Republican Party

Considering their political positions in this changing world, their animal ought to be an ostrich with its head in the sand.

God, guns, and freedom U.S. Politics

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Persons of interest

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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. … [I]t had always been about power. The rest? The principles? The values? It was all a lie.

—Stuart Stevens, former GOP campaign strategist, member of The Lincoln Project

“”The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

—Thomas E. Mann & Norman J. Ornstein, 2012

“”We oppose teaching of Higher order Thinking Skills [because they] have the purpose of challenging the student's fixed beliefs and undermining parental control.

—Texas GOP platform, demonstrating exactly what the GOP is — pure dagnasty evil a bunch of willfully ignorant morons.[citation NOT needed]

The Republican Party is — as of 2024 — one of the two major political parties in the United States. The party comprises several small, unofficial, and highly factionalized "sub-parties" with drastically different beliefs. As of 2024, devoid of much policy unity, the party has unified behind the personality and vague nationalist promises of a perennial presidential candidate, perennial president, and former reality TV show celebrity named Donald Trump.

The base of the Republican Party self-describes as conservative, but they continually elected leaders who are anything but conservative. These leaders nominate conservative supreme court justices in exchange for power. This bizarre political approach has left the leadership of the Republican Party manifesting almost everything the party base claims to hate. Their most recent party convention broadcast to children featured Kid Rock rapping, pretending to masturbate with a microphone, screaming FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT, in between speeches ranging from SlutWalk organizer and OnlyFans creator Amber Rose, to speeches by a convicted felon.

Despite being founded as a black slavery abolition party, the party now enjoys almost no political support from blacks. Republicans accelerated their drift away from minorities with the Barry Goldwater insurgency of the 1960s, specifically with Goldwater beating the famously moderate Republican Nelson Rockefeller,

Ronald Reagan's hostility to the poor and those with low-income was one of many factors in leading the Party to its current state. Not content with appearing just evil, Reagan also brought the whole wingnut circus in the Republican Party, courting Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals, who had once supported Jimmy Carter (President of the United States from 1977 to 1981) but who became disillusioned with the Democratic Party. Yet another Ronnie blunder. Either way, that caused the GOP as a whole to shift to the right at a far greater pace than the Democrats have moved to the left, and many of those centrist Reaganites and Rockefeller Republicans switched parties due to the more centrist policies of the Democrat Bill Clinton (President of the United States from 1993 to 2001). The final nail in the coffin came when Dubya, who was highly neoconservative, became President (2001). While many neocons like McCain remained with the party, the Republican Party, after McCain lost the 2008 U.S. presidential election, had completed its full transformation into the mess that it is today. Voteview and its sister sites have the statistics to back this up going back decades. Speaking of statistics, Republicans lie three times more often than Democrats.

History

Origins

In the 1830s, with the ascension of Andrew Jackson to the presidency, disaffected Democrats broke away, joining with lingering Federalists to form a new second party in opposition to him. This new party was deliberately named the Whig Party, harkening back to an older British party that advocated limiting the power of the British monarchy. The Whigs similarly advocated limiting the power of the presidency, and opposed the Democratic Party's policies in the 1840s, particularly "Manifest Destiny", the idea that the U.S. is uniquely special in the world and rightfully should expand to control most of North America.

By the 1850s, the Whig Party began fracturing over major issues of the day, primarily regarding the issue of slavery. The Compromise of 1850 caused a major rift in the party between the pro-Compromise and anti-Compromise Whigs. The Whigs were demolished in the 1852 presidential election, with war hero Winfield Scott losing in a landslide to northern Democrat and "doughface" Franklin Pierce. The party never recovered from the crushing defeat, and in 1854 anti-slavery Whigs joined with Free Soilers to form the new Republican Party. In the 1856 presidential election, the Republicans tempered their anti-slavery stance to merely oppose expansion of slavery into new territories; this brought them into conflict with the "American Party" (better known as the "Know Nothings", a populist, anti-immigration party that emerged in the Northeast at the end of the 1840s); the two parties split the vote, allowing the Democrat and doughface James Buchanan to win.

In the aftermath of the 1856 election and the Supreme Court's controversial Dred Scott decision, anti-slavery Know Nothings and Whigs joined up with Republicans, which effectively killed the two parties; although the Know Nothing Party would impotently linger until 1860. The Democratic Party, which was strongest in the South, became the primary party of slavery; the Republican Party, strongest in the North, became the primary party of abolition, in particular the sub-faction known as "Radical Republicans", who advocated for immediate and unconditional abolition.

