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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsNYT - Paul Krugman connects today's right wing madness to Reagan. Brilliant Op Ed
When Did Republicans Start Hating Facts"
A straight line runs from Reagan to the Trump dead-enders.
Paul Krugman
By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/opinion/republicans-reagan-disinformation.html
Republicans spent most of 2020 rejecting science in the face of a runaway pandemic; now theyre rejecting democracy in the face of a clear election loss. What do these rejections have in common? In each case, one of Americas two major parties simply refused to accept facts it didnt like. Im not sure its right to say Republicans believe that, say, wearing face masks is useless or that there was widespread voter fraud. Framing the issue as one of belief suggests that some kind of evidence might change party loyalists minds.
In reality, what Republicans say they believe flows from what they want to do, whether its ignore a deadly disease or stay in power despite the voters verdict. In other words, the point isnt that the G.O.P. believes untrue things. It is, rather, that the party has become hostile to the very idea that theres an objective reality that might conflict with its political goals.
Notice, by the way, that Im not including qualifiers, like saying some Republicans. Were talking about most of the party here. The Texas lawsuit calling on the Supreme Court to overturn the election was both absurd and deeply un-American, but more than 60 percent of Republicans in the House signed a brief supporting it, and only a handful of elected Republicans denounced the suit. At this point, you arent considered a proper Republican unless you hate facts. But when and how did the G.O.P. get that way? If you think it started with Donald Trump and will end when he leaves the scene (if he ever does), youre naïve.
Republicans have been heading in this direction for decades. Im not sure whether we can pinpoint the moment when the party began its descent into malignant madness, but the trajectory that led to this moment probably became irreversible under Ronald Reagan. Republicans have, of course, turned Reagan into an icon, portraying him as the savior of a desperate, declining nation. Mostly, however, this is just propaganda. Youd never know from the legend that economic growth under Reagan was only slightly faster than it had been under Jimmy Carter, and slower than it would be under Bill Clinton.
snip
last part
For rejecting facts comes naturally to people who insist that theyre acting on behalf of God. So does refusing to accept election results that dont go their way. After all, if liberals are servants of Satan trying to destroy Americas soul, they shouldnt be allowed to exercise power even if they should happen to win more votes. Sure enough, a few days ago the televangelist Pat Robertson who first became politically influential under Reagan pronounced the Texas lawsuit a miracle, an intervention by God that would keep Trump in office. The point is that the G.O.P. rejection of facts that has been so conspicuous this year wasnt an aberration. What were seeing is the culmination of a degradation that began a long time ago and is almost surely irreversible.
It is all worth reading - sorry about the paywall
Cha
(297,800 posts)Solly Mack
(90,792 posts)pecosbob
(7,545 posts)I can think of at least a half a dozen posters here at DU who've been saying this for decades...myself included. The Rubicon was crossed when Reagan traded arms for hostages for an election win.
NRaleighLiberal
(60,026 posts)pecosbob
(7,545 posts)Hermit-The-Prog
(33,484 posts)The pandemic and this election shit may be enough to get people to notice how we got here. They're sitting at home and you can only watch so many pharma commercials waiting for breathless talk show hosts to say the same thing again. Sooner or later, somebody reads who is not used to it.
Hekate
(90,865 posts)...As it happens, that was 20 years ago. He has been an acute observer of RW politics for longer than that. Hes a liberal.
Anyway, now that youve been introduced, so to speak, heres one link among many
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman
davekriss
(4,628 posts)Mine, too. I still read him twice a week, though today there are more reality grounded, progressive voices to be heard. Requires that I read a lot more!
SunSeeker
(51,745 posts)Reagan was not original in that respect. Republicans have been cheating scum, willing to sell the country down the river since Hoover.
What Reagan really did to change the GOP was cultivating racist, reality-hating right wing evangelicals.
From the article:
For rejecting facts comes naturally to people who insist that theyre acting on behalf of God. So does refusing to accept election results that dont go their way. After all, if liberals are servants of Satan trying to destroy Americas soul, they shouldnt be allowed to exercise power even if they should happen to win more votes.
The point is that the G.O.P. rejection of facts that has been so conspicuous this year wasnt an aberration. What were seeing is the culmination of a degradation that began a long time ago and is almost surely irreversible.
The loony evangelical right is now the GOP base. We can't change these loons' minds. We need to spend our precious time and resources on increasing our own base by going after nonvoters. Those folks are persuadable, and we need to make it easier for them to vote. And we need to add DC and Puerto Rico as states.
For your analysis of the analysis.
jalan48
(13,901 posts)c-rational
(2,596 posts)SunSeeker
(51,745 posts)melman
(7,681 posts)The whole Never Trumper con is based on pretending this all just started and the GOP was good before 2016. That is the idea charlatans like Nicolle Wallace, Steve Schmidt, Rick Wilson, Jennifer Rubin and all the rest are selling. It's a lie.
