Longtime GOP insider Mike Lofgren on his former party: "Going easy on these people will not work"

[malaise]

https://www.salon.com/2021/01/16/longtime-gop-insider-mike-lofgren-on-his-former-party-going-easy-on-these-people-will-not-work/

Republican officials at the highest level support insurrection, terrorism and treason. They have presided over a political culture that, for many years, has inculcated seditious desires within millions of expertly programmed citizens. The consequences became manifest on Jan. 6 when a rabid mob of neo-Confederates, fascists and associated psychotics took the Capitol by force, perhaps hoping to murder duly elected members of Congress — not to mention the vice president — and install Donald Trump as dictator.

As surreal as that summary of recent events might seem, it was not entirely unpredictable. Mike Lofgren, a former Republican congressional staff member of 28 years, began warning about the danger of the GOP in 2011, even going so far as to condemn his longtime party as a "death cult." Before his retirement, Lofgren worked in both the House and Senate as a specialist staffer for national security affairs, tasked with analyzing Pentagon budget requests and preparing military-related legislation.

Lofgren's formal training, not incidentally is as a historian. He holds an M.A. in history from the University of Akron, and went on to study European history on a Fulbright scholarship at the University of Bern and the University of Basel in Switzerland.

The unique combination of Lofgren's historical expertise and his long career in the "boiler room" of legislative politics, as he calls it, put him in the perfect position to see the destructive monstrosity that Republicans and their far-right allies have created. He has detailed his analysis and experience in two books, "The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless and the Middle Class Got Shafted" and "The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government."

With that latter title, by the way, Lofgren was not gesturing toward the conspiracy-theory delusion currently popular among Trump supporters. Rather, he meant "deep state" as an umbrella term for the lobbying firms, corporate donors and military-industrial complex that have a stranglehold on American public policy.
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Interesting read

[SheltieLover]

1. Enabling emboldening

We have this because prick nixon, bush, cheny, etc. were not fully prosecuted & MAX sentences handed out!

[TreasonousBastard]

2. Reagan, Gingrich, the Tea Party, and now this...

Yes, the Republican Party is no longer the party of Buckley, Hoover, Eisenhower, Goldwater, or even Nixon.

It was always wrong about some things, but now is no longer even a useful tool in bringing up alternatives and controlling any excesses of the left.

It started with Reagan's associates changing things in ways even he might not have liked if be knew about them, and Gingrich solidified the concept of power for power's own sake.

It does not even pretend to offer positive proposals, and is now simply a weapon of destruction.

[Laelth]

6. That "Party" didn't even produce a 2020 platform.

It’s a cult of personality and a safe-haven for malcontents and psychopaths. That’s all that’s left of it.

-Laelth

[Hermit-The-Prog]

3. Won't buy his books, but will acknowledge he recognized it as a death cult long before I did.

In 2011, I still thought the Republican party was a coalition of some evil assholes and some misinformed, but hopeful, conservatives. It took the pandemic for me to recognize that the entire party is a death cult.

[JonLP24]

4. I agree

This is why I'm not interested in "both sides" arguments anymore.

[CrispyQ]

5. I had not heard this:

At the same time, once the mob was dispersed, they went throughout the D.C. metro area randomly beating up people whom they could victimize.

Has this been on the news?

[Turin_C3PO]

7. That stuck out to me too.

I haven’t seen anything on the news about that. But I don’t doubt that it’s true.