As I was driving to work today, I was pondering the long slow demise of the Republican Party. Below is what I came up with. The list is non-comprehensive and anecdotal. After all, it was just a commute filling muse. For reference, I was born in 1966, grew up in PA, and consider the Republican Party of the mid-1970s as the reference point for a functioning Republican Party.
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Ronald Regan proposes trickle-down economics.Everyone knew this was not going to work including George H.W. Bush who called it VooDoo Economics.Now 36 years later, it’s become an entrenched lie in the Republican Party, like a lie from a cheating spouse who can figure his/her way out.Their stuck with it and it continues to do damage to the country.
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Fall of the Soviet Union.This event had two negative impacts on the Republican Party. It created the enduring myth of an outsized level of influence by Reagan which supports a go-it-alone interventionist philosophy in the Republican Party to this day.Secondly, there is something in the Republican/Conservative mindset that seeks a bifurcated world of us and them, good guys and bad guys rather than recognizing that he world is a complex, multipolar entity.Looking back, we were all better off when the “them” that the Republicans were fixated on was foreign country compared to the current demonization of Muslims.
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The appointment of Antonin Scalia to the Supreme Court. His odd brand of “originalism” helped to create the myth that precedent-following jurists were somehow “legislating from the bench” and was the point of origin for the battle line over which the Republican-controlled Senate is not refusing to fulfill its constitutional duty to meet with and hold hearings on Judge Garland.
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The rise of Lee Atwater and his corrosive campaign tactics in the 1980s, which brought us the Willie Horton ad and was the foreshadowing for Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
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Arlen Spector destroys his career and reputation attacking Anita Hill. This one is a bit personal for me.Growing up in PA, we had Spector and John Heinz for Senator.They were, at least at the time I thought, reasonable Republican.Heck, I even voted for Spector in the 1980s. I am still at a loss to understand what motivated him.
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Clinton derangement syndrome.To me the consistent and increasingly bizarre attacks on Bill and Hillary Clinton represented a concerted effort to create the impression/illusion that there was something fundamentally illegitimate about there being a Democrat in the White House.The Republicans tried to imbed the ideas that somehow Clinton must have cheated and/or the people who voted for him were un-American or somehow foreign. This culminated in the unfounded impeachment process.Even now I find it hard to believe that they tried to impeach President Clinton for having an affair. The moment I remember best was when then Representative Lindsey Graham was asked if reasonable men could disagree and he said yes.To this day I write him an occasional email to remind him that he once peered into the abyss and stepped back and suggest that he do so again. (Most recently I encouraged him to endorse a Democratic presidential candidate over Trump.)
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Bush v. Gore.Rather than letting the political process play out in Florida, the Republican-controlled Supreme Court chose to intervene.This handed us perhaps the worst president in U.S. History and did incredible damage to the reputation of the court.
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Dick Cheney.No further explanation required.
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The utilization of the tragedy of 9/11 to invade Iraq.Like the Clinton impeachment, it’s hard for me to believe that this really happened. This could be a long explanation, but I’ll keep it short.I was strongly opposed to the concept that the U.S. should consider and had the right to invade a country because we suspected that they might someday do us harm, but I did try to keep an open mind on WMDs.Not that I thought we should invade, but that at least Bush believe that they might actually exist.My personal low point came during a speech that President Bush gave in June of 2003.At this point our military was largely in control in Iraq and it was abundantly clear that there were no WMDs.President Bush could have said that he stood by his decision to invade Iraq even though there were no WMDs because he felt it was his duty to protect us.I would have disagreed but at least respective his point of view and recognized it as internally self-consistent. Instead he went with “we’re still going to find them”.It was the last time I listened to any of his speeches.
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John McCain 2008.During his campaign for president in 2000, John McCain was a reasonable guy with whom I disagreed.In 2008, he decided that he had to abandon his career and principles and embrace the crazy in his effort to become President. He through the last of his credibility away when he picked Sarah Palin for VP.During some of his campaign events, with the secret-Kenyan-Muslim statements, harbingers of today’s Trump rallies.In an unguarded moment of public decency, McCain did pull back from the abyss when a particularly crazy woman went on an anti-Obama rant and corrected here by telling her that Obama was a decent family man.As with Graham, I occasionally contact Senator McCain, remind him of this, and ask for another act of courage and decency.Neither Graham nor McCain have ever responded.
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Mitch McConnell’s pledge in 2008 to oppose everything President Obama would do.This position led to the biggest farce of the last 8 years.Upon taking office, President Obama decided to address the health insurance crisis in the U.S. by implemented the center right solution of creating health care exchanges as developed by the Heritage Foundation and implemented by Republican Governor Romney in Massachusetts. The Republicans then doubled down by portraying this as some sort of socialist government takeover of health care.Since then we’ve seen scores of these silly “repeal and replace” rituals.But since Obama implanted their plan, if they repeal it then there’s nothing left to replace it with. Then we followed up with the bizarre Romney presidential campaign during which he was forced to claim that as president he would repeal the program that was his greatest accomplishment as governor.
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Donald Trump.
I sincerely hope that we are currently watching the end of this story unfold in which the Republican Party implodes and is forced to rebuild. Because, despite being a life-long Democrat, I recognize that we need a functioning Republican/Conservative party. We need robust political debate. We need to relearn how to compromise. We need the ~40% of the people in the country who identify as conservative to feel and be represented. I hope that’s the path we’re on.