Blue_true
(31,261 posts)create a Trump, they are now on our side. It definitely seems to be a marriage of convenience to them, except for Wallace, who except for her fondness of W, appears to have turned to the right page. I really dont know how to handle the Never Trumpers, at one level, I can never trust them, while on another level I realize that they help us potentially close elections.
What I hope comes out of the farce that a Trump has run since Nov 3 is that republicans who truly believed in the rule of law, but had to be republicans have had the rose-colored shades knocked from their eyes and now see that even they are not safe if they follow the laws that we have. Hopefully the threats of harm that they are getting and them having to have police protection will wake them up and force them to look at the cold and brutal reality of what they have stood for for decades, and understand that led them and us to where we are today. They can no longer justify things like voter suppression, because that endangers them now.
JoeOtterbein
(7,702 posts)...and now all of a sudden they discover that Repubs lie?
Jeeze.
Hekate
(90,865 posts)JoeOtterbein
(7,702 posts)...I was referring to retrumplicans. Specifically the "never tRumpers" who fell for Raygun and the rest of the lying repubs until tRump. Like they never knew how evil the party has been, and continues to be, since at least Nixon.
Blue_true
(31,261 posts)Reagan refined it to a dangerous art form. Reagan also brought extreme religious people into the republican power calculus, Nixon toyed with that element, but never put it front and center like Reagan did.
Nixon brought about the southern strategy, an act that directly pitted Americans against each other. Reagan brought the element of race in that strategy to the surface, Nixon had shied away from using race as the bludgeoning tool that Reagan did.
What we have now is that the vast majority of evangelicals and an increasing number of hyper religious Catholics and Jewish people see anyone that don the share their point of view as incarnate evil, for the time being they have a truce with each other, at least until they destroy the secular humanists or basically anyone who isnt them. So they can witness a monster putting children in cages and having them sleep on hard floors and not be repulsed by that, to them that monstrosity is all part of Gods plan.
Marie Marie
(9,999 posts)spiraled into unthinkable amount of suffering and deaths. Yup, Reagan is responsible for so much of our downfall as a nation. Union busting, the decline of the middle class, tax cuts for the rich resulting in huge deficits and on and on.
Upthevibe
(8,083 posts)Thanks for posting....
Midnight Writer
(21,819 posts)The ghosts of McCarthy and his man Roy Cohn are still with us. Trump has a very McCarthy style.
Eisenhower got in bed with the Evangelist Right and fostered the military-industrial complex.
Nixon went full Southern Strategy. (And was nakedly corrupt)
As did Reagan. Also the "figurehead" strategy. As Gil Scot-Heron said "America wanted John Wayne. They settled for Ronald Reagan"
Reagan also laid bare the Party of the Rich strategy, making it respectable with it's Ayn Rand philosophy.
Bush's were President As Tools advocates. As Grover Norquist said, the people he works for just wants a President with enough working digits to sign whatever they put in front of him. W went hard for the crank vote.
And then Trump. Need I?
retread
(3,764 posts)certainot
(9,090 posts)i like his stuff in general but how much longer are democrats and liberals going to keep walking around the stinking pile of shit under the living room rug?
it was limbaugh and sons on 1500 radio stations for years that made reagan into a god while he and bush should have been in jail for the 'october surprise'
JudyM
(29,294 posts)We know we have right on our side but we seem to think it speaks for itself. Clearly, it only speaks to those of us who are tuning in.
burrowowl
(17,653 posts)Roisin Ni Fiachra
(2,574 posts)Like turning off a light switch.
George II
(67,782 posts)....Nixon and his closest advisors circled the wagons and "stonewalled" the investigations.
Back in August C-Span or PBS ran their Watergate documentary - republicans were almost as one-minded a bloc as they are today. Then after months of holding back the tapes, when they were finally released along with the "smoking gun" tape, the dam broke and republicans lined up behind impeachment. But even then, there were a half dozen on the Judiciary Committee who didn't budge.
But the right wing madness really accelerated under Reagan and Bush. That was about the time that Reagan relaxed FCC media ownership rules, Rush Limbaugh and RW talk shows showed up. They mushroomed under Bush and by the time Clinton was elected they were almost at the level of poison that they are today.
From there it was down hill to the point that we're at today, and I don't know if it will ever be fully turned around. But groups like The Lincoln Project and Republican Vets Against Trump, the two most prominent, are a refreshing change and hopefully will continue their work after Biden takes over. I see that the Lincoln Project intends to remain active. They've admitted that although there will be (in reality, almost has to be) two separate ideologies, the only way things can progress is through compromise like it was decades ago.
Hopefully all the old, crusty, nasty republicans will one day soon be pushed out of office, with the help of those conservative groups, and we can get back to where we were in the 1950s and early 1960s, and even to a degree in the 1970s.
ananda
(28,885 posts)He got the ball rolling.
calimary
(81,527 posts)And hits hard.
Hit 'em for ME, too, Paul.