It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump
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Read between September 24 - September 28, 2020
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Trump isn’t an aberration of the Republican Party; he is the Republican Party in a purified form. I
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Since 1964, no Republican presidential candidate has broken 17 percent with African American voters, and by 2016 only 3 percent considered themselves Republican.4
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The modern Democratic Party has fought for civil rights and believes government has a moral role in helping to create racial equality in America. The modern Republican Party has fought civil rights and is very hesitant to assert government has a role in equality of any sort, including racial.
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After Goldwater carried only southern states and received a record low of 7 percent of the black vote, the party faced a basic choice: do what was necessary to appeal to more nonwhite voters, or build a party to win with white voters. It chose the latter, and when most successfully executed, a race-based strategy was the foundation of many of the Republican Party’s biggest victories, from Nixon to Trump.
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Why? The Republican Party was—and still is—afraid of Donald Trump. Early in the primary season, his threats to run as an independent neutralized any hint of courage the Republican Party establishment might have been able to muster.
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How do you abandon deeply held beliefs about character, personal responsibility, foreign policy, and the national debt in a matter of months? You don’t. The obvious answer is those beliefs weren’t deeply held. In the end, the Republican Party rallied behind Donald Trump because if that was the deal needed to regain power, what was the problem? Because it had always been about power. The rest? The principles? The values? It was all a lie.
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Donald Trump for over a decade had managed to lose more money than any other American and, in some years, twice as much as any other American. This is the man Republicans chose because of his business smarts and success:
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Republican Party claims to be a party that understands the need to run government efficiently, managing debt and balancing a budget. In truth the modern Republican Party is the equivalent of Donald Trump: addicted to debt and selling a false image of success.
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in the post–World War II era, Republican presidents have contributed far more to the deficit than Democrats.
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Special interest groups are like terrorists: they test for weakness and exploit fear. What happened to the Republican Party is that slowly over half a century the kooks and weirdos and social misfits of a conservative ideology started discovering that they could force reasonable people to support unreasonable positions through fear. The transition of the National Rifle Association is a perfect parable: over a couple of decades, it evolved from a gun-safety education organization to a thuggish gang that rewards those at the top with millions of dollars based on proven ability to muscle elected ...more
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Polarization in Congress derives from both sincere ideological differences about policy means and ends and strategic behavior to exploit those differences to win elections. The combination of high ideological stakes and intense competition for party control of the national government has all but eliminated the incentives for significant bipartisan cooperation on important national problems. Consequently, polarization has reduced congressional capacity to govern.
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The evidence points to a major partisan asymmetry in polarization. Despite the widespread belief that both parties have moved to the extremes, the movement of the Republican Party to the right accounts for most of the divergence between the two parties. Since the 1970s, each new cohort of Republican legislators has taken more conservative positions on legislation than the cohorts before them. That is not true of Democratic legislators.11
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Published in 1952, the Memoirs of Franz von Papen is a study in self-deception by an intelligent man who knows he made terrible mistakes with horrific consequences but is still trying to explain that his choices were the best of bad ones available. In an effort to justify abolishing the ban on Nazi storm troopers, he blamed left-wing radicals:
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American history has never seen a party so unified in perpetuating a massive fraud. This isn’t the action of a rogue president like Watergate but a deliberate, calculated decision for a major governing party of the most powerful nation in the history of the world to join hands and deny what they know is true: that Donald Trump is a threat to the country.
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This was their moment to stand for something, and they chose to stand for reelection. Let us remember.
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Illegal voting has long been a felony, and the idea that of all the felonies possible to commit, someone would risk the consequences of a felony conviction to vote is one of the more almost-charming absurdities imaginable. Our problem in America is getting people to vote, not stopping illegals.
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Minority voters did not just refuse to show up; Republican legislatures and governors systematically blocked African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans from the polls.
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Demographic groups that preferred Trump were three times as likely to be a bigger part of the voter pool than nonvoters. Among groups that preferred Clinton, they were about 50 percent more likely to be a bigger part of the nonvoting community.
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Perhaps these men and women deserve some of our pity for their pathos, but they have proven they deserve none of our respect. They had a sworn oath to defend the country and chose to defend Donald Trump, the most anti-American president in the country’s history.
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These are the new segregationists, who have convinced themselves they are fighting a just war to defend the values of “our way of life.”
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The Trump Republican Party has abandoned any pretense of kindness or compassion as a desirable human quality. All his life Donald Trump has seen these as weaknesses, not virtues worthy of aspiration. Now so it is with the Republican Party.
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Donald Trump did not change the Republican Party as much as he gave the party permission to reveal its true self. The Lindsey Grahams of the world have not changed. We are only now seeing who they always were, freed from any need to pretend.
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As the Democratic Party drifts more leftward, there is an urgent need for a center-right party to argue for a different vision and governing philosophy. But how can the party that gave us Donald Trump be a legitimate voice for conservatism as a positive force? Without moral legitimacy, a center-right party becomes a soufflé of grievances and anger that exists to settle scores, not solve problems. A political party without a higher purpose is nothing more than a cartel, a syndicate.
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So it is with today’s Republican Party. It is a cartel that exists to elect Republicans. There is no organized, coherent purpose other than the acquisition and maintenance of power.