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The rot started a long time ago. This didn’t start with Fatso45. Not at all.
In fact, Barry Goldwater, an Arizona Republican who once ran for president, predicted what we are seeing now
:“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.”
It started back in 1964, after the Civil Rights Act was passed, and the parties divided along racial politics. One side endeavored to expand rights for people, the other side, stuck in tradition, did not. And the people who were against change like women’s rights, minority rights, gay rights, and were for the Vietnam war led a campaign against those who wanted that change.
Damn. He really nailed it, didn’t he?
That’s when we started to see all the talk about people on the left being communists, immoral, unAmerican, etc. That’s when the right started all the talk about feminism being immoral as women started coming into the workforce and Roe became the law of the land, allowing women to exercise control over their reproductive systems and sex lives by being able to obtain abortions legally for the first time along with legal and widely available birth control. When we saw all the talk about blacks being criminals and taking jobs from whites with the advent of affirmative action. When nonwhite immigrants were accused of taking jobs from the white man or after 9/11, being terrorists. When we saw war protesters, many of whom were young draft age white men who refused to go to war, left the country to avoid it, protested it, dressed weird, listened to rock and roll, and stopped going to church/taking up nonChristian beliefs like Buddhism and Hari Khrisna as immoral and anti-American. But the Republican party had enough people running the party and government who were housebroken enough to contain the worst actors to the fringes of the party and to moderate the opposition to the forces of change.
But the fringe wasn’t going to stay there. Oh, no. Not when you think your cause is righteous. and destruction is imminent if you lose.
It took off with right wing radio in the 80s and 90s, most notably by Rush Limbaugh. They started spewing caustic, racist, sexist talk designed to gin up the working class white population, mostly men. Together with people like Newt Gingrich in the House, the right started to talk about their opponents on the left as enemies of America. Evangelical Christians also saw these changes as a moral threat to America’s soul as well, particularly the changes to women’s rights, increasing acceptance of sex outside of marriage, and gay rights, and joined hands with the fringe element to become a key voting bloc called the “Moral Majority”. The Moral Majority gave people like Gingrich a moral shield to what he was doing—when Clinton was impeached by the House he led, Gingrich’s affair with his now wife, Callista, that was going on at the same time was essentially ignored by that same group of Christians who condemned Clinton for his affair. All Gingrich had to do was say he was a practicing Catholic, quote some Bible to them, and that was all those Christians needed to hear—all was forgiven as long as he could take out the hated Clinton and stop the Democratic agenda.
The left was painted by people like Limbaugh as well as the Moral Majority and their representatives in Congress as being a mortal threat to America and that they had to be stopped before judgement rained down on this country. Limbaugh in particular became the poster boy for the right, even acting as a kingmaker in political circles—if you pissed him off, you literally could lose your political career, and if you wanted one, you have to sound just like him and if you could, be a regular guest on his show. Sound familiar?
Then Fox News added to the chorus being sung by the right regarding the left being anti America and pushed the narrative that the mainstream media was being run by leftists who were out to get “traditional America” and could not be trusted. With Fox pushing the right wing narrative against women’s rights, minority rights, and more and more, LGBTQ rights, and the growing belief among the conservative base that all other media could not be trusted, Fox became the go-to network for the right, with all of the stars in the right wing political universe making appearances on their shows. Other right wing talk shows sprung up as well to reinforce/establish the right wing media universe and world view.
All of this talk rested increasingly on twisting the truth and reducing the arguments to simplistic, belligerent “us vs. them” scaremongering talk and bumper sticker policy that was easy for the Republican base to understand and for politicians to campaign with. And as time went on and the right wing media became more entrenched and widespread, twisting the truth evolved into outright lies about the Democrats and their agendas and beliefs as well as war talk. And that talk angered and frightened a greater proportion of the mostly white, rural, churchgoing/traditional values crowd who lapped it all up. Those hosts were speaking to everything they believed, and they started voting for people who were willing to reinforce their beliefs about a new America that was out to get them—an America that was made up of nonwhite, nonChristian/atheist, and women who didn’t want to marry young (or at all), birth baby after baby and stay at home (and thanks to Roe, they didn’t have to anymore). An America that if taken over by Democrats, would kill them and drive America to the very gates of hell if we, the righteous, don’t stop them.
Well, when you start talking about your opponents as being a threat to you and your country, and you have leaders who twist the truth or outright lie about them, and you are frightened that your country will be harshly judged by God if you don’t get things back the way they were before 1964, you start getting the mindset that it is “all hands on deck”—whatever it is you have to do to stop your country going down the drain, you do. Whoever is on your side is your friend, and we aren’t going to care what kind of person you really are because you believe like I do. And if the people leading you into battle are ginning you up on lies and twisted versions of the truth and a dark view of America under your opponent’s rule, and you therefore support them because you think they are the last wall between you and destruction, well, you are already on the road to hell. You’re not going to really care too much about what those people who are leading you are really doing and saying as long as they are fighting by your side for your very soul.