Civil War and Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln

The 1860 election was one of the most chaotic in U.S. history. The Democratic Party, split over the issue of slavery, fought an internal battle and wound up nominating two candidates, while a third party, the Constitutional Union Party, tried to attract Democrats in the South who wanted to avoid secession by ignoring the slavery issue altogether. With all that in mind, the 1860 election wound up being basically two separate elections - Republican Abraham Lincoln against Democrat Stephen A. Douglas in the North; and Democrat John C. Breckinridge against CUP candidate John Bell in the South. The ultimate result was Lincoln winning by sweeping the North and the West coast, and the other candidates splitting the rest.

Despite his protestations that he could not and would not abolish slavery, Lincoln's election triggered panicked calls for secession by pro-slavery Southerners who feared his abolitionism. In the months between November 1860 and Lincoln's inauguration in March 1861, seven states voted to secede from the U.S., which James Buchanan did little to oppose; these seceding states also began seizing federal military bases and weapons depots. The Civil War officially began in April 1861 with Confederate military forces attacking a federal fort in Charleston, South Carolina.

In the run up to the 1864 elections, the war was still raging but the North was slowly winning and the end was in sight. With this in mind, Lincoln retitled the Republican Party as the "National Union Party" in an attempt to draw in anti-secession Democrats and others who refused to vote for the Republican Party, and he took on War Democrat Andrew Johnson as his vice president. With mounting Union victories in the war, he easily defeated Democrat and general George McClellan, who struggled with the factions of his own party. The Union won the war in April 1865, and Lincoln was assassinated by a Southern sympathizer soon thereafter, putting the kibosh on Lincoln's plans to repair the broken nation.

Reconstruction, the Spoils System, and Gold buggery

With Lincoln's death, Democrat Andrew Johnson inherited the presidency and immediately began fighting with the Republican Party; Radical Republicans in particular pushed hard against Johnson, even impeaching him by setting a trap that he knowingly walked into; he barely escaped conviction during the subsequent Senate trial. The "Civil War Amendments" were passed in this time, amending the U.S. constitution to abolish slavery, grant citizenship and due process to the freed slaves, and then grant them the right to vote. The Radical Republicans began pushing for free market economics and increased civil rights for the freedmen; meanwhile, "Reconstruction" began in the states that had seceded.

Reconstruction was the process where the Union reintegrated the defeated and militarily occupied South back into the fold. Lincoln had favored a soft approach, hoping to bring the South back without punishing it too harshly. Johnson, a Southerner himself, likewise hoped for a fast reintegration, even if it came at the expense of newly freed slaves. The Radical Republicans however, favored punishing the South and continuing to push for civil rights for black Americans. With Southern Democrats who had participated in secession barred from public service, Republicans found themselves in control of the South. This of course caused tensions with the old Southern establishment, who began a terrorist campaign against "carpetbaggers" and freed blacks, which includes the formation of the paramilitary force known as the Ku Klux Klan or KKK.

The victorious Union commander, General Ulysses S Grant, was elected president in 1868. While he did some legitimately good things like crushing the KKK, implementing reforms of government agencies, and pushing for civil rights for the black population, his tenure was nevertheless marred by rampant corruption by his cabinet secretaries. His historical assessments tend to point out that he was a generally good guy who did good things but he was too loyal to his very bad underlings.

During the 1870s, the Republican Party began to split into two factions. With slavery successfully abolished, the new big issue of the day became the "Spoils System". The Spoils System (as in "to the victor goes the spoils") refers to when a president is inaugurated, he is allowed to hire his friends, family, and supporters to work in the federal government's civil service, particularly the postal service, at the time the largest agency in the federal government. This system was great for ensuring political loyalty but also encouraged corruption and punished competent but politically disloyal civil servants. The Radical Republican faction fizzled out during Grant's administration and reemerged as the "Stalwarts", conservatives who opposed any change to the spoils system. Opposing the Stalwarts were the moderate "Half-Breeds", who wanted to switch to an apolitical, merit-based system that discouraged corruption.

In the 1876 election, Republican and Half-Breed Rutherford B. Hayes faced a very close result against Northern Democrat Samuel Tilden; he cut a deal with racist Southern Democrats called "Redeemers". The "corrupt bargain" was that if the Redeemers wouldn't oppose his election bid, Hayes would end Reconstruction. They accepted, Hayes won the election, and he officially ended Reconstruction as soon as he was inaugurated. The Redeemers thus seized control of the "Solid South", and the Democratic Party would dominate Southern politics until the political realignment in the late 1960s.

