans.
Nevertheless, two things I did notice about the Bushies; they actually made an effort at outreach towards the Latino vote, and they were pretty good at stressing that We Are Not At War With Islam.
At the time, I didn’t think much of it. Great, so forty years after the civil rights movement, our president isn’t a complete racist; what does he want, a cookiee?
But then the teabaggers rose to power, and walked back both these things. So yes, the GOP has in fact gotten worse, just in my short lifetime.
WereBear
@Kropadope: Nixon spent the last years of his life in a fancy condo instead of a San Simeon mansion and devotedly taking care of Pat who was in ill health. Imagine one of the current crop doing that.
The likes of Newt have a new one out of the showroom before the X-ray finishes downloading.
I loathe Nixon. But facts are facts.
A Ghost To Most
@magurakurin:
I hated Noxin with a white hot passion, but I think you are right. That truly sucks
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
This all goes back to Nixon and the southern strategy, when they began courting disaffected racist Democrats. They knew then what kind of creatures they were asking into the party, but they chose to do it anyway, as they could use the votes, and they thought they could control these people and keep them more or less under wraps.
And for a while, it worked. It helped them win 49 states in 1972 and 1984, and it got them the Congress in 1994. And, for a good long while, the shitbags they’d welcomed into the party kept out of the spotlight; but that was only because they didn’t have any real power. They’d have turned the spotlights on themselves gladly, if only they’d been up there in the booth, running the show.
Ah, but people like that, they weren’t wiling to sit by and let their betters run things while they just trudged out to vote each year. They began running for office themselves, shit offices, like county commissioner and county party officials. And the guys who ran the big show didn’t give two damns, ’cause who the hell cares about lame-O seats like those, right? Only, once you get enough low offices filled, you can begin creeping on up the ladder, and that’s what happened.
Now, these deranged, demented assholes who would have been a county precinct chairman 20 or 30 years ago, and some nobody state representative 10 years ago are sitting in Congress. And the base voters are sending these people out to run for big-time offices, and often electing them. And the “serious” party guys don’t know what the fuck to do.
Trump is just the logical end to this whole process. You give these shitbags enough leeway, and sooner or later, they’re going to nominate somebody like that for president. Eugene Robinson had a piece this morning about how it’s utterly plausible that Trump could get nominated next year. And “serious” party guys still don’t believe that. They think their Trump problem is a, well, supply-side problem. All you have to do is get rid of Trump, or buy him off somehow and get him to go away, and it’ll all be over. But it’s a demand side problem. He wouldn’t be where he is if there weren’t buyers for what he’s selling.
Republicans have bought into this supply-side economic shit for, what, now? 30 years? 35, 40 years? Who knew they were too dumb not to apply it to politics as well?
schrodinger's cat
@magurakurin: Yes they are worse now, but they were pretty bad in the Bush era too. The Bushies destroyed a country (Iraq) on a whim, didn’t they?
magurakurin
@Kropadope:
well, that’s a different hypothetical. Yeah, Nixon 2.0 plopped down in the 2016 landscape would probably be a whole nother animal.
Baud
Republicans have learned two things. One, their voters won’t leave them no matter what they do. Two, our voters’ motivation to go to the polls won’t increase no matter what they do. Until one of those two things changes, nothing will change.
Anne Laurie
Hate to break it to you, but: I’ve been keeping an eye on the Repubs for more than fifty years, Cole, and during that period they’ve always been more venal than not.
You & the rest of the Sane GOP Minority had the chance to take back “your” party during Watergate, but you chickened out & let the CREEPsters sacrifice Tricky Dick while scuttled into the darkness. (Hi, Cheney… Rumsfeld… Wolfowitz… ) “You” still could’ve carved out the rot when Reagan bumbled onto the stage, but noooo, Jimmy Carter was a wussy peacenik who wore cardigans. By the time Dubya’s handlers staged the Brooks Brothers riot and Poppy’s hand-picked SCOTUS decreed that the popular vote only mattered when the “right” people were popular, anyone with an IQ over room temperature and a soul not thoroughly corrupt was hunting for the exits.
We all did stupid shit when we were young & angry, and I’m glad you grew up and refudiated the whole GOP crime cartel. But saying that the rot started recently is like insisting that your friend didn’t die of AIDS, he died of Karposi’s sarcoma or pneumocystic pneumonia — those may have been the proximate causes, but they wouldn’t have gotten a foothold if the HIV virus hadn’t destroyed his immune system already.
The current batch of GOP office-holders and office-seekers are every one the political equivalent of an opportunistic infection.
geg6
I give you credit for finally seeing the light, but they haven’t changed in all the years I’ve been paying attention. And that goes back to 1964. Goldwater and his people were disgusting racists. Phyllis Schlafly was making her bones. Ronnie Reagan had turned his coat long before and was shilling for GE and the MIC. The Southern Strategy was being formulated. The evangelicals were being radicalized. Nixon being elected was ominous enough but Kissinger was and is a horrific moral monster and they set the stage for that amiable but evil dunce Reagan, who set the stage for the disaster that was the Cheney/Bush fail parade. The only thing about them that’s gotten worse over the years is their impulse control. Their ideas and goals, however, are no different now than they were in 1964.
bargal20
The most bitterly funny comment under that old Red State article written by Cole is the one accusing him of “beating a strawman” because Americans don’t torture.
magurakurin
@schrodinger’s cat:
I guess it’s a perspective of time. I don’t see the Bush era as really a distinct one from now. You can go back to a time when there were actually Republican politicians who gave a shit about, you know, people. They were pretty much all completely gone by the end of the Bush era, I feel.
JPL
@WereBear: I’d vote for Nixon over any of the current Republican candidates.
I voted for McGovern, btw.
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodinger’s cat: Yes, but the W era is within the last 20 years.
@A Ghost To Most: I would say that 1980 was the turning point. When the assholes in the GOP started to take control.
magurakurin
@magurakurin:
a long lost era…Young Republicans attend your Union Meetings
Chris
@DH:
1932 is my cutoff, in that from that election onwards there’s not a single presidential election in which I wouldn’t vote for the Democrat over the Republican. Yes, even with Democrats who got crushed like Stevenson, McGovern and Mondale, and even with Republicans who were actual moderates like Eisenhower or Ford.
At the state and local level, I could’ve been more forgiving up until the nineties, when the moderates were basically purged.
@Sourmash:
Yep. Even Eisenhower got an electoral boost out of the Red Scare.
Baud
@efgoldman:
The bad Republicans have always been this bad, but they used to have more diversity with some good folks. That’s what they’ve really lost.
MoeLarryAndJesus
There’s an old joke about a guy going into a coma in 1959 and waking up in 1969. He looks out the window and sees the flag at half mast and asks a nurse who died, and she tells him it was Eisenhower.
And he says, “Goddamnit! That means that bastard Nixon is President!”
Omnes Omnibus
@WereBear: Nixon is also great on twitter.
JPL
@Anne Laurie: You forgot that Carter gave back Panama their canal.
btw.. sent you e-mail, highlighting the New Yorker article that Billmon has been tweeting about.
geg6
@Anne Laurie:
Ha! We pretty much said the same thing but you did it better.
MattF
Going back a bit farther, the Republican party has certainly devolved since Eisenhower– bearing in mind, e.g., that Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock to enforce desegregation, invented the phrase ‘military-industrial complex’, and warned against land wars in Asia.
But, contrariwise, Nixon’s the one who invented the Southern Strategy and prosecuted the Nixon/Kissinger ‘plan’ for Vietnam. Not to mention that Nixon’s minions were the inventors of ratf*king and included the likes of Pat Buchanan, Spiro Agnew, and Ben Stein. Nixon’s era was the start of a long slide, and he bears a lot of the blame, IMO.
schrodinger's cat
@efgoldman: I don’t have that long of a perspective, I was comparing the time Cole was writing about, to today. I don’t see much difference except the fact that their spokesmodels have gotten cruder and nuttier.
Omnes Omnibus
@Anne Laurie: Preach it, sister!
schrodinger's cat
@Omnes Omnibus: Cole’s window was the last 10 years and I am saying that they have been quite bad for more than that, starting from the Clinton impeachment at the very least.
Baud
@Chris:
I think I’d go back to Teddy R.
geg6
@MattF:
Nope, sorry. Read your Rick Perlstein. It was Goldwater. That was when the people who eventually implemented the Southern Strategy first started to come up with the idea.
Snarki, child of Loki
I think there’s a lot of truth to “The GOP has been getting worse and worse ever since X”.
Where “X” is “when I started really paying attention”.
The GOP loony fringe was aways bad, but now the average GOPer makes the old fringe look sober, sane, and smart.
MattF
@Baud: Yeah, Wilson was pretty horrible– an old-style Southern Democrat, although that aspect of his politics is usually ignored.
JPL
So is anyone watching Sarah?
Baud
@MattF:
He was! But who was his opponent? I don’t recall if he was worse.
But I agree. Wilson gives me pause.
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodinger’s cat: I get that, but my comment specifically noted 20 years, no?
Myiq2xu
How ironic. When you were a RWNJ I was a liberal Democrat. Now you’re a LWNJ and I’m a flaming moderate/small government liberal.
At least we agree on Hillary these days. I have to admit, you were right about her all along.
MattF
@geg6: Well, LBJ predicted it, if you want to look for a progenitor. So, it’s fair to say that the Southern Strategy was in the air in the 60’s. But (and I think Perlstein would agree) Nixon’s administration was the key turn.
Myiq2xu
https://twitter.com/SwanSpirit/status/637367404599844864/photo/1
Haydnseek
When I was in high school, Ronald Reagan was governor of my beloved California, and Richard Nixon was president. I’ve hated these motherfuckers my entire political life. I do agree that they’ve gotten more frantically psychotic in the last several decades, but hey. Same leopards, just way more spots.
