In a pretty good article yesterday, The Daily Beast identified 6 steps in the move from a right-wing but somewhat moral GOP under George HW to the current Trumpist cult version.
www.thedailybeast.com/…
From George H.W. Bush’s Grand Old Party to Donald Trump’s Cult for Profit in Just Six Steps
There are ways in which the Bushes—especially Dubya—helped abet this tragic march.
The Beast names these six steps:
1.Generational degeneration: Greatest generation>Boomers
But Republican Baby Boomers have been this country’s true moral disaster. I mean here Newt Gingrich first and foremost, but also people like Dick Cheney and all the other “chicken hawks” who got out of going to Vietnam.
2.The rise of the right-wing media
Bush Sr. was president when right-wing talk radio first took off. This was a direct result of the Reagan-era FCC’s 1987 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, which many conservatives had trained their sights on for years. The repeal was helped along by an anti-Fairness Doctrine decision by a three-judge panel on the D.C. Court of Appeals on which the two-member majority consisted of two judges named Bork and Scalia. So then we got Limbaugh et al...By Bush’s last year in the White House, Limbaugh had dozens of imitators. Today, Limbaugh is still on the air, and there are hundreds of little Limbaughs around, thousands if you count prominent tweeters and Instagrammers and podcasters.
3. The Southernization of the GOP
This started in Bush Sr.’s time, as congressional seats across the South that had been Democratic since Reconstruction flipped to Republican. But it really accelerated when Bush Jr. was president, and it was a conscious strategy on Dubya and Karl Rove’s part—remember that Scriptural dog-whistling he did on the campaign trail? It was aimed chiefly at the South. (Note: I would have started earlier with Nixon’s “Southern Strategy.”)
4. A Koched-up party
The Koch brothers had financed various libertarian and conservative think tanks and other projects since the 1970s. David Koch even ran as the vice-presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party in 1980. That was foolishness, wasting money on a campaign that ended up getting less than 2 percent of the vote. By the 2000s, though, the Koch brothers figured it out. They started bankrolling Republican candidates at all levels of government, and over time—and with an assist or two from the Roberts Supreme Court—they’ve all but bought the Republican Party and turned it very hard right on economic issues.
5. The end of facts
No one lies like Trump lies, that’s a given. On the other hand, not even Trump has told us that some despot halfway across the world is six months away from developing a nuclear bomb and is intent on dropping it on the United States. Compared to that one, Trump is still, er, bush-league. But the problem here is not just literal falsehoods. It’s the substitution of superstition for objective truth.
6. Obama derangement syndrome
Finally, the fact that the country elected a black president pushed millions of right-wing Americans over some psychic cliff and into the arms of the first presidential candidate in modern times who threw away the racial dog whistle and went straight for the megaphone. It’s understandable at this time that people speak of Bush Sr.’s personal qualities—his courtliness, his sense of duty, and commitment to public service. But those personal qualities weren’t the only factors that produced him. He came from a time and represented a kind of politics that the Republican Party of today has taken many steps to leave dead and buried, unmentioned and in an unmarked grave. His son was complicit in some of those steps.
To their list, I would add half a dozen more:
--Anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-science fundamentalism, which carried the Deep South up to the North. Roe played a key role here.
--Citizens’ United,
--The gutting of the Voting Rights Act by SCOTUS. We can’t forget that at least some of the spectacular cheating going on in 6 or 7 states was made easier by this shift.
--Ruralization of Rethugs in conjunction with gerrymandering. The magnitude of Rethug benefits from the concentration of progressives in a few states and a few districts within states is incredibly damaging.
--Obama’s inability to fight effectively to support the ACA politically after passing it, and the link from that to the Tea Party. 2010, imo, was the result of a combination of a new political force, and Obama taking a vacation after he passed the ACA.
--The effectiveness of Right-Wing Think Tanks when the left had virtually nothing similar: AEI, Heritage, Cato, Federalist Society. This is a very big deal, that started with Reagan but has continued right up to the present. It created permission for the awful economic policy that we haven’t beat as yet—but the fight is coming right quick with the House Hearings. Nevertheless, this created an illusion of pro-worker behavior among the Rethugs that we are still working to overcome.
Thoughts appreciated.