Hayes had promised not to run for reelection in 1880, and kept his promise. Fellow Half-Breed James A. Garfield won the election, but he was shot a few months after his inauguration by Charles Guiteau, a crazy person who decided to kill Garfield for not gifting him a job under the spoils system. Garfield wound up dying due to unsanitary practices by the doctors who treated his wounds; Garfield's successor, a Stalwart named Chester A. Arthur, surprised everyone by passing the Pendleton Act in 1883, which began the process of abolishing the spoils system and making a merit-based civil service. With that issue du jour settled, some of the Half-Breeds shifted gears and became loud champions of cleaning up government corruption. These anti-corruption crusaders became informally known as "Mugwumps" and played a key role in the defeat of Republican candidate James G. Blaine in the 1884 election. Although Blaine had been a Half-Breed, he was plagued by allegations of corruption and the Mugwumps subsequently refused to support him, choosing instead to support the reformist Democrat, Grover Cleveland, who won a narrow victory. The Mugwumps did not rejoin the party, instead becoming independents or joining the Democrats. Notably, Theodore Roosevelt, an anti-corruption advocate who had been very sympathetic towards the Mugwump cause and did not support Blaine during the primaries, surprisingly came out in support of Blaine after the primaries, thus saving his political career from the fate of other Mugwumps.

With the battle over the spoils system winding down with the passage of the Pendleton Act, two new battlegrounds appeared: fighting against corruption; and monetary policy. Reform-minded minorities in both the Republican and Democratic Parties loudly began crusades to halt corrupt politicians and businesses. Meanwhile a populist groundswell began in the 1890s as farmers and laborers began agitating for "free silver". Under the gold standard at the time, if a person had gold, they could take it to a mint and have it turned into coins, which could then be spent as money. The Free Silver movement wanted to be able to do so with silver as well, even though silver was more numerous and less valuable than gold, so that poor farmers and laborers could pay off debts owed to banks and wealthy businesses. Naturally, banks and wealthy businessmen strongly opposed free silver, and backed the candidacy of William McKinley, a conservative Republican who also opposed free silver. McKinley's victory sealed the deal and largely ended the Free Silver movement. McKinley would also oversee a short war with Spain which resulted in the U.S.'s acquisition of the Spanish colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Cuba would soon be granted semi-independence, but U.S. occupation of the Philippines would result in a bloody insurgency, while Puerto Rico remains a U.S. possession to the modern day.

Roosevelt and the Progressive Era

McKinley's vice president died in 1899, so in 1900, Republican party bosses in the Northeast convinced McKinley to accept Theodore Roosevelt as his new running mate; the reformist Roosevelt had run afoul of those party bosses and they wanted to "kick him upstairs" to the vice presidency, where he'd be largely powerless. McKinley easily won the election, but was assassinated by an anarchist shortly after his reinauguration, making Roosevelt the new president. Roosevelt then kickstarted the Progressive Era, becoming famous for trustbusting, rooting out corruption, and creating new federal agencies like the FDA, the forerunner to the Department of Labor, and the United States Forest Service. Roosevelt easily won reelection in 1904 but spent much of his second term fighting with the powerful conservative bloc of his own party, and resorted to holding "bully pulpit" rallies where he'd angrily complain about Congress, further dooming any chances of accomplishing much.

Roosevelt's protege and chosen successor, William Howard Taft, won election in 1908 and proceeded to alienate Roosevelt by aligning himself with the conservative bloc. Roosevelt went on a rampage and drifted further leftward in his policy agenda. In the 1912 election, Roosevelt failed to win the Republican nomination so he jumped ship and joined the fledgling, leftist Progressive Party, which was soon popularly nicknamed the "Bull Moose Party" after Roosevelt joked he was strong as a bull moose. The Progressive Party and Republican Party split the vote, allowing Democrat Woodrow Wilson to sweep into office. Roosevelt rejoined the Republican Party in the aftermath of 1912, remaining a prominent voice - and a major thorn in Wilson's side - right up until Roosevelt's death in 1919.

With Roosevelt's death, a general fatigue from progressive advocacy, and Wilson's suppression of leftism in the First Red Scare, the progressive wing of the Republican Party withered and died, and the Progressive Era came to an end. Republican Warren G. Harding won the 1920 election by explicitly rejecting the Progressivist policies of Roosevelt and Wilson, promising a "return to normalcy". Harding was a popular president but died about a year and a half into his term, at which point a series of scandals were uncovered, notably the Teapot Dome scandal, which involved the Secretary of the Interior accepting huge bribes to grant sweetheart deals to oil companies controlling the U.S. Navy's oil reserves.

The 1920s, the Great Depression, and the New Deal era

Harding's rejection of progressivism continued with his successor Calvin Coolidge, who championed laissez-faire economic policy and low government intervention, to the point that he refused to do anything when a major flood hit Mississippi in 1927, instead setting up a commission to encourage private donations to help. He was followed by another Republican, Herbert Hoover. Soon after Hoover's inauguration, the U.S. stock market crashed, which set off a series of events that culminated in the Great Depression. Hoover, like Coolidge, refused to use the federal government to start large-scale relief efforts, instead focusing on "rugged individualism" and private efforts, which further exacerbated the crisis. He also tried to kickstart the economy by passing the infamous Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act, which raised tariffs to unusually high levels; however, this had the opposite effect and triggered a trade war. Hoover also chose to blame Mexican immigrants for the crisis, and launched a massive deportation effort, forcing hundreds of thousands of Mexican-Americans to move to Mexico, despite the fact that a significant number of them were children and/or American citizens.