JPL
@efgoldman: Already home? How was it and what did you order?
Omnes Omnibus
@Myiq2xu: Dear god, you are daft.
Calouste
@Baud: The GOP used to have McCarthy, Goldwater, Thrumond, Helmes and probably a bunch of others I have forgotten about. There have always been some really rotten apples in there, although now it’s practically all of them.
Myiq2xu
@efgoldman: He was the POTUS who desegregated our nation’s schools. He ended the war in Vietnam, and opened diplomatic relations with China.
Nixon was a mixed bag. He was a foreign policy expert, a rabid anti-communist, a crook, and a social liberal.
Calouste
@Omnes Omnibus: “Small government liberal” is apparently the new code word for libertarians who are ashamed to call themselves that.
Baud
@Calouste:
We’ve had a few doozies too, as we’ve transitioned from the Dixiecrats.
Myiq2xu
@Calouste: If you think Goldwater was a rotten apple you are a fucking idiot.
BTW – Hillary was a “Goldwater Girl.”
Cervantes
@efgoldman:
Some would argue that it was Nixon who first proposed to create the EPA via executive order (see “Reorganization Plan Number 3,” July 9, 1970); and that Congress supported his initiative.
Myiq2xu
@Calouste: Wrong – a SGL is someone who believes in local control and a relatively weak central government.
Myiq2xu
@Omnes Omnibus: KMA
gian
@efgoldman:
They got nothing on the Borgias
Omnes Omnibus
@Myiq2xu: You are completely daft. I am amazed that you can form sentences.
Myiq2xu
@efgoldman: Nixon did best in the Midwest and West.
geg6
@MattF:
Don’t agree. Perlstein’s entire thesis over his three-part history of the modern conservative movement begins with Goldwater presicely because that is when the seeds of its rise and fall were sown. It’s pretty clear, if you’ve read them all.
Myiq2xu
@Omnes Omnibus: I’m surprised they let you have internet access.
Gin & Tonic
@efgoldman: Isn’t that the place that exploded a few years ago?
Calouste
@Myiq2xu: Yep, a libertarian.
I must say that I am happy to see that that label is now so tainted that people are running away from it.
Btw, are you sure you don’t mean to say “state rights”?
Omnes Omnibus
@efgoldman: Excellent and congratulations.
Schlemazel
It is pretty obvious if you read the comments to that posting (and I strongly recommend NOT) as normal as you seem there John the mouth breathing trogs commenting hate your sanity.
Splitting Image
I think that there are two different questions here. “Are the Republicans worse now than they used to be?” and “Is the conservative movement worse than it used to be?”
The answer to the first question is yes and the answer to the second question is probably no. The frothing at the mouth hate has always been there, but it used to be mostly Democratic, and for a long time it was split between the two parties. Now that the white nationalists, Christianists, and conspiracy theorists have fully taken over the Republican party and kicked everyone else out, the Republican party is decidedly worse, but at the same time the numbers of white nationalists and Christianists are in a long decline.
In 1980, David Koch ran for office as a Libertarian. He and Charles hadn’t begun their takeover of the Republican party yet. The Moral Majority was only just beginning to unite racist Protestants and racist Catholics under the same banner. All of the Tea Partiers were out there, but they didn’t necessarily identify as Republicans. Goldwater, for example, could have run as a Democrat. Reagan’s tax policies helped give people like the Kochs more money to spend on politics, and they worked for years to get the godbotherers under one tent. Their success has led to what we see now.
I think one thing that has changed is the amount of advertising money which supports radical candidates. As the amount of SuperPAC money rises (especially since Citizens United), and traditional sources of advertising revenue shrink, news channels are becoming more partisan and more prone to saying what advertisers want to hear. The Kochs are planning to spend nearly a billion dollars on this election and no one wants to risk calling out a candidate they might have their eye on. Not even Trump. It used to be that the amount of election spending was somewhat even between the two parties, and a lot of the Republican funders didn’t want to risk alienating people in an election campaign who might be valued customers the rest of the year. Now some of these people are dropping millions into the pot for candidates who are calling for deportations and frivolous wars.
Baud
I have the Nixonland audio book but haven’t read/listened it yet.
Amir Khalid
@Myiq2xu:
John Cole agrees with you on something? I’m a regular here, why didn’t someone send me the memo?
Gin & Tonic
@Myiq2xu: Nixon a social liberal? You really are a moron, just like they all say.
Omnes Omnibus
@Gin & Tonic: Daft, just like I said.
Splitting Image
@Myiq2xu:
Cleek’s Law in action.
chopper
@Omnes Omnibus:
yup. as god-awful as the GOP was back then, they actually figured out a way to get worse. i didn’t even think it was possible.
rikyrah
The GOP for some-hint, my Black behind…..has been bad since1964. I hope you know enough American history to understand why.
schrodinger's cat
@Omnes Omnibus: You are probably right. I did not pay much attention to lolitics before Clinton impeachment, so I can’t speak from my own experience.
Schlemazel
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
Nixon really was the trailing edge of a wave the Dems started.
HHH, the man who should have been President in 1960
jl
Back in the day, long ago, I switched registration from Democrat to Republican. I forget why. I think I was young and libertarian-curious, and had some long forgotten-beef with the CA Democratic party that was doing some kind of machine politics hijinks. I was young and indulged myself in symbolic protests.
The GOP junk mail was weird and seriously disturbing, and all of it was total BS. So, I forgot about my protest and switched back a few months later.
But the GOP political mailers kept on for years, until I moved. And I got onto a lot of fraudster mailing lists too, all of a sudden.
Jut looking at the garbage the GOP and their associated scamsters send out should be enough to make a person wonder.
Edit: I wonder if sending out tons of BS and selling your name off to scamsters is a CA GOP thing, or if it happens in other states too.
Baud
@Calouste:
I’m a big government libertarian.
JPL
@efgoldman: Sounds like a good time was had by all.
schrodinger's cat
@Baud: That was a depressing book, I only read the first two hundred pages, when DougJ was doing the book club thingie.
Jerry
Don’t forget about Reagan’s state’s rights speech in Philadelphia, MS in 1980.
magurakurin
@Myiq2xu:
referring to something Hillary Clinton did when she was 17 years old by labeling her “a Goldwater Girl,” is the ratfucker’s secret handshake as far as I can tell.
Let me guess, Sanders/Warren is your “dream” ticket? ( a dream for the Republicans in the Senate who would then no longer have to deal with the woman who is rapidly becoming the ban hammer of the Senate)
oh and Warren was a Republican until 1995, while were on the subject of people who saw the light late in life. Not a knock on her at all. Like Victor Lasso says, “welcome back to the fight.”
Baud
@schrodinger’s cat:
Now I’m scared.
Cervantes
@efgoldman:
Several questions about the above but I’ll limit myself to one: If the “solid South” was “untouchable Democratic territory” until 1972, how did Republican John Tower get himself elected to the U.S. Senate in 1961? (This was the special election held to fill new VP LBJ’s seat.)
More important: Congratulations on a Happy Anniversary!
Mary G
I think they were always this bad, but they hid it better. It’s interesting to read the comment rankings on John’s Red State piece. He gets 1 out of 5 when those disagreeing with him get 3 to 5.
John Cole
@Anne Laurie:
I was three.
Chris
@Baud:
Meaning Teddy Roosevelt was the last Republican you’d have voted for?
My impression was both parties basically grew a progressive wing at the same time, but it wasn’t until FDR that it was clear that the Democrats were becoming the more progressive-friendly of the two.
Baud
@John Cole:
The perfect intellectual age to deal with the GOP.
Baud
@Chris:
Yes that’s what I meant.
I thought the GOP abandoned progressivism after Teddy, while it grew in the Democratic Party.
Schlemazel
@Gin & Tonic:
You have to understand the rules
Anything I disagree with = LIBERAL
Anything I like = CONSERVATIVE
The common clay of the new West, you know, morons.
chopper
@John Cole:
that’s no excuse.
catbirdman
I grew up a birder and became a biologist, and everyone I knew knew that Reagan was a disaster. Even my parents — died in the wool Michigan Republicans — voted for Mondale in 1984. Republicans have not given a single shit about the environment during my lifetime, and about 99% of the scientists and environmentalists I know are Dems and always have been. From James Watt to Dan Quayle to the entire current lot of them, they have always pushed for destruction in the name of profit. It’s more obvious now than ever that they really don’t care about anything but power and profit, but it’s never been a secret.
Omnes Omnibus
@John Cole: So?
CaseyL
The GOP is enormously worse, because there’s no one left who gives a shit about governing. It’s all posturing and appealing to the very darkest of human nature. Name an issue, any issue at all, and not only is the GOP wrong on the issue, they’re wrong in the worst possible way.
NCSteve
I remember the exact moment they began to go off the rails. I was working, at the time, for people who were rather high up in the world of state Republicanism. The kind of folks who were on a first name basis with with Republican governors and were old buddies with Republican senators and were generally knit into the fabric of the state GOP.
And I remember well how tepidly they supported the reelection of George H.W. Bush. How grudgingly they wrote the checks, how prone they were to skip the big fundraiser and just cut a check instead, how constantly they grumbled about his unreaganess. And thus it was nationwide, from the Republican members of Congress down to the blowhards in the bar.
And when Clinton beat the candidate they barely supported, their response was blind, blazing rage, shock and horror and, above all, deeply aggrieved outrage. And looking back, it’s clear what happened. In just the twelve years between Reagan’s inauguaration and Clinton’s election, they had truly come to believe that they, and they alone ruled by divine right, that elections were just tedious little civic rituals by which their divine right to rule was legitimated by the serfs and any election they lost had been stolen from them like a thief breaking in to your house at night and stealing your silver.