But up until the advent of the Tea Party in the late 2000s, the Republican establishment and apparatus were still able to keep the housebroken members in the top offices and to put a lid on the crazy. People like Mitt Romney, John Boehner, John McCain, George H. W. Bush were still in control at the highest levels of government, and they tamed/tamped down/ostracized a lot of the more feral members. But the Tea Party managed to send a significant number of these feral Congressional members to the House to the point where they made up a major part of the Republican caucus and could no longer be stuffed in a box. They made Speaker Boehner’s life hell, hell to the point where he and Paul Ryan, his successor, just couldn’t govern their caucus. Both Boehner and Ryan eventually ended up resigning as Speaker and left politics altogether. In all likelihood they knew that what they were seeing was the likely future of their party, and they refused to continue to deal with it.
The firewall just couldn’t hold for much longer. With each election the base was becoming more and more radical, more and more wanting to push back against the changes they saw, ginned up by all the forces I’ve talked about above. And eventually the dam broke—with John McCain’s and Mitt Romney’s losses to Barack Obama, a black man with a funny name running the country, the right wing sphere went into overdrive, casting Obama as a Muslim and not as American as they were because he had a Kenyan father and blaming McCain’s and Romney’s losses on them not being real Republicans—a RINO.
After that loss in 2012, it was on. The base, after eight years of Obama, and getting drunk on right wing lies, doomsday talk, and racist talk about Obama from Fox, right wing media, Republican politicians, and conservative Christian leaders, did not want any more McCains or Romneys—they wanted fighters, brawlers.
Enter Fatso45.
He was as crude and direct spoken as they were. He talked in simplistic language and made threats to people. He called Democrats and other establishment Republicans names and he said all the stuff they were thinking about women, immigrants, minorities and gay people. He sucked up to the Christian right with his talk about appointing judges. And he was a rich man, a household name, with a pretty wife so he must know what he is talking about. He sounded like Rush Limbaugh, someone they had long supported and loved. The fact that he was a crooked businessman, had been married three times and had cheated on all of his wives didn’t matter.
By the time Fatso came on board, the base was ready to take whoever would beat back “the left”. And you know the rest—it’s been turtles all the way down since. The base looked the other way or cheered outright when Fatso started crapping like a diarrhetic Christmas goose all over the law and the Constitution and what most people would consider decent behavior—all the stuff they would have lynched Obama for had he done even a tenth of what Fatso did.
Since the housebroken people have now largely been drummed out of visible politics on the Republican side there are no more adults in the party to check this stuff. Those that used to be considered traditional Republicans like Lindsay Graham, Mitch McConnell, and Mitt Romney are keeping quiet—they don’t want to lose their seats or invite threats or harassment from the base like Liz Cheney did. It’s a feral, feces throwing, free for all over there with the radical members holding people like Kevin McCarthy hostage—McCarthy is now doing the two step with ferals like Majorie Taylor Greene, Matt Geatz, Paul Gosar, and others in order to become Speaker. Anyone who wants to run for office, even a clown like Santos who literally lied his way into office and will be seated as a Congressional member while McCarthy, the putative Speaker, looks the other way has a place in today’s Republican party.
It’s sad that there is nobody in the Republican world that is just willing to just say, “STOP!”. The Republican congressional leaders are leaving it largely to non-Republicans to do a job they should be doing—exposing this rot and cleaning it up. But not only are these leaders refusing to do that, they condemn anyone, Democrats or Republicans who aren’t down with Fatso and his crowd who try to insert some saneness and standards back into the equation.
But as I’ve shown, it’s not like we didn’t see this coming. Our buddy who we started this off with, Goldwater in the 60s saw it coming. It just took a while. Would that the Republican party heeded his words:
“Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed. Their mistaken course stems from false notions of equality, ladies and gentlemen. Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism. Fellow Republicans, it is the cause of Republicanism to resist concentrations of power, private or public, which enforce such conformity and inflict such despotism. It is the cause of Republicanism to ensure that power remains in the hands of the people. ”
So, the upshot is, the TLDR is,
For at least 60 years, the Republican party was primed to accept any soldier they could find who would advance their goals: to wipe out the Democrat/progressive portion of the country and restore America to what it was pre-1964 when white, straight, Christian men had all power in all corners of American life and everyone else had to shut up and salute. When you are at war, you take any body you can, and that is what the Republican party is down to now: If you are on our side and will help us fight, we don’t care what you are and when you do something you shouldn’t do or you are outright criminal, we are going to defend you or just look the other way if we can’t defend you because we need you for battle.
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