Hoover's mishandling of the Depression caused him to lose in a landslide to Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1932 election, and FDR's New Deal Coalition would more or less dominate the federal government until the 1960s. The Republicans loosely split into the "Old Right", which still supported the old-fashioned laissez-faire, conservative economics of McKinley, Harding, and Coolidge; and the liberal wing largely based in the Northeast that supported FDR's New Deal. After FDR's reelection in 1936, the economy soured and the Old Right Republicans joined with conservative Southern Democrats to form a "conservative coalition" that would hamper FDR's agenda until the onset of World War II. During the war, the conservative coalition was able to undo much of the New Deal, although it notably didn't end Social Security. FDR would win reelection in 1940 and 1944 but the GOP gained steam and in 1946 Republicans gained a majority in both houses of Congress, the first time since the 1920s. FDR died in April 1945 and his successor Harry Truman aligned himself with the liberal wing of the New Deal Coalition, and proceeded to alienate the Solid South by implementing the early stages of desegregation., which nearly cost him the 1948 election. This would very soon have a major impact on both parties...

Civil Rights and War in Vietnam

By 1952, Truman had become unpopular thanks to his inability to end the Korean War, and the onset of McCarthyism. He saw the writing on the wall and chose not to run for reelection. Both parties courted the hero of World War II, General Dwight "Ike" Eisenhower, but he ultimately chose to join the Republicans. He easily won the 1952 and 1956 elections. A moderate Republican, he successfully brought the Korean War to an end, and presided over a period of general economic prosperity. He also presided over the initial stages of the Civil Rights movement and desegregation, notably deploying the elite 101st Airborne Division to enforce the integration of a high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, and signing the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

In 1960, Ike's vice president and vehement anti-communist Richard Nixon won the nomination but then lost a close race against John F. Kennedy. JFK was assassinated in 1963, leaving the presidency to Lyndon B. Johnson. The liberal LBJ proceeded to continue with the early stages of the U.S.'s involvement in Vietnam and continued supporting Civil Rights efforts, culminating in the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. The latter in particular was the death knell for the Solid South's support of the Democratic Party, and the conservative, segregationist South began migrating over to the Republican Party, solidifying the conservative bloc's control of the party. Likewise, moderate Republicans in the Northeast and West Coast began migrating over to the Democratic Party, which was still under the control of the liberal New Deal Coalition.

In 1964, Barry Goldwater, a "small government" fiscal conservative won the Republican nomination, running against LBJ. Goldwater did shockingly well in the South, since he opposed the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act on the grounds that he felt it was government overreach. Segregationists in the South who opposed the Civil Rights Act on racist grounds didn't much care about the rationale, and supported him. He still lost in a landslide to LBJ, but some Republicans took note of Goldwater's accomplishment.

Tricky Dick "Not a crook" Nixon.

The 1968 election cycle saw Nixon return from purgatory. With the lingering Vietnam War having become wildly unpopular, LBJ chose not to run for reelection, and his vice president Hubert Humphrey wound up winning the nomination after considerable controversy, including the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, and major protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Nixon was the guy who took note of Goldwater's success in 1964 and ran with it. He and his campaign came up with what is now known as "the Southern Strategy", which involved attracting conservative, segregationist Southerners by avoiding overt racism and instead resorting to loaded terminology that alludes to racism. In an interview in 1981, Republican strategist Lee Atwater summed it up as:

“” Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger". By 1968, you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this", is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger". So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back-burner

Nixon did not carry the South thanks to a third party run by segregationist George Wallace; but he did better in the South than expected, and he did win the overall election. Nixon's victory cemented the realignment begun way back in 1948 when the Solid South began fleeing Truman, and in future elections, the South would almost always go for the Republican. In 1972 Nixon absolutely destroyed the progressive-leaning anti-war Democrat George McGovern, thereby ending the Democratic Party's flirtation with progressivism. Nixon successfully ended the Vietnam War in 1973, but then the Watergate scandal came out, and Nixon was forced to resign in August 1974.