Oh, we had little hints. Buchanan’s garnering of enough delegates to get himself a speech, little jibes by certain controversial cabinet secretaries–quickly walked back–that there weren’t Republicans and Democrats, but rather only Americans and Democrats and so on. But the GOP has had a seed of crazy in it since it absorbed the Know Nothings in the late 1850s. No, the descent into madness began then, exactly then, and it got continually worse month on month, year on year. Out of that came Gingrich with his use of eliminationist language and recommendations that you call your opponents “sick” and “traitors” and Whitewater and now, today, the party’s mainstream is, literally indistinguishable from the Birchers of the 50’s. And even that’s not enough as they steadily lurch toward becoming an radical anti-democratic nihilistic white nationalist movement party, something more suited for 1930’s Europe than the United States.
magurakurin
@John Cole:
I know you have no fucks left to give to the haters, but I hold no ill will to your past at all. A man is judged by who is not but what he may have been. You are aces, boss. And sober, too. yee ha. :)
WaterGirl
@John Cole:
That’s pretty funny.
Omnes Omnibus
@Chris: TR was better than Wilson. Less racist.
Botsplainer
I went from being a self-described “fiscal conservative” Republican to being conservatively progressive. Katrina, the obvious cluster fuck of the occupation authority, Schiavo and the wholesale sell off of the economy to slicksters turned me.
In other words, I want bang for the buck on programs that benefit broad numbers of people. Run ’em smart, run ’em efficient, sell them to the public, seek consensus first.
jl
@Gin & Tonic:
” Nixon a social liberal? You really are a moron, just like they all say. ”
IIRC, Nixon was a pragmatist who did some social liberal things, like environmental protection, when pressured by a Congress with sane Republicans siding with Democrats, and public opinion. He gave in when he needed to in order to get political room to pursue his true destiny, which was to be World Historical Figure in foreign affairs.
But when he had to come up with a health reform plan after the attempts to pass a compromise bill with Democrats failed, somebody came to him with early proposals for patient unfriendly HMOs and said it would get the corporations more money for providing less care. :Sounds good to me’ said Nixon.
Edit: I hope I have my history right, I think that was afterwards. I remember reading that Nixon had contempt for most domestic policy issues, thought they where sissy BS bread and circuses crap to keep the rabble happy. Nothing more.
Redshift
@jl:
It’s widespread. Weyrich, the co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, pretty much invented mass direct-mail fundraising, which was always tied together with spreading conservative ideas. I don’t know how much he got into the pure scam side of things, but there were plenty of others who grasped that a mailing list of people who would respond to conservative fundraising appeals was a gold mine of the extremely gullible, who would likely respond to any sales pitch or scam.
When I was in high school, several friends of mine got summer jobs doing clerical work for what they didn’t know at the time was a conservative telemarketing firm. The pitch was that “Ronald Reagan needs your help (i.e., money) right now” for some issue that had actually been voted on weeks before. Scamming old people out of their Social Security checks, basically. They all quit en masse, after some minor and untraceable office sabotage.
So yeah, it’s widespread and has been for decades.
Omnes Omnibus
@efgoldman: Why do you think I am calling him daft?
Kropadope
@WereBear:
Wow, point taken.
JCJ
@jl:
Their mailings are still crazy. I get plenty of fund raising solicitations from Republicans and conservative/lunatic groups. I read some of them – they are “interesting” in that the logical fallacies are impressive. I sometimes send the envelopes back (if I don’t have to add postage) with a note saying they are demented.
Chris
@jl:
IIRC, Nixon was Johnson in reverse. In the same way that LBJ mostly really cared about domestic policy and was willing to go with whatever the consensus was on foreign policy (war in Vietnam! Yay!), Nixon mostly really cared about foreign policy and was willing to go with whatever the consensus was on domestic policy.
Trentrunner
@Kropadope: I’m always a little put off by this argument.
Almost ALL of us–including Republicans–suffer human losses and pain.
The problem is Republicans only give a shit about policy connected to suffering when it affects THEM directly (e.g., gay marriage, every fucking other thing).
So, Dick had to be a caregiver to Pat. Well, he was privileged and white and wealthy, so as hard as it was–and it could be damn hard–he had it easier than 99% of the rest of us who will go through that.
Proper politics can diminish that suffering. Fuck those assholes and their thoroughgoing selfishness that allows them to oppose policy that would do so.
Frank Bolton
Conservatives haven’t really gotten any crazier after all these years. I mean, even before Reagan they supported Mellonomics, dismantling Social Security and Medicare, ripping the heart out of unions, covert imperialism via the CIA, overt imperialism via the military, spying on supposed subversives and ordering ratfucks or outright hitjobs, decriminalizing marital rape, banning contraceptives, and of course the crowning horror of Jim Crow.
What’s different is that the factions of social conservatives and economic conservatives formally aligned after the unveiling of the Southern Strategy. Before that the social conservatives could sometimes support not-insane positions on the economy such as William Jennings Bryan and the economic conservatives could sometimes support not-insane positions on the culture such as anti-lynching laws and abortion.
jl
@Redshift: I got lots of appeals from random older white guys in suits named some patriotic sounding name. They were conservative, they have some foundation that did conservative things, on a crusade of some sort, please send him badly needed funds to keep up his critically needed work. I thought well, shit, I have no clue what this guy is doing with the money. Putting it all in the bank is a ‘conservative thing’ to do, and from what all I could tell from the mailer, maybe that was exactly what they did with it.
Later while helping to taking care some GOP great aunt and uncle in their last days, I found out they had send off a lot of money to sketchy come ons like that.
I also remember appeals to send money in a tip top crucial emergency EMERGENCY TIME SENSITIVE DO NOT DELAY !! effort to stop some dastardly liberal plot that did not exist.
The teabaggers in my family who think, as a commenter above noted, that anything they don’t like is liberal, and everything that they do like is conservative are suckers for that come on.
stinger
I’d have to go back to Eisenhower to find a Republican president I’d have voted for. There have been Republican governors and senators, from my state and others, that I have occasionally voted for or could imagine voting for — but not for decades now. Probably going back to the Reagan era, in fact.
PaulW
I used to be a registered Republican myself. I believed in a functional government that improved itself through effective controls and ending wasteful practices, a strong system of checks and balances, separation of church and state that protects all religions while promoting none, genuine efforts at balanced budgets – which meant targeted tax cuts AND tax hikes along with spending cuts aimed at curtailing waste – and slow yet meaningful improvements to our civil rights.
Apparently that makes me a f-cking socialist librul RINO.
I consider myself an Apostate now, someone so burned by the twists and casual cruelty and growth of ignorant racism within the Republican Party that I constantly call on the party’s utter defeat and removal from power at all levels – federal, state, local – to ensure that the Republicans cannot damage anything or hurt anyone for the next ten generations. Even though I cannot make the full switch over to Democrats and remain a defiant NPA, I cannot ever support this Far Right, Norquist-led uber-rich-owned Bible-thumping mockery of a political organization.
When the Roosevelt Republicans return from exile and reclaim the party, THEN I will go back.
Jay C
@Cervantes:
Basically, Tower got elected in 1961 as a backlash against what the PTB in Texas (I.e,, wealthy reactionaries, same as always) saw as national Democrats getting too liberal, especially on the issue of Civil Rights. It didn’t take much to change their affiliation from D to R, as long as the political structure stayed the same: plutocratic feudalism, with barbecue…
dww44
@Baud: If I end up canvassing in 2016 (hopefully the Dem nominee will have a ground game in this red state) I’m going to remember this cryptic and altogether true analysis of yours.
I encountered this so much last year in our two Dem state wide races here: Dems telling me they only vote in Presidential years and angry older white woman who said she was on a mission to rid the country of every Democrat, including Obama. She didn’t say black;it was clearly understood. There was no doubt that she would vote;anger is a good motivator.
srv
@efgoldman:
Reagan seriously moderated after the first term. The neocons were thrown out. Remember Gorby? Of course, the Deaver and Howard Baker were running the show while Ronnie drooled. You can thank Nancy for that, but you never will, because drapes or something…
NIxon was the last liberal President of the Republic, saddled with the three-letter democrrat Presidents’ legacies. Of course, they’re the heroes now. What a joke.
This is why we need Trump – a complete break from the past of democrat vs republican. The first real third way this country has had since Teddy.
They chose wrong then, hopefully some of you will step up for your kids and break from the cycle of anti-partisanship.
Stop, open your mind – Teddy in 1912:
http://www.ssa.gov/history/trspeech.html
CONGRATULATIONS!
Demonstrably worse in the last decade? You understate, Mr. Cole. If the GOP were a dog, you’d have no reservations about shooting it. They have gone completely off the rails.
stinger
Or, what Baud said at @31.
Amir Khalid
@PaulW:
You’re waiting for sane Republicans to reclaim your party so you can go back to it. Do you see any such Republicans on the horizon? How long before they, and you, can begin the reclamation?
WJS
@srv:
I vaguely remember this show, and it starred H. Ross Perot as a billionaire who said crazy shit and didn’t win the presidency.
pseudonymous in nc
Said it before, will say it again: American politics will have corrected itself when Cole feels able to vote for Republicans of the old-school Main Street small-govt small-bidness variety. But those Republicans are now either independents or conservative Democrats, and there’s a lot of space for crazies.
J R in WV
My Dad was a Rockefeller Republican, and Nelson was not what today’s Republicans would call a conservative. My Dad was like Tommy’s folks, anti-segregation, quit the Elks, J.C.s Country Club all at once because they were segregated, and told them so.
