Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

by Thomas L. Friedman

The G.O.P. used to be an incredibly rich polyculture. It gave us ideas as diverse as our national parks (under Theodore Roosevelt), the Environmental Protection Agency and Clean Air and Clean Water Acts (under Richard Nixon), radical nuclear arms control and the Montreal Protocol to close the ozone hole (under Ronald Reagan), cap-and-trade to curb acid rain (under George H. W. Bush), and market-based health care reform (under Mitt Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts). And for decades the party itself was a pluralistic amalgam of northern liberal Republicans and southern and western conservatives. But in recent years the Tea Party and other hyperconservative forces, also funded in large part by fossil fuel companies and oil billionaires, have tried to wipe out the Republican Party’s once rich polyculture and turn it into a monoculture that’s enormously susceptible to diseased ideas: climate change is a hoax; evolution never happened; we don’t need immigration reform. All of this weakened the G.O.P.’s foundation and opened the way for an invasive species such as Donald Trump to make deep inroads into its garden.