Post Watergate and the "Reagan Revolution"

Nixon was replaced by Gerald Ford, who is arguably most famous for pardoning Nixon and then bumbling his way through the 1976 election, which he lost to the moderate Southern Democrat Jimmy Carter. The 1976 election wound up being a referendum on the Nixon era, and Carter won largely thanks to his status as an "outsider", and in part to Ford's poor campaign. With the old Nixon bloc crushed by his resignation and Ford's defeat, the Republican Party embraced a new dynamic under an actor-turned-corporate-spokesman-turned-California-governor... Ronald Wilson Reagan. Reagan continued with Nixon's veiled racism but went even further to embrace the Religious Right, a relatively new phenomenon of extremely right-wing Christians who leaned heavily on their religion to justify and spread their political beliefs; in particular Reagan allied with Jerry Falwell's powerful "Moral Majority". Carter, who had become unpopular due to lagging economic conditions and foreign policy blunders, was wrecked by Reagan in the 1980 election.

Reagan oversaw the "Reagan Revolution", which saw him entrench conservatism in the national zeitgeist. He instituted "trickle-down economics", slashed funding to federal agencies he didn't like (such as welfare and regulatory agencies), and lavished on those he did like (primarily the military, including that he tried to literally build a giant space laser...). Like Nixon, he held an intense hatred of communism and leftism in general, so he helped support right-wing rebels and dictators in Nicaragua, Argentina, El Salvador, and Angola. While Carter had begun supporting the mujahideen rebels during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Reagan doubled down, dumping massive piles of cash on the project. When Reagan's administration was caught illegally selling weapons to Iran to raise money for supporting right-wing death squads in Nicaragua, Reagan leaned on his folksy charm to avoid prosecution. He talked a lot of shit about the Soviet Union, which was dying a slow death since the 1970s. He kickstarted a pointless arms race with the Soviets, which the Soviet economy couldn't sustain; Reagan's supporters subsequently claimed credit on his behalf for the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.

The damage being caused by Reagan's neoliberal policies and his anti-communist streak was not immediately apparent, and he wound up being wildly popular. He was pretty charismatic and the economy seemed to be doing really well after the malaise of the late 1970s. Reagan's reelection in 1984 remains one of the most one-sided victories in U.S. history aside from Nixon's 1972 win and George Washington's two unanimous victories. The Democratic Party, reeling from these crushing defeats, chose to embrace Third Way neoliberalism and the centrist New Democrat bloc formed. Reagan was followed in 1988 by George H.W. Bush, his vice president, but Bush lacked Reagan's charisma and Religious Right creds. Despite a successful war against Iraq, the economy soured in the early 1990s and Bush was forced to break his campaign promise to never raise taxes and... raised taxes. With a third party challenger in H. Ross Perot snagging a portion of the fiscal conservative vote, Bush lost in 1992 to the New Democrat Bill Clinton.

The year of 1994 was one of historical significance for U.S. politics. In the mid-term elections that year, a Georgia Republican named Newt Gingrich led the "Republican Revolution" where the party successfully portrayed Clinton as a "tax and spend liberal" and promised to undo Clinton's "radical" policies. Many Republicans signed on to a "Contract with America" that espoused their fiscal conservative proposals. The ploy worked, and in the 1994 mid-terms, the Republicans won a majority in the House for the first time since 1952; however, this did not carry over into 1996 when the charismatic Clinton defeated Bob Dole. The Republicans nevertheless proceeded to block much of Clinton's agenda and led many investigations into the president, culminating in impeaching him in late 1998 for lying under oath about an extra-marital affair he had had. All that being said, Clinton and the Republicans did manage to work together occasionally to pass some major deregulatory bills, like the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act in the late 1990s.

The 21st Century and the War on Terror

Clinton's chosen successor, his vice president Al Gore, "lost" a closely contested election 2000 to Republican George W. Bush, son of George H.W. Bush. Bush won by successfully portraying himself as a "compassionate conservative", and thanks to the uncharismatic Gore distancing himself from the still-popular Clinton. Oh yeah, some meddling from courts and election officials may have helped a smidge too. See the article on the 2000 U.S. presidential election for more on that mess, because it's too much to summarize here. Bush came into office in 2001 and immediately doubled down on Reaganomics, passing a massive tax cut that primarily benefited the upper class and corporations, thus eradicating the budget surplus he inherited from Clinton.

Anyway... then this little thing happened called "9/11", and everything proceeded to go to shit.

In response to the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001, President Bush declared a War on Terror. Initially this meant that the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, which is where Al Qaeda, the organization that planned and executed the 9/11 attacks, was headquartered. This was followed up by a 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq... for... reasons. The stated goal was that Iraq had been skirting U.N. mandated inspections of its nuclear and chemical weapons programs, and was thus illegally hiding nuclear and chemical weapons ("weapons of mass destruction" or WMDs); there was also some not-so-subtle hinting that Iraq had helped Al Qaeda carry out 9/11. The real reason was more along the lines of: Bush and the neoconservatives in his Cabinet came into office already wanting to build a case for overthrowing Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein; the shocking brutality of the 9/11 attacks gave them the popular support they needed and they just had to make any sort of feeble attempt to justify it. With rage over 9/11 still high, Bush was able to push through Congressional authorization (Gingrich's "Republican Revolution" still controlled Congress) and Americans were forced to go along for the ride.