Pissed off a lot of people in that small town. Republicans weren’t all horrible until Reagan. Lots of them were, but Reagan picked true believers to work for him, and they took over the place.
When I was in school at Great Lakes Navy, we were up into Wisconsin one weekend, train rides and walking. The weather turned on us, and we went into a book store that was right there. The books were a little odd, mostly all paperback at a time when bookstores sold hardbacks.
Of course we were short haired military looking youngsters. They started talking to us, and in just a few minutes I figured out that we were in the local John Birch Society clubhouse and book store. We headed down the road in the rain pretty quickly after that.
And that’s a large part of why the Republican party is the way it is – they were happy to accept the support of crazy people like members of the Birch Society. And then those crazy people took over the party apparatus. And here we are, worrying that people might vote for those bastards!
Don’t let people drag you down John. You’re doing the right thing, taking care of the brothers at your little college, working to care foe abandoned pets, and helping people learn about rat-f**king Republicans on the Innertubenets.
dww44
@NCSteve: Often I really wish there was a “like” button.
jl
@srv:
Donald Trump’s Newest Campaign Ad
Jimmy Kimmel
https://youtu.be/-ep53vIAV9c
Origuy
A musical salute to Cole’s epiphany.
Cervantes
[1] Lincoln’s Republican Party was not fully evil. You could say the same thing through Hoover, maybe, but not much farther than that. Certainly by the time of Nixon and McCarthy in the ’40s and ’50s, there was nothing left to admire in the mainstream of the party; even Ike detested Nixon and his ilk, and people like Rockefeller in New York and Sargent in Massachusetts were already atypical when they appeared on the scene.
As for [2]: Has the Republican Party become worse in 2015 than it was in 2005? Sure. And even worse than it was in 1995? Sure. And yet, what the Party has become now could have been predicted twenty years ago and maybe even thirty years ago. The Reagan Revolution was predicated on distracting from the truth, cynically denying the legitimacy of methods for ascertaining the truth, and all the while lying shamelessly about pretty much everything. Does that sound familiar?
Amir Khalid
@srv:
Donald Trump is a diversion. All he has to offer your country is an undignified, if entertaining, presidential campaign. He does not offer a break from the conservative vs. liberal stalemate. He does not offer policy that makes sense. He does not offer a coherent governing philosophy. He is not equipped to offer such things. His presidency would be that of a really obnoxious toddler.
PaulW
@Amir Khalid:
As of right now, the wait seems forever. There’s a combination of the deep-pocket financiers – the Kochs are an example – who honestly don’t care about the causes only as long as they stay rich and powerful, with the cynical con-artists feeding off the fear-mongering media industry for every penny they can get, driving the ill-informed GOP voting base into ignoring the real dangers – decaying infrastructure, low wages, growing personal debt, external forces such as climate change – in lieu of ZOMG THE MEXICAN MUSLIM OBAMABOTS ARE RAPING OUR GUNS.
Something’s got to give. One of these pillars of ongoing aggrieved BS and greed has to collapse. The only likely solution is to have the Republicans fall out of elective offices to such a degree that their fear-mongering no longer has influence in government. That somehow there’s no longer any money to be made on the bull. That enough Democrats get elected into office with a clear mandate for genuine reforms in universal voting rights, closing of corporate tax loopholes, and effective efforts in closing the income inequality gap to where people won’t live in debt their whole lives.
Cervantes
@efgoldman:
Not clear to me why you think Tower was an “anomaly” while the other Republican in Florida was a “harbinger.”
As for resemblance between Tower, Cruz, and Perry: look at voting rights (to take one key example).
Also, I wasn’t asking about those other states because I thought you were discussing the “solid South.”
Amir Khalid
@PaulW:
Then why wait? Why not just give up on the Republicans and join some other, saner party?
Cervantes
@J R in WV:
You may not know the answer but I’ll ask anyway because I’m curious: if up to Day Zero your dad had been a member of the segregated Elks et al., what made him quit suddenly and volubly on Day One?
srv
@Amir Khalid:
Your nihilism having grown up under various fascist police states is apparent. It’s a year from the convention and you want your detailed 12 step plan today.
That’s not how it works in America. There is a time and place for everything. It’s not that time yet.
Do us a favor. Walk down the block. America is 100X more diverse than your block.
Redshift
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
I don’t think that’s all that happened. If the people at the top had been forced out, there would have been more of a fight. I think the missing element in your analysis is the grift, which has been a major part of the conservative movement since before Reagan.
With the rise of wingnut welfare, the GOP politicians who used to be in elected office for power and success realized they could have more power and (monetary) success by quitting. So they moved “up and out,” leaving the rubes to move up into their now unwanted positions, which they like just fine, because they don’t care if their only “accomplishment” is throwing sand in the gears.
Chet Murthy
John,
I’ve been reading you a long time, but I confess that, as a leftie, I didn’t read you when you were in the phase to which you refer, with that link. I have often wondered, if you had a post or series of posts, that might be a sort of description of how you changed your mind. I mean …. well, I had my own epiphan(ies) at various times, and, well, I thought it might be useful to share with others, how you had yours.
B/c ….. well, lefties tend to think of the “other” as being wholly wrong. And that’s just incorrect. Feh. I don’t know what I’m really saying here. Just … I’ve repeatedly wondered how you came to your current set of views on the world.
And I bet others also wonder, and would appreciated being enlightened.
Cervantes
@srv:
“Nihilism”?
jl
Khalid don’t owe me no favors.
But if it’s a nice day over there…
Malaysia is pretty diverse in ways that would freak the GOP the eff out if we were like it. Can srv guess?
Mike J
John Patrick Coan @JPsoFLY 13h13 hours ago
I bought a white noise machine but all it does is yell about “The 2nd Amendment”, “free trade”, and “post-racial America”.
NotMax
Sorry, Mr. Cole, but apparently you’ve got the tinted shades of selective nostalgia on that obscure that you had blackout blinders on before you came over from the dark side.
So, the day before the 2000 election? Anytime after that, what was underway was painfully blatant to those who chose to see.
Redshift
@Cervantes: It appears to be the troll’s latest attempt at “I’m rubber and you’re glue.” If it’s something bad that’s said about conservatives, it must be hurled at liberals, regardless of whether it makes sense. Either that or he just has no idea what the word means, since wanting a coherent political philosophy from a candidate is pretty much the opposite.
Equally bizarre is being unable to understand that a political philosophy and detailed policy proposals are entirely different things.
Cervantes
@jl:
What “diversity” there is in Malaysia is “managed” cynically, unjustly, and often brutally by the ruling elite.
That fact, however, has nothing to do with the reasonableness of questions raised here by Amir Khalid — and the attempt by srv to link the two is a red herring — and not a fresh one at that.
lgerard
Best part of the Palin/Trump mind meld…
the people in the background going up and down the escalator
it mesmerizing
Bluemeadow
@Haydnseek: Totally agree, I must be a tad older – was already at UCLA when Uncle Ronnie took over the university system and imposed tuition. Liked him on Death Valley Days, couldn’t stand him as governor and never mind his presidency.
Mr Bula
People give Cole a hard time because he was a republican, and yeah, you had to squint really hard to make the GOP look good. But what Cole did, that shift in a cognitive framework, that’s not easy to do.
Cervantes
@Mr Bula:
I suppose that if it were easier, it would not be so rare.
Another Holocene Human
@efgoldman: Newt was never reasonable. That asshole shut down the federal government.
However, I don’t think he ever conceived of a time that, post-tantrum, you wouldn’t negotiate some sort of deal with the opposing party that could be passed and signed. That was just normative behavior.
Thank Mitch McConnell, Feckless Boehner, and Ted Cruz for blowing that notion out of the water. Governing? What’s that?
jl
@Cervantes: I was thinking of religious diversity. I don’t think GOPers would be able to tolerate the mix of Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism. Even if they were Muslim and benefited from practicing the state religion, could they function in a society with a third of the population practicing competing organized religions?
But, yes I was trolling srv.
And curious about Amir Khalid’s reaction to my question.
kindness
So that piece at RedState was from 2005, eh? Hmmm. I didn’t read RedState then so I wouldn’t have known. Good piece and we all are thankful you left.
We like curmudgeons over here.
ranchandsyrup
@Myiq2xu: re: Hillary, so what? The point of the op is that people can change. Is she gonna do a heel turn and profess her love to Goldwater while the crowd boos if she gets elected?
RaflW
NotMax
@Bluemeadow
Have wondered how much 20 Mule Team Borax Reagan snorted back then to so thoroughly rot his psyche.
danielx
One could say the Republican Party’s Original Sin was its tacit acceptance of Jim Crow, way back when. They’ve added to it since then with opposition to the New Deal, and then opposition to Social Security, Medicare and other such programs. Oh yeah, there was that whole bit about a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam and a few other foreign policy disasters that occurred on various Republican watches. Add to this their detestation of regulation of any sort that doesn’t protect property, add seasonings of rabid anticommunism, evangelical fervor, out and out racism, and neoconservative war love with a dab of out and out lies stirred in to simmer for a few decades.
Anne Laurie
@Myiq2xu:
With the same Heartlanders(tm) who have given people like Grassley, Steve King & Ted Cruz their undying support.
“You know — morons!”
Mean, sadistic morons.
Cervantes
@danielx:
Good point.
Chris
@efgoldman:
And when the Iranian Revolution happened, the knee-jerk reaction of a lot of people was that it was a KGB plot – I’ve heard that there are people who clung to this belief all through the eighties and right up to the fall of the Soviet Union, well after it should have become obvious that the Islamic Republic was something far outside of both the communist and capitalist worlds’ norms, that no Red in his right mind would ever have brought it about, and that it in turn would never be taking orders from them, especially when they’re from Russia.
