It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump
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The fact that the Republican establishment is so invested in the myth that their problems are a matter of language is revealing and self-damning. At the root of it is a deep condescension that they—the de facto White Party of America—know what is best for black folks, and it’s unfortunate these black folks don’t seem to get it but, you know, they are different and we have to talk to them in a language they can understand.
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Donald Trump, the most openly racist president since Andrew Johnson or his hero Andrew Jackson
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Republicans have forgotten, have discounted, or, perhaps for some, still secretly admire that Ronald Reagan wielded race as a magnet to attract disaffected white Democrats.
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For a political party that espouses to admire business so much and wants to run government like a business, ignoring those who are selling like crazy in the toughest markets is self-defeating but very telling.
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But the inadequacy of legislation supported by Democrats is far different from a calculated effort to appeal to white voters by manipulating the race issue. One is a failure of policy. The other is a moral failure.
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there was little Nixon could do to attract black voters, so the focus should be on utilizing black voters’ support of Democrats to alienate white voters.
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the Republicans have been masters of proclaiming the virtues of personal responsibility, at least until Trump, whose eternal state is claiming he is victimized.
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But nowhere in the autopsy was there an acknowledgment or even consideration that the reason Republicans were failing with nonwhite voters was policy based, not just a question of demonstrating sincerity or failure to engage minorities.
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Trump doesn’t signal a lowering of standards of morality by Republican voters. Instead, he gives them a chance to prove how little they have always cared about those issues.
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In The Immoral Majority, Ben Howe, an evangelical who grew up in the movement, describes the long list of disgraced preachers as “figures who were cartoonish, dramatic, deceitful, wealthy, white, smarmy, judgmental, callous, and, above all, hypocritical. Charlatans.”6 This is about as perfect a description of Donald Trump as one can find.
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Their followers proudly claim they favor “authenticity” as a virtue but are drawn to the most elaborately artificial of men who cosmetically, chemically, and surgically alter their physical presence as if to affirm they were of a different, more godlike persona.
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Their entire artifice is to appear abnormal and thus escape judgment. These men are “different” and should be judged differently.
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a young staffer said that she knew God wouldn’t let us lose. To which Matthew Dowd, who was coordinating the polling, gently said, “I’m not sure God is following the tracking.”
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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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The history of the national debt is like all history: it varies greatly by authorship.
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Ask most white Republicans in “red” states about government’s spending too much, and they will rail against welfare and probably throw in a little California hating because, well, it’s California and all kinds of satanic evils are being perpetuated in that state Donald Trump calls a “disaster.”
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For all their bluster about the federal government and states’ rights, the most conservative states in the country are far and away the most dependent on federal aid.
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Every time a New Yorker or Californian goes to work, he or she is helping build roads, hospitals, and schools in Mississippi.
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There’s a language war here that Republicans have been winning for decades. “Welfare” is what the poor get because they are, well, poor, and being poor is a choice because in America anyone can succeed.
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But if Republicans were serious about being the party of fiscal responsibility, they would combine any efforts to cut entitlements with a real push to end corporate welfare of all kinds, on the state or federal level.
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(I’ve never bought the idea that this was a deliberate lie, if only because the one thing you can say about politicians like Tony Blair and George W. Bush is that they do not like to be proven wrong, and if they believed no weapons of mass destruction would be found, they would not have set themselves up for an inevitable humiliation. But that’s another book.)
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the Reagan crowd harnessed their inner John Galt to believe they had a moral duty to cut taxes, particularly for the wealthy, who were the most deserving because they were, well, wealthy and had proven themselves superior to those of lesser means.
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A belief in the power of tax cuts is about as close as it can be to a definitional core belief that exists in the Republican Party.
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But the negative political impact of Clinton’s tax increases, which hurt Democrats badly in the 1994 midterms, was nullified by the colossal stupidity of Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House.
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Being against “out-of-control federal spending,” a phrase I must have used in a hundred ads, is a catechism of the Republican faith. But no one really believes in it any more than communicants believe they are actually eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ. It just makes the members of the Republican Church feel closer to their political God.
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But what is often forgotten is that the National Review began as basically a well-educated-racist publication.
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The losing Buckley argument was one that would continue to be a touchstone of the Republican credo on race until today: that in America, race doesn’t matter; anyone can succeed.
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Today the intellectual leaders of the Republican Party are the paranoids, kooks, know-nothings, and bigots who once could be heard only on late-night talk shows, the stations you listened to on long drives because it was hard to fall asleep while laughing.
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When any political movement loses all sense of self and has no unifying theory of government, it ceases to function as a collective rooted in thought and becomes more like fans of a sports team.
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It’s not just that no one knows anything about the subject; they don’t remotely care. All Republicans want to do is beat the team playing the Giants.
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One of the hallmarks of the Trump era is the alacrity with which intelligent people embrace stupidity.
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The Deep State seems to be driven by Trump’s annoyance that there was a government that existed before he came to power and there is a government that will exist afterward.
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Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics, published in 2018,
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“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”
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Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics, published in 2016,
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To promote a world viewpoint distinct from that shared by the majority, it was critical to assert that everyone else simply didn’t have the correct information on which to base decisions.