The War on Terror also had domestic effects. More draconian laws were passed which allowed for increased surveillance of U.S. citizens and new security agencies like the Orwellian-titled "Department of Homeland Security" and the TSA were created. As the War on Terror ground ever onward, it came out that the U.S. was imprisoning suspected terrorists without any sort of rights (like habeas corpus or the right to counsel), and was in fact torturing some of them at "black sites" operated by the CIA in foreign countries. Abuse of prisoners also happened at places like Abu Ghraib and Bagram.

Despite all this, Bush won reelection in 2004, thanks in part to the Democrats nominating another uncharismatic "policy wonk", who failed to counter Bush's very effective control over the narrative. Rather than the election being a referendum on Bush and his fucked up policies, it became a referendum on this boring, flip-flopping "radical liberal" from Massachusetts who "lied about his military service". However, Bush's mismanagement of the economy and the wars would cause a backlash against Republicans, and their Gingrich-led domination of Congress would end in the 2006 mid-terms.

Bush's tenure ended with a major financial crisis, triggered largely by the deregulatory policies of Clinton and Bush. With Bush on his way out, Barack Obama, a centrist New Democrat like Clinton, was able to sweep into office in 2008 by holding off John McCain, who traded in his solid "political maverick" cred to cater to the more conservative elements of his party, notably by choosing wingnut Sarah Palin as his running mate.

The Obama era would see the Republican Party embrace extremist elements within its ranks. An astroturfed, Libertarian-ish movement erupted in reaction to Obama's inauguration; styling itself the "Tea Party", it fiercely opposed anything Obama sought to accomplish. Whackadoos like the Birthers and the Oath Keepers, both of which bought into conspiracy theories about Obama's citizenship status, also joined the fun; and the Sovereign citizen movement, whose adherents tend to be very right-wing, picked up steam. With this extremism on the rise and the recovery from the 2007-2008 financial crisis going slower than desired, the Tea Party successfully led the charge for another Republican victory, taking control of Congress in the 2010 mid-terms. Like when Gingrich's party won in 1994, the new Republican Congress would quash Obama's attempts to get anything done. Obama nevertheless defeated Mitt Romney in 2012, in a bit of a reversal of the 2004 election - Obama successfully turned it into a referendum on this boring, wealthy policy wonk from Massachusetts.

Trump Part I

In 2016, Obama's first Secretary of State and Bill Clinton's spouse, Hillary Clinton, was widely seen as his successor and a shoo-in for the next president. The Democratic Party rallied behind her, despite a strong challenge from the Vermont social democrat Bernie Sanders, and everything seemed to line up just right. The Republicans had a spirited primary campaign but out of the mess arose an amoral slumlord and reality TV host named Donald John Trump. While Clinton assumed the election was "in the bag", Trump successfully appealed to populist rage and nativist sentiment. He had no concrete plans, answers, or policy proposals aside from that he wanted to cut taxes and build a wall on the US-Mexico border. He was all bluster and childish insults, and lied about even easily provable facts. Despite his silly antics, his disinterest and ignorance of Christianity, and his long and well-documented history as a philanderer, the Religious Right came out in full support of him. And somehow, it worked. In one of history's great upsets, Trump narrowly defeated Clinton, ushering in a dark time for anyone who isn't fabulously wealthy.

The motto for Trump's term was essentially "the cruelty is the point". He slashed taxes, gutted welfare programs, assigned woefully inadequate people to his Cabinet, such as an oil executive as his Secretary of State, a coal industry lawyer as his head of the EPA, a Christian Nationalist zealot as his Secretary of Education, and a wealthy shipping heiress as his Secretary of Transportation. He spent about a quarter of his term playing golf, almost always at clubs he personally owned, while overcharging his staff and the Secret Service to stay there with him. When Congress flipped (barely) back to the Democrats in 2018 and denied him money to build his border wall (despite his vague assurances that Mexico would somehow pay for it), he resorted to diverting funding for the Department of Defense to pay for it. He also cozied up to ruthless dictators like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un, and packed the federal courts with right-wing Federalist Society extremists, notably including three relatively young associate justices to the Supreme Court, ensuring right-wing domination of the courts for the foreseeable future.

In the end, he was undone by his own hubris. In 2020, the covid-19 pandemic exploded. Trump, who was totally obsessed with his own poll numbers and popularity, at first refused to acknowledge that it was happening or that it had the potential to be pretty bad, and eventually shifted to just lying about the outbreak and what to do about it. He launched attacks on government officials who were trying their best to help with the problem, and even mused about injecting people with bleach to fight the disease as nearby physicians listened in stunned horror. His complete mismanagement of the pandemic eventually led to economic problems as supply chains broke and small businesses were unable to stay open due to quarantines.