Kropadope
@Trentrunner: I suppose familial devotion goes a long way with me to speaking to the character of the person. Most prominent Republicans who I know anything about their home-life, I see either abandonment, cheating, or a fellow partner in exploiting the American people. I don’t know about many Democrats overall, but the Obamas are beautiful, though there are the Clintons and McGreevy. Even without personally knowing about his home life, I can see Jimmy Carter is a mensch (I hope I’m using that right, I’m not Jewish; I also hope I’m right that that’s Jewish).
I’m sorry, I just don’t see any tenderness out of (to be charitable) 75+% of Republican elected officials in any sphere of life.
Another Holocene Human
@NCSteve:
Indeed. Paranoia and Bircherism wasn’t enough. Fascism and white supremacy are the new hotness.
NotMax
@Kropadope
Yiddish, actually.
Cervantes
@Redshift:
Exactly.
@efgoldman:
To me, certainly.
Anyhow, I’m off. Have a good evening!
Another Holocene Human
@Omnes Omnibus:
Precisely. It’s not as if TR wasn’t racist. He just wasn’t so intensely dedicated to racism. Racism pervades Wilson’s policy positions, from redlining to the invasion of Haiti.
RaflW
@efgoldman: I can’t even be bothered to try and sort out this srv blort: “Your nihilism having grown up under various fascist police states is apparent.”
I think someone’s fancy word salad shooter was set at a bit too high a setting tonight.
Kropadope
@NotMax: Right, of course. I don’t suppose Jewish is even a language?
srv
@efgoldman: This is the problem with you liberals. There always has to be a conspiracy and someone behind the someone.
Would that I was a true believer mclaren. Only non-poseur at this site.
I do, however, have to recalibrate. As you all age, you’re ability to follow from one thread (or day) to another is seriously degraded.
RaflW
@efgoldman: No such luck. Hasn’t OD’ed.
Redshift
@efgoldman:
Absolutely; I have often thought the same thing. Of course, the fact that he couldn’t foresee this, or felt powerless to prevent it, is perhaps the earliest sign that he was going to be a terrible Speaker.
Kropadope
@srv:
Two things:
I’m glad you acknowledge your poseur status; I could never quite figure out what your deal was, but the main concept I kept coming back to was “phony.”
This was the one thing you could have said that would actually convince me that you are mclaren. If this is the case, of course, it serves to refute your statement.
srv
Hillary doesn’t get it, but truest thing she will ever say.
And none of you people will ever get it either.
2016 is going to be the most awesome year evah.
@Kropadope: I don’t even feel sorry for you liberal poseurs anymore.
I was here a year before mclaren. It’s not hard. But it’s too hard for you.
Anne Laurie
@geg6:
Goldwater, while cranky, may not have been completely insane. His backers/supporters, on the other hand, saw him as the figurehead for a return to the “golden age” of their McKinley dreams — hard money, ‘muscular’ empire-building, women/people of color/the lower classes kept on a short leash. They were a little too far ahead of the Great American Heartlander voters, but they deserve credit for paving the way to Reagan via Nixon, and I agree with Perlstein (if I understand him) that Reagan marked the GOP’s complete repudiation of American values in favor of MURICA FVCK YEAH!!!
NotMax
OT:
@efgoldman
As you’re here, thought would drag this over from the Open Thread below and see if you ‘re in agreement.
Ingrid Bergman day on TCM. If anything, somehow she got better and better looking the older she became.
srv
Balloon-Juice is the place where everyone has fallen down and they never got back up.
Ruckus
Both parties have been bad at various times, but the current republican party has made an art out of being bad, in every way definable. In the current lifetime of anyone still living it started with Hoover. But it wasn’t all the various president’s fault. Well other than being associated with some of the ratfuckers that became more noticed as time went on. A big piece was Joe McCarthy. But not all republicans of that era were bat shit crazy. Some of them recognized that people of McCarthy’s bent were dangerous. Over the next 30 yrs most of the sane were chased out of office, leaving the crazy and crazier in place, until there is no sanity left in the republican party.
The shame is that so many don’t want to accept that the republicans have all gone bat shit crazy. They seem to think that the democrats are all out to do something to them that is horrible, like make healthcare somewhat available, and for the most part not want to go to war over nothing or forge a path out of poverty, or keep the financial industry from screwing them completely, or invading ladyparts with religious instruments or whatever. It boggles the mind that I trust homeless people far more than cops or republicans.
Anne Laurie
@John Cole: Thus, the quote-symbols. Don’t blame you personally for Watergate, but by the time you were old enough to vote, the many layers of GOP venality exposed by the (aborted, alas) Watergate investigations were on the record for anyone to read. Ditto, St. Ronnie’s Iran-contra shenanigans. Registering (R) because they tickled your anti-peacenik fancies, or whatever, was done in the face of the evidence.
Chris
@efgoldman:
I think I remember reading somewhere that Goldwater liked JFK in a “worthy adversary” kind of way and looked forward to running against him – by contrast, thought LBJ was a dirtbag.
the Conster
Republicans are so much worse now – they’ve doubled down on every bad, stupid, hurtful idea – facts be damned. There used to be a Republican legislative faction that believed government plays an important role in things like highway bills and public health – now they’re all anti-science and anti-reason nihilists, and proud of it because there’s a black president that’s demonstrably smarter than all of them put together and it’s driven them all into psychopathic madness.
Ruckus
@efgoldman:
If nothing else our time would be better spent.
Ruckus
@efgoldman:
I’m just an old crank in the corner mumbling about dead people and deader ideas.
We must be related in some way.
Radio One
the last good Republican President was probably Theodore Roosevelt, and most of his predecessors, except for Grant and Lincoln, were awful Presidents too.
trollhattan
@NCSteve:
Yours is a tale I’d like told frequently and assertively. There seemed to be a point at which the election cycle ceased being a periodic taking of the pulse of the people and transitioned to a cycle of corporate opportunities, lost or won. The concrete hardened in the time of Reagan.
I have money in the bank enough to afford a nice jackhammer.
TriassicSands
There’s no doubt the Republican Party has gotten worse over the past decade, but I think they were a lot worse in the nineties than you, John Cole, may realize.
srv
@efgoldman: I was here long before you, I will be here long after you are gone. We both know, your clock is shorter than mine.
No doubt you will see more conspiracies, as liberals are wont to do, but with the proper medication, you may still yet find the truth.
trollhattan
@srv:
You sure that’s spelled “clock”?
Redshift
@the Conster: Yeah, one of the things i was struck by when I was looking up Paul Weyrich was that while he was a promoter of conservative movement ideas, he was also a strong advocate for mass transit and served on the board of Amtrak.
Cervantes
@Chris:
And JFK looked forward to running against Goldwater, too, mostly because the latter’s unglued rhetoric made him seem easiest to defeat.
The other leading Republicans — Romney, Rockefeller, Nixon — all polled well behind JFK, too, but Goldwater was the one making the most helpful suggestions, such as that we could defeat Communism once and for all by bombing the men’s room at the Kremlin.
Amir Khalid
@jl:
Can’t speak for the GOP. But there are certainly people in the Malay Muslim majority here, particularly in Peninsular Malaysia, who resent having to accommodate other races and faiths, and wish they didn’t have to. It’s different in Sabah and Sarawak, where indigenous people are much more ethnically and religiously diverse than on the Peninsula.
Chris
@efgoldman:
Would patrician/plebeian types of distinctions have mattered to Goldwater? I didn’t think he was a blue blood – son of a department store owner, as I recall, so middle class background. And his nemesis within his own party was its Eastern Establishment, that most patrician of American institutions.
(I’m actually hitting the sack, but I’ll read the answer with interest in the morning).
mclaren
By “new,” the people at Red State mean: “more crazed, more psychotic, more dementedly vicious and rabid.”
With The Donald, they’ll get their wish…
Cervantes
@srv:
If you have been drinking, stop.
If you have not been drinking, start now.
Kropadope
@srv:
OK, so McLaren was your second personality, not your first. Am I supposed to be impressed? In fact, since efgoldman proposed this possibility, everything you said has led me to believe that you are McLaren.
This makes me want to believe your also a front pager. DougJ?
mclaren
@efgoldman:
“For his time?”
Ahem. Need I dredge up that 24 May 1964 interview in which Barry Goldwater suggests using nuclear weapons on the Viet Cong…?
Or should I instead point to the flyers put out by Goldwater supporters in Dallas TX bearing the words WANTED FOR TREASON and a picture of JIFK?
Ruckus
@Cervantes:
Are you thinking that dehydration is the problem?
If so, bold choice but I’m thinking that if there was this much dehydration there wouldn’t be the strength to type, even this badly.
Oh…. you meant alcohol. It has to be too much. Too little can get one righteousness, while too much can get amazing levels of incoherent thought and behavior.
srv
Swimmingly, as they say, down under.
I will never get enough of people lecturing me about Trump for the next year. It’s going to be huge.
(hey, mc! I’m tapping out… winky wink… sheesh).
pps: @mclaren: As you know, Goldie was ahead of his time.
Cervantes
@Chris:
He was descended from Puritans on his mother’s side. His dad was a department-store owner, yes, but the family was wealthy, not precisely middle-class.
Cervantes
@srv:
Malaysia is in the Northern hemisphere …
Anyhow, what’s your point? That Amir Khalid should not criticize Trump even though he has already criticized his own corrupt PM? That’s incoherent.
mclaren
@Kropadope:
That’s seriously insulting.
That srv jerkoff is (as far as I can tell) a far right fringe lunatic. I’m far left. Bernie Sanders is okay, but not left enough for my taste. Sanders needs to hammer on the Military Industrial Complex a lot more.
