Decades. The Republican Party, as manipulated through the tentacles of a variety of right wing financiers, has spent the last few decades creeping down a slope so slippery that they can't even begin to think about turning around on that hill.
The things we've heard from the audiences at recent Republican events did not arrive overnight. The sentiments they express have been around forever, probably. Yet, we off and on seem to reach points in our history as humans where we temper those baser instincts.
I noticed this problem during Clinton's presidency. I was in my 20's in the 90's. I heard enough right wing radio and TV to know that it was there, and that the hosts and guests would say awful, awful things.
When I was doing my graduate school work, I ran into a report by the media watchdog FAIR. The report was about the number of errors in fact, and offensive statements made by Rush LImbaugh. He had only begun to get unleashed on the general public.
The things that Rush was saying were vile, hateful, and offensive. Most importantly, they were deliberate distortions of truth.
This is when I noticed how much right wing legislators sounded like right wing propagandists in the media. The reason, of course, is that the right wing media is the primary driver of issues for Republican Party. It is a wide and spacious highway of misinformation, distortion of fact, fallacious reasoning, and outright lies.
Maybe I hadn't noticed it before. I'd say that's likely. However, the whole Contract on America and the conservative congress of 1994 only gave them inspiration to keep sliding sliding down that slippery slope.
Conspiracies about Democratic Presidents killing American citizens seemed commonplace. It was revolting.
Very few of us have any real dislike for Bernie Sanders. He's a unique individual in politics in the US. He's a left winger. Even then, even when he's on the radio with Thom Hartmann, even when he's confronted with a clumsily phrased, overly aggressive tirade against policies of conservative governance... even then, he doesn't come unstuck. He calmly and politely restates the questions and assumptions, and he can simply dismiss it as a means of political interaction that is counterproductive.
He is about as far left as it gets for us, but he doesn't sound like over the top AM radio hosts.
The elected representatives on the right began to sound more and more like the AM radio hosts, and read more like the nutso pamphleteer wannabes who populate RW conferences and Birch-Ins. (I made that up. I've never heard of a Birch-In, but I'm sure they'd unload some vile hate material there.)
They went off on this tangent with Reagan. You should despise your government. I've never understood how they miss the definition of "government" that is implicit in the very founding documents they claim to adore. Did they not notice that the government is "We the people?" Or are they just the types who don't read the prologue? They have spent the last 30 years enabling the fringiest amongst them. So now they are confronted with the inevitable roosting of the chickens, the paying of the piper, the coins to the ferryman, the looking in the mouth of the gift horse...
So what are they supposed to do? I mean this is a group of people who, when asked about the response to the question on whether someone should be left to die due to a lack of ability to pay, aggressively denounce the questioner because of such a tricky "gotcha" question.
Tip for the Republicans, the answer is easy: No person inside of our borders will be refused necessary medical treatment due to a lack of ability to pay. Nobody.
See? Easy answer. None of this hemming and hawing about "Well, in my world..." It's not your world. In this real world, people do things that are stupid. They make decisions based on short term thinking. And you think that it could possibly be okay to allow someone to die for a problem that did not harm anyone else? You guys must have buried your moral compass under the Reagan Library.
The Entire Republican base reminds me of a suffering sports franchise. Sports franchises will often go through a series of coaches and losing seasons before they realize that there is something fundamentally wrong with the structure of the management, and that a new coach won't solve anything. Ask any LA Clippers coach. Right now, the Republican base is out trying to hire another coach before they even fire the current coaches.
Maybe Chris Christie will be that magic coach. Or not. I choose not. It's not even a choice, really. I see no possible way that Chris Christie would be able to do anything other than be forced to defend patently absurd actions and statements.
His entry into the race is probably only contingent on some way of going back in time and not riding a helicopter to his kid's baseball game.
The base is just doing what their masters have been bidding them to do for the past few decades. It's just that the masters never actually believed that the most extreme policies suggested by right wing propagandists and fanatics would actually make it into real policy discussions as a real option!
Although... What if we had a drinking game for the next Republican debate? Each time someone cheers a morally reprehensible action that completely contradicts the moral teachings of all of the religious holy books of every culture throughout the entire history of the world, you drink. I predict you'd be hammered before the third question.