In the 2020 election, Trump was mercifully defeated by Obama's old vice president, Joe Biden. However, the election was much closer than it rightfully should've been, and Trump refused to accept defeat. He and his supporters invented a whole narrative about how the "radical" Democrats had stolen the election and there was no way he could've possibly lost, despite a complete lack of evidence to support the claims. He launched a flurry of legal challenges, tried to use his office to "convince" election officials to alter results in his favor, and his supporters even tried to generate fake electors to participate in the electoral college. When all this failed, on January 6, 2021, the day the election was to be officially certified by Congress, Trump led a demonstration near the capital that turned into a full riot aimed at stopping the certification so that Trump would be allowed to remain in office. The riot was quelled but the damage was done. Afterward Trump and his supporters would disavow the riot, flipping between stories that it was actually a false flag carried out by "radical leftists" or that it was actually not that bad.

An Interim Period

Biden's term began with him trying to clean up the mess he inherited from Trump. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a long process, and economic problems caused by the pandemic lingered and worsened. Republicans were able to retake the House in the 2022 midterms. By this point, Trump's neo-fascist "MAGA" movement had entrenched itself within the Republican Party. With Republican control of the House razor thin, a handful of MAGA extremists took the opportunity to stall the Speaker of the House selection process and forced their agenda to be accepted by party leadership. As in 1994 and 2010, Congressional Republicans, with help from Trump-packed courts, ensured that Biden was not able to achieve a lot of his policy agenda thenceforth. Throughout Biden's term, Trump continued holding rallies where he'd rail against "radical liberal Democrats", Joe Biden, and whatever else happened to be bothering him at that moment.

The 2024 election cycle began (in 2023...) with the expectation that Biden and Trump would face off again. The Republicans held primaries but Trump refused to participate in any of the events or debates, and still easily won. The 80 year old incumbent Biden, having had to endure a difficult three years of presidency, was showing signs of physical and mental decline. After a disastrous "debate" in June 2024, it became apparent to everyone that Biden just wasn't up to the task of defeating Trump, despite Trump (who was 78 as of the election) also appearing to be showing signs of cognitive decline. In July 2024, Biden stepped aside and endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, as the new candidate. As Trump ranted and raged about the change, Harris enjoyed a sudden swell of support; things seemed to be going pretty well for the Democrats.

However, the upswing didn't last. Harris, who historically has been a poor campaigner, ran a tone-deaf campaign, and failed to differentiate herself from Biden, who was becoming increasingly unpopular as poor economic conditions (particularly high inflation) continued. Harris alienated her base by shifting rightward, and alienated substantial Arab-American populations in crucial swing states like Michigan and Pennsylvania by doing little to address concerns over Israel's ongoing "war" in Gaza.

Trump, on the other hand, went back to what he does best. He provided few details about his agenda, aside from that he wanted to massively increase tariffs on goods from China, and promised to conduct the largest deportation effort in U.S. history. He talked a lot about prosecuting political opponents for the crime of existing. He harnessed populist rage and frustration with the slow recovery from the pandemic-spawned economic problems despite offering no real solutions. He also attracted right-wing billionaire tech CEOs like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, who proceeded to throw their considerable resources behind Trump's campaign.

As in 2017... somehow it worked. In the November 2024 election, Trump won a plurality of the popular vote and a solid victory in the electoral college; Republicans also claimed slim leads in both Houses of Congress, giving Republicans complete control over the entire federal government for at least the next two years.

Trump Part II

More to come...

Modern factions

There isn't much sanity left. There was once a moderate, center-right faction that could actually comprehend freedom of religion and how having sanity doesn't make you a pinko commie; they're the remnants of the Eisenhower Era, and the public figure closest to this is Arnold Schwarzenegger.

This is not the Republican Party at large anymore. Since at least the 1980s, if not even earlier with the Southern Strategy, the "teh evul leebrals and illeegull alienz r destroyin' Murica oh noes #MAGA" faction has come to dominate the party. As of late 2021, the party mostly consists of the more fanatical elements of the neoconservative Reagan-style Religious Right, a strong neo-fascist Alt-Right movement that inexplicably centers around the worship of Donald Trump, and a few libertarian donors who are happy to pull the strings of Republican politicians to get a lower tax bill (deficit be damned these days, of course). Even factions of the party that were merely somewhat insane, such as the Palin-style paleolibertarian Tea Party, have effectively been purged.

Below is a list of ideological factions and general types of Republicans in recent history, from most moderate, by Republican standards, to the most racist wingnuts ever to exist in American history (of which is the focus of the article). Despite this historical range of views for Republicans, by 2022 Republicans as a whole have become far more racist than Democrats. A poll by the Public Religion Research Institute found that on a 0-1 scale of structural racism Republicans had a score of 0.67 vs. 0.27 for Democrats.