Anne Laurie
@NCSteve:
That’s beautiful.
And so godsdamned true.
mclaren
@srv:
WTF does that even mean?
Lie down, buddy. Sleep it off. You’ll make sense in the morning.
Amir Khalid
@srv:
Najib’s a dick. Corrupt and stupid. Pretty much everyone in Malaysia has thought so for years. And given his inept handling of the MH370 business, the whole world knows it too. But obviously, none of that is relevant to what I said about the Donald.
trollhattan
@Cervantes:
Stoopid Democrat geography is stoopid! et al, etc. also, too.
Origuy
@efgoldman: I got curious, so I looked it up. Yiddish developed in the Rhineland, probably shortly after Charlemagne, and spread eastward. The earliest written evidence is from the 13th century, and printed Yiddish appears in 1541, using Hebrew characters.
Yiddish is one of several languages of the Jewish diaspora; another is Ladino, based on Old Spanish.
trollhattan
@mclaren:
I think it means we live on a planet of intense gravity, i.e., a LOT of gravity.
So, not getting up am I, also, too.
J R in WV
@Cervantes:
Cervantes, I’m not sure. I was born in 1950. I would guess as a newsman he was seeing events in the civil rights effort that struck his moral instinct.
While he remained a registered Republican, he also walked with local NAACP members when marches were taking place in the deep south.
We were in West Virginia, which was not a Jim Crow state. When we drove through the deep south on a family vacation, and I saw signs at a filling station saying “Colored Only” and “White Only” on water fountains and restrooms, I didn’t know what that meant.
When I asked about it, mom said “We’ll talk about it later, in private.” She didn’t want to attract attention to a car that would be perceived as northern in a place clinging to their post-Reconstruction Jim Crow past, which seems smart from this distance. I got some education on our vacations!
My wife’s great-uncle was Superintendent of schools in another county in the coal fields. In the union-busting past the companies brought in strike-breakers from the deep south, black men willing to take any job with good pay, even a dangerous one in a bad situation. I doubt if any of them knew what a strike was, or how striking workers would feel about any scabs, black or white.
But later, the county had black coal miners working alongside white coal miners. The UMWA (United Mine Workers of America) had an anti-segregation clause in its constitution. And the school board had several black elected members, and there were two black assistant Superintendents of the school system, back in the 1940s and 50s.
I think Dad saw what was happening, realized where the moral position was, talked with Mom, and with his Dad, who was the publisher of the newspapers, and made his decision not to continue membership in segregated organizations. I didn’t ever see the inside of the country club until I was invited to a wedding reception there in the 1990s or thereabouts.
He continued to belong to organizations that weren’t segregated, ran a Christmas Party group to fund toys for kids whose parents were not going to be able to do anything for the holidays, things like that.
It was a big deal in many ways. In school, I wasn’t ever going to be part of the clique of kids whose parents were country club folks. I wasn’t going to be on the gold team, or the swimming team, that was at the country club. Fortunately, I didn’t give a rat for any of that.
That’s as close to an answer as I can give you. We never talked about it, it was just how things were. He was an interesting person. Not afraid to take an unpopular stand, and work for it, if he thought it was right.
mclaren
@Anne Laurie:
Great post by NC Steve. Very well written. Also accurate, as far as it goes.
But I’d peg the start of the mass insanity in the Republican Party much earlier — circa 1948, when Joe McCarty began his kamikaze run. That guy was seriously out to lunch. McCarthy was calling General George Marshall a communist stooge. Permit me to quote: “Marshall is a medical miracle, a man born without guts and without brains.”
For those of you not in the know, General George Marshall is basically the guy who won WW II. And who was instrumental in sending aid to Europe when it was in ruins and when Paul Nitze was agitating for Germany to get sown with radioactive dust from the Hanford A and B reactors and turned “into a barren field.”
If George Marshall isn’t the greatest figure in American history, he’s definitely close. And ratfvcker McCarthy was smearing him non-stop. And the supposedly “respectable” Republicans like Taft just sat back and smirked behind their hands.
The craziness really ramped up into the stratosphere, as far as I can tell, when Reagan got elected. Do I really need to run down the list of insanity? Ronald Reagan wandering through the halls of the West Wing muttering “klaatu barada nicto”? Nancy Reagan hiring an astrologer to dictate the timing of Reagan’s major speeches? A Secretary of the Interior so whacked out on evangelical nuttiness that he claimed “we don’t need to worry about conservation because the Rapture will happen before we can exhaust our natural resources”?
Or how about the time Reagan lectured a lobbyist on how close the End Times were, and how the events in the middle east in the 1980s confirmed that the End Times were nearly upon us…?
Source: The Rapture Revealed, Barbara Rossing, page 43, Basic Books: 30 March, 2007.
Anne Laurie
@srv:
So, you don’t know anything about Kuala Lumpur, either.
Or you do, but you’re pretending to be an All-American Idiot?
Cervantes
@mclaren:
You think that proves something about Goldwater? There are people who, had they been around then, might have applauded him — because the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam in 1964 would ostensibly have saved tens of thousands of American lives, as it ostensibly did in Japan.
Why not do it?
And having done it, why not justify it as above?
After all, the US war machine has always had as its highest priority — perhaps even its only mission — safeguarding the welfare of the American fighting man.
Cervantes
@Jay C:
Thanks.
In other words, as early as 1961, in order to win LBJ’s vacant Senate seat, Republican John Tower capitalized on Texans’ fear of civil-rights advances — which was what we later called the “Southern strategy”?
But to play devil’s advocate for a moment, let’s consider that LBJ beat Tower for that seat in November of 1960; and then Tower turned around and defeated someone else for it in May of 1961. What pro-civil-rights tendency did JFK, LBJ, and other national Democrats demonstrate in those months? Was it enough to scare Texas Democrats into voting for Tower when they had just rejected him months before?
Aleta
@mclaren: And before that, Richard Nixon became prominent due to the prosecution of Alger Hiss for espionage. An ugly performance, I was told by someone who witnessed it. Possibly Hiss was framed with documents that someone forged to look like they came from Hiss’ typewriter.
TriassicSands
…and the eighties, and the seventies, and the sixties, and don’t even get me started on the fifties.
raven
@Cervantes: fuck lbj
RK
Reading Cole’s piece reminds me about the blood on Hillary Clinton’s cold, calculating hands.
scav
Is srv sorta random-channeling a best-of miscellany of troll styles? I swear there was a flash of caligula towards the end (didn’t manage to bother to read to the bitter bitter bottom of the thread though).
Ben
@magurakurin: This. Too much focus on POTUS and not enough on the now extinct moderate GOP members of Congress… Rudman, Hatch (before he finally gave in to the crazy), Nunn, etc. Congress used to be a semi-sane place with moderate republicans and moderate democrats. Now, gerrymandering has completely fucked and rigged the system. The one thing that needs changing, like yesterday, is that it is completely insane that North Dakota has the same number of senators as NY, California and Texas. Congress is no longer representative of “the people”.
wvng
@Splitting Image: I would argue that the conservative movement is worse now because the right wing media that stirs them up and keeps them in a continual state of outrage is more omnipresent and worse. The Fox effect is quite real. And of course the GOP is worse because they have purged everyone who is not part of the conservative movement.
I would argue that a core inflection point is about 1993-1994 when Newt and Rush decided that all republicans should only use scorched earth rhetoric about liberals and Dems. That made the possibility of compromise in the public interest increasingly difficult until we get to the point we are at today.
Gvg
It seems to me the key is purges and defections of voter caused by dramatic events that leave the GOP less diluted in insane to sane ratio and also smart to dumb ratio. In 2006 a lot of former republican voters voted dem, not just because of Iraq being a mess but also because of a series of corruption scandals. going back to all the other proposed turning points in this thread, I think they all had some significance in a similar way. In my aware time it seemed like the GOP was on the rise here in Florida and a bunch of ambitious people felt the way to get office was to act conservative and be GOP. Demi’s were on a losing streak. So they went REP and won and weren’t that smart but the party leadership didn’t care because the needed numbers to vote for their preferred policy so as long as they were reliable support, they didn’t all have to be smart. but then something happened and smart guys ran out and smart voters went dem at least for a cycle and suddenly they all seem to be dumb. It’s not like any party has ever had mostly smart reps,however the GOP base now seems to hate smart so none of their policies work even if they get them passed. I know they always had long term drawbacks but they used to be able to think enough to start something. Now they can’t. They also aren’t able to see why. they have reached a tipping point somehow. they still have a lot of energy though so they keep running around in circles. I think it’s the continuous series of choices that has them always getting worse and the fact they have driven away the diluting better parts of their past group.
BobS
The Republican Party I know has stood for ‘hate, fear, & greed’ my entire life (although now they pronounce it ‘HATE, FEAR, & GREED’). Mr .Cole deserves credit for finally figuring that out (like John Dean and Kevin Phillips before him), but that it took until The Idiot’s second term is not something to be proud of.
@efgoldman: Nixon (& Kissenger’s) ‘secret plan’ to end the war was a treasonous pre-1968 election subversion of negotiations between North and South Vietnam, i.e. promising the South Vietnamese a better deal after Nixon became president.
@Frank Bolton: “covert imperialism via the CIA, overt imperialism via the military, spying on supposed subversives” pretty much describes every administration of my lifetime, Democrat or Republican.
Cervantes
@raven:
Hey, how are you this morning?
We are back from the mountains for now. Went hiking on the Appalachian trail (no, not that kind of hiking). Did some white-water rafting. Caught some trout.
Now it’s a return to civilization — such as it is.
NobodySpecial
Like a lot of people, 1980 was my breaking moment with the GOP. Mostly because of John B. Anderson, who was our Congressman and (more importantly to a young kid) the guy who cleaned out his garage and gave the kid’s old toys to the guy who mowed his lawn (my dad). Even as a kid, Reagan seemed like a guy who was too busy trying to pick fights with people to be President. My move left finished during the Bush-Richards battle when I was living in Dallas. I haven’t voted R for anyone since.
SiubhanDuinne
@Ben:
Nunn was a Democrat.
Matt McIrvin
@magurakurin: Going by the “positions on issues of partisan controversy” yardstick, Donald Trump would be the best of the current Republicans. I think potential governing style counts for a lot, though, and that definitely applies to Nixon too.
jake the antisoshul soshulist
@Anne Laurie:
Goldwater was pro-choice, pro gay rights, and thought the religious right were nuts. I wish there were some Goldwater Republicans left today.
leeleeFl
@Anne Laurie: this is perfect. I knew some decent local republican pols back home when I was young. Rarely voted for any cause I was an FDR fan-girl due to my Mom and Dad raising me right.
Another Holocene Human
@PaulW:
Oh dear. Lincoln Chafee switched parties. Charlie Crist (who defended education funding and promoted a tangible anti-racist agenda) switched parties.
They aren’t coming back. They’ve kissed the GOP goodbye.
Another Holocene Human
@Cervantes:
As a child, I couldn’t understand why the grownups couldn’t grasp that “tax and spend” was not a slur.
In thirty years, some of the grups have caught on that the alternative is to spend and borrow (The Sarah Palin School of Governance), but I still have cognitive dissonance about the whole thing. I still don’t understand …
But I do know it was a second order dogwhistle. It was a way of reframing “Libs take your money and give it to those people”. But you’d think the reframing would make anyone with firing neurons take pause.
Reagan did a lot of borrowing. He also cut bennies for “good, deserving” white people who “earned it”. They didn’t learn.
Another Holocene Human
@Amir Khalid:
In other words, Maine’s LePage.
Matt McIrvin
I was a Republican in 1976 when I was 8, because Gerald Ford was the President, and I figured if he was the President he had to be the good guy.
I left the party when my political reasoning evolved beyond that stage. I guess this is not much of a story.
(That said, I supported most of George W. Bush’s military policy from September 2001 until around the summer of 2003, which I now regard as unforgivable irrationality driven purely by 9/11 shock and a need to believe that Something was Being Done. I think my breaking point was actually a conversation I had with The Editors in The Poor Man comment boards, in which he gently ripped apart the last of the supporting arguments I had. The Abu Ghraib photos also came out sometime around then.)
Another Holocene Human
@Cervantes: I’ll answer because I know the answer for my family. My grandparents were one of those mid-century rich-poor marriages because high tax rate and the GI bill and good wages were a great leveler. But because of familial wealth, after a few years of renting a dump, my grandparents moved into a much nicer burb, although in the newer Catholicky part that was still half cornfields at the time.
They joined “the” country club. This must have been the late 1950s.
Illinois had all kinds of housing discrimination and predatory lending practices and so on but this area didn’t have covenants AFAIK so well off Black families were moving into the area in onsies-twosies.
My grandparents and some other families in the club, remember this is a private club, sponsored an African-American family to join.
I don’t remember if the exact story was the family was accepted but then rejected because of backlash, but whatever the story, ultimately this family was not allowed to join the country club, which resulted in multiple families all pulling out of “the” country club in protest and founding a new one. This happened in the 60s.
Basically, joining the club was aspirational and it was a way to access business contacts or massage business relationships (which is why Jews and Blacks have tried to get into these clubs, deals are done there that they were being cut out of). My grandmother believed that just like they’d desegregated the state colleges and other areas of public life, they were going to desegregate private life and she worked towards that goal.
So that’s why my grandmother was there. Trying to change it from the inside.
(Just to keep me honest, my other grandmother was a deadender Republican who thought all the budget cuts would hit other people.)
Another Holocene Human
@Redshift:
He was a geek who fancied choo-choo’s and wrote white papers about how to spend transit money to benefit whites only.
When I got into the industry, pro’s would be all “read this” about Weyrich because “conservatives can support transit”. Hey, I learned a lot but, damn, that Weyrich guy was a freaky racist.
At least he wasn’t a “defund Amtrak to get rid of the n*gger union” sort.
Ben
@SiubhanDuinne: Fair enough and thanks for pointing that out (hadn’t had enough coffee yet)… point is he was a moderate/conservative dem. Moderate dems/repubs in congress, that were willing to negotiate and actually govern, have been replaced by dipshits like Bachman and Cruz. If the US had the Congressional makeup from 30 years ago, there wouldn’t be 17 gop whacko’s running for president (just 2-3) and faux news and their blogosphere kindred spirits would be marginalized. The adults have left the building and the narcissistic, tantrum throwing, low IQ jesus freaks have taken over the GOP. There is no doubt in my mind that the GOP changed dramatically since Cole left it. For full disclosure, I’ve been following Cole since the inception of this blog and had a similar transformation… partially due to growing up, not being a racist and being an atheist.
dianne
I’m a yellow dog Dem (I would vote for a mangy yellow yard dog before I would vote for a Republican) and I still remember sitting in a restaurant in the south with my in-laws. During a lull in the conversation around us, I blurted out but, but … Reagon said ketchup is a vegetable. Heads all around us swiveled toward our direction and that was my first politically inappropriate statement. Apparently, speaking critically of the saint was heresy. I realized then that the south was no longer a Democratic stronghold.
My Jessie Helms loving inlaws were horrified. We are in a great big beautiful blue state now and I am finally able to breathe free.I still say politically inappropriate things but usually in letters to the editor.
AnonPhenom
Not continually evil. Just always capable of slipping into evil very quickly.
This was an eye opener in that regard for me. The mindset of the individuals who make up todays Republican Party hasn’t changed much since those letters were written, the Party itself has maintained the same outlook of “those who own the country by right ought to run it” plus or minus varying amounts of conservative authoritarianism for the spice of it (current level: double-plus good)
“And what does it (elite educational facilities) produce but, on the whole, Old Guard Republicans with blinders on, and women who rarely develop out of the child class and create just about nothing. I think you Boston UMB is quite a diffent fish, as in Boston there is a cultural and intellectual tradition. But certainly the middle and far western types I know are distressing examples of conspicuous waste of good human material. They are usually salt of the earth, good people in the community activities and awfully nice people …but they are almost to a man anti-Semetic, anti-foreign, anti-progress, anti-phi-beta-kappa, anti-contemporary art and music and living in a little compartment walled about by their money, their friends, who are all just about exactly the same as they are, etc. etc. They don’t think, create or explore… And are marking time until they die, playing poker, bridge and tennis and sitting on Boards.”
D58826
I can remember the time when the GOP had people like Hugh Scott, Ev Dirkson, Ike, etc.
Cervantes
@Anne Laurie:
Actually, residential areas in Malaysia, even in Kuala Lumpur, can be pretty thoroughly segregated by race.
AnonPhenom
Not continually evil. Just always capable of slipping into evil very quickly.
This was an eye opener in that regard for me. The mindset of the individuals who make up todays Republican Party hasn’t changed much since those letters were written, the Party itself has maintained the same outlook of “those who own the country by right ought to run it” plus or minus varying amounts of conservative authoritarianism for the spice of it (current level: double-plus good)
“And what does it (elite educational facilities) produce but, on the whole, Old Guard Republicans with blinders on, and women who rarely develop out of the child class and create just about nothing. I think your Boston UMB is quite a diffent fish, as in Boston there is a cultural and intellectual tradition. But certainly the middle and far western types I know are distressing examples of conspicuous waste of good human material. They are usually salt of the earth, good people in the community activities and awfully nice people …but they are almost to a man anti-Semetic, anti-foreign, anti-progress, anti-phi-beta-kappa, anti-contemporary art and music and living in a little compartment walled about by their money, their friends, who are all just about exactly the same as they are, etc. etc. They don’t think, create or explore… And are marking time until they die, playing poker, bridge and tennis and sitting on Boards.”
shell
The thing is, when places like Red State call for a new republican party, they dont mean it in the way we think. In other words, becomin g more progressive, more inclusive. You know, that whole ‘outreach’ thing.
But no, they mean becoming even more pure, throwing out the heretics and doubling down on everything they profess now.
Cervantes
@Ben:
“Left the building”? The “adults” burned down the building and quite deliberately put up a
revivalcircus tent in which to entertain the masses — and now …Gex
Yes, acceleration leads to a parabolic shape on the chart of how awful the GOP are.
But the Southern Strategy was in effect long before your conversion. How did we get here? The same mechanism was in effect when the GOP was “reasonable” and “adult”. They invited this in to keep winning on economic policies that are bad for most. I guess I consider that just as bad and evil as they are now.
Mark B.
Jimmy Carter was the last president that treated Americans like adults. He acted like they were real participants an could handle real talk about the difficulties of modern life. After he got beat by Reagan’s dumbed down happy talk, it’s been all snake oil all the time. Of course, one party is worse than the other, but they are both bad.
gelfling545
@geg6: “Kissinger was and is a horrific moral monster”
We know this now but that was absolutely not known to the average person at the time. A great many things that became apparent after the fact were generally not common knowledge at the time. Alternative sources of information were few and often spurious at that time. What we know now can hardly be made the basis for judging people’s actions before such information was generally available.
Nancy
I think that my parents’ Republican party was maybe not so bad. But that’s going back 60 to 70 years ago. By this time I was old enough to vote, not so bad had become awful, and I never considered Republican-ness. To my mother’s dismay, since in the small town, all the volunteers at the polls who signed her in could see her children’s names below her’s and realize the ghastly truth. They were not registered Republicans.
Small-town western PA was probably a lot like West Virginia. Mr. Cole is a good bit younger than I am. I give him credit for his ability to leave the ranks of the Repugs.
My dad, now long gone, was able to change his mind. Always recall that with pride.
Nancy
I admire Jimmy Carter and agree with your comment.
Nancy
@Mark B.:
I admire Jimmy Carter and agree with your comment. Not just because he’s old and ill, he doesn’t need our pity or anyone’s late day admiration.
He was a good guy then and is now.
Gus diZerega
@WereBear: Well said. American conservatism had a respectable intellectual and political tradition that they threw overboard when the Birchers and Christiban entered in, particularly with the Southern Strategy. The South was conservative in a very different way than the North. The North imagined it was part of the American constitutional heritage, and to a degree it was. The South saw itself as part of the Confederate heritage, which explicitly repudiated key parts of the American heritage, as for example the principle of government by consent of the governed and individual rights. They said as much. From a genuinely Northern conservative perspective they were right wing revolutionary radicals, and they are.
But Northern conservatives have drunk the kool aid of blind tribalism in pursuit of power and stupidly gone along while pissing all over their own tradition.
We forget on all side that Obamacare was devised by the Heritage Foundation back when it was Northern conservative. (I prefer single payer but that’s a different conversation.) Now the nihilist totalitarians of the right denounce it as socialist tyranny.
RaflW
@Cervantes:
Expecting coherence from srv was your first mistake.
Chris
@Gex:
Like their couterparts in many other times and places, our traditional “adult” conservative elites thought they could turn psychos loose on their enemies and still be able to control them. Instead they’ve been slipping off the leash more and more often to the point that it mighy as well not exist.
Chris
@Gus diZerega:
Really, what it comes down to (your first sentence) is that for most of history it was impossible to really judge eithr party because they were loose confederations with liberals and conservatives both. Even when one wing was clearly dominant, the other wing wasn’t gone.
The current setup where the extreme right wing is not only the leading but literally the ONLY part of the GOP, is something new – last twenty or twenty five years. Moderate-to-liberal Republicans have been sidelined for a lot longer than that, but at least they used to exist.
Elie
“White frailty” has taken root in the GOP but even has a thread or two in the Democrats. Its a time of great stress and self evaluation, fear from the white population. They have increasing awareness that they were indeed in an entitled state of being and that the entitlement is now being challenged at its roots. Whether it is the deference that white people expect from the blacks and browns via the reaction of some of Bernie’s white progressive supporters, all the way to the enraged exuberance of Trump’s followers… this is a time of great self examination and appreciation of vulnerability.
All of this emotion had a natural home in the Republican Party, which had been teasing and using racism for over 30 years. They just never looked ahead far enough to see the natural consequence of what they were setting up by purging their party of any moderation or sanity. And they are very much stuck with it as is the whole American political system. We are being damaged by this but as WearBear commented yesterday, this horror had to happen because the demographics are not going away.
Also, the world is watching us. So much of the time in our history, our more extreme citizens could watch lynchings and the stories didn’t make it out to the world except slowly. Now it is all over the world almost immediately. Cops can’t shoot people in the back without it showing up explicitly way before the evening news. This puts a lot of pressure on white people who represent the entitled majority. I believe that the speed and availability of this information and the immediate impact its having on the people who are doing it, is what is making the behavior more and more extreme. In the old days, this change might have played out over a decade. No more.
The boil of racism and injustice is being popped by two fingers: inexorable demographics and social media/internet exposure. Yes, it is ugly. The challenge will be the clean up and how to make the best of healing our country. What kind of antibiotics do we need?
pluege
insane crazy, racist, violent, reverse robinhoodism is the reagan legacy.
As a proud bleeding heart liberal since the late 1960’s I have always been able to see a somewhat sane conservative case that could be made countering liberal cases. The problem is that republicans/conservatives NEVER make that case. They only make their cases stemming from their crap-awful personalities and outlook on life, i.e., their case is always made in terms of oppression, violence, racism, bigotry, ignorance, inequality, authoritariansim, sadism, dishonesty, etc.
https://soundcloud.com/dave-cadaqu/conservatives-make-clean-things-dirty-dave-cadaqu-c-2014
Archon
Conservatives went from hearing talk of a “Permanent Republican Majority”, to a cosmopolitan black liberal in the White House getting elected then re-elected, the second time without even pretending to flatter the conservative id. All in a time span of about 8 years.
We shouldn’t minimize how paradigm shifting that is to a lot of conservatives that drank the right-wing mythology Kool-Aid.
That doesn’t excuse the Republicans behavior during the Obama era but I do think we should understand that beneath all their anger and obstruction and intolerance is a lot of self-doubt about their views and beliefs.
That’s why I really respect John Cole because one of the most difficult things to do in life is to admit some of your deeply held beliefs (whether political, moral, or cultural) were wrong.
moderateindy
There use to be a difference between conservatives and the Republican party. Now there is none. The conservative movement is the Republican party.
The real sea change came with Reagan. He pushed the philosophy that government is the problem. His focus was on helping big business, and his donor base. With things like supply side economics, he helped usher in the idea that things like math and science didn’t matter. Forget what the numbers say about his economic policy they don’t matter, it’s the ideology that is important. It was the beginning of the whole tax policy philosophy that investment was more important than labor. And over all culturally that greed is good. The Republican party since then has been about power, and not about governance.
But that being said, it has really gone into a death spiral since W. Getting progressively more hateful, gleefully ignorant about science, and facts and figures. Surely the right wing press has helped stimulate the lizard brain portion of the base with their constant selling of fear and outrage. But since Reagan the Republican party has become a much worse entity.
Woodrowfan
Nixon was NOT a social liberal, never, ever, no way, no how. Gah. He was always a conservative. He railed against “forced busing”, had his aides put together a list of Jews in the government, cheered the hardhats who beat up anti-war protesters, was a huge bigot on race and religion, blamed the students for Kent State, etc, etc. Just because he signed a few bills with huge majorities because he didn’t want to be embarrassed by an over-ridden veto does NOT! make him a liberal. Can we please bury this stupid meme about Nixon. Being less reactionary than the current republicans doesn’t make Nixon a liberal anymore than saying dog shit is nastier than horseshit doesn’t make horseshit a gourmet meal.
A guy
Republicans are absolutely crushed john cole isn’t one of them. Lol!
BruceJ
@Archon: “Permanent Republican Majority” Have you looked at state houses lately? Where do you think the pack of loons in Congress is coming from? The single most critical failure of the Democratic party was their catastrophic loss in 2010. This gave the howling GOP mob the keys to redistricting.
Remember the scene in the original Jurassic Park where they come upon the nesting grounds of the velociraptors, and they’re just a howling mob eating each other? Welcome to the State Legislatures of America. Your future Congressmen and Senators are the ones who survive to get out of the nest.
Scott P.
Let’s not forget who put up these posters just before Kennedy’s visit to Dallas. Swap out Obama’s picture for Kennedy, and replace ‘Communists’ with ‘Muslims’ (or ‘Communist Muslims’), and it would be indistinguishable from the stuff the right wing churns out now.
SFAW
@Scott P.:
Did David Broder write the text for that poster? Looks like his style.
kuvasz
How quickly forgotten. The GOP went into overdrive with its nastiness when Newt Gingrich appeared in 1978 in the House and started his flame-throwing act towards Congressional Democrats.
Least one forget:
Newt Gingrich’s 1996 GOPAC memo that lists negative nouns and adjectives to use against their opponents.
“Language: A Key Mechanism of Control”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4443.htm
schrodinger's cat
@Mark B.: President Obama has always treated us as adults. Its the GOP and it adherents who persist in behaving like children.
Death Panel Truck
@JPL: There’s no way in hell I’d vote for that racist, anti-Semitic bastard. The Oval Office tapes revealed the real Richard Nixon – a small, petty, vindictive asshole who, according to Hunter S. Thompson, was so crooked his aides had to screw his pants on every morning.
Gex
@Chris: Yep. Which ultimately makes the argument that the GOP is worse now nonsensical. The knowing unleashing of this insanity for personal gain is evil, even if they thought they could keep it under control. If they’d have kept it under control, all the people who have left in disgust over the last decade would have gladly kept supporting them and their Southern Strategy.
Kropadope
@moderateindy:
There is nothing conservative about the Republican party. At all.
Matt McIrvin
@danielx:
The Democratic Party had more involvement with Jim Crow. And at the Republican Party’s origin decades earlier, it was very much the less-racist party, and the only sensible option for an anti-racist.
But, by whatever historical accident, the Democratic Party is the one that tried to get better, starting around the middle of the 20th century. And the Republican Party jumped headlong into the resulting open niche. On purpose.
Kropadope
@Matt McIrvin: So, it was the Republicans embrace of Jim Crow after it stopped being cool* or legal.
*Meant in the broadest meaning of the word possible
Death Panel Truck
@Ben:
Maybe that’s why the upper body isn’t called “The Senate of Representatives.”
CalD
I remember when John was a Republican. He was the only right-wing blogger I truly feared.
Patricia Kayden
@JPL: True dat. Wasn’t it Nixon who campaigned on the so-called Southern Strategy where appeals could be made to White racists without using the “N” word? And Reagan started his campaign in a Mississippi city known for its racist history. Since at least the 60s, Republicans have always been overtly racist. Some people just didn’t want to see this because it didn’t directly impact them.
Paul in KY
@magurakurin: Pres. Carter lowered limit to 55.
H.K. Anders
@John Cole: Excuses!
Paul in KY
@Anne Laurie: Great post, Anne!
Ralph
He also started the War on Drugs. That’s been working out so great it’s become one of our major institutions!
“You can’t even call this a war. Wars end.” -The Wire