Moderates

• Actual Centrists
• Fusionists
• Libertarians (so now you know we've reached full hellworld when "I'd like government not to work" is the good-guy option)

Conservatives

• Neocons
• The Swamp (businessmen, lobbyists, and consultants)
• Neoliberals (lawmakers whose policies explicitly empower corporations over workers)
• "Independents" who always find ways to support the party
• Religious Wingnuts

Far Right

• The Tea Party (an amalgamation of the libertarian, evangelical, neoliberal, and paleoconservative wings, but with a stronger emphasis on conspiracy theories, racism, misogyny, and anarcho-capitalism, many of whom would later become part of the MAGA crowd. The election of Donald Trump and the resulting high-deficit Republican budgets effectively killed, and showed the hypocrisy, of this ostensibly austerity-focused movement).
• Paleocons (who first found their voices in Pat Buchanan and later through Sarah Palin)
• Trumpism

There be Dragons

• Conspiracy theorists
• Neoconfederates
• The Alt-right
• QAnon

Though the trend was clear well before then, since the election of Donald Trump, the more moderate factions of the party (by Republican standards, that is) have increasingly been squeezed out by crank factions driven primarily by Fox News style outrage, conspiracy theory, and a fanatical desire to "own the libs".

No longer party of civil rights

What the Southern Strategy leads to.

Map of the 1964 Presidential Election, notable for being the first election after the Civil Rights Act, which Johnson signed into law and Goldwater opposed.

Didn't the South use to be Democratic? The "Southern Strategy" is the short-form US History 101 exam answer to this question. Before the Civil Rights Act (CRA) of 1964, major Democrat blocs came in two flavors:

1. Dixiecrats and some Republicans associated with the Abolitionist movement
2. Northeastern reformer-types, who we would understand as the modern Democratic Party

From 1940 onward, the Northeastern branch grew dominant, adding a pro-civil rights plank to the party platform and reversing its segregationist nature. So suddenly, you have this big clump of disgruntled southerners who feel abandoned by their party (whom they've been supporting for abstract reasons) and a GOP eager to snap up those votes by campaigning against the Civil Rights Act. Republicans have a very comprehensive platform to get those voters out, but they obviously have a ceiling in terms of popular votes.

Interestingly, before (and shortly following) the CRA, many Democratic Parties in the South, while agreeing on segregation, differed significantly on economic issues. You had radical leftists like Huey Long and arch-conservatives like John Rarick under the same tent, even within the same state (in this case, Louisiana). Also, there was a lot more diversity in primary elections. In Tennessee, for instance, Nashville tended to send more liberal Democrats to Congress (such as Estes Kefauver) who were more receptive to civil rights, while outlying rural areas supported Blue Dog Democrats. The problem for Democrats is that the white half of their coalition either switched to the GOP, moved away, or died, leaving the crusty, black civil rights leaders in charge who had started migrating to the part during the same time. Events like Kennedy bailing out MLK during the 1960 Presidential Election also played a role in showing mainstream politicians that appealing to black voters was a viable strategy. King's dad endorsed Kennedy in 1960, and although King didn't endorse Johnson in 1964, he did say of Goldwater “I had no alternative but to urge every Negro and white person of goodwill to vote against Mr. Goldwater and to withdraw support from any Republican candidate that did not publicly disassociate himself from Senator Goldwater and his philosophy.”

This is not to say that hostilities didn't exist between the DNC and the Civil Rights Movement. The Kennedy Administration infamously spied on MLK, and Johnson was similarly hostile to the man despite his support for Civil Rights. However, Democrats were much more willing to say the right things on issues of Civil Rights publicly than Republicans were, even if they were antagonistic with the leaders of these movements behind the scenes. The end result is that party affiliation is now overwhelmingly determined by race and locality.

The story of the last half-century (1968-2016) will be the tale of how the GOP systematically turned white working-class voters against the Democrats. First, it was the Southern Strategy with race, then the evangelical movement with abortion, and now it's blue-collar whites with nativist populism. Bringing the Southern Strategy up in a debate is pointless since they just dismiss it as darkie lies liberal propaganda.

Despite all this, Republicans continue trying to dine out on their distant origin as the anti-slavery party; many will, with a straight face, offer their and the Democratic Party's pre-CRA history as proof that the Democrats are the party of racism, not the Republicans.

War machine

See the main article on this topic: Military-industrial complex

Although the Cold War has ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia ostensibly remained a fearsome military power, up until they showed they weren't. Meanwhile, there is some tension between the U.S. and Red China over economic and military matters. Some see a pivot East, and having China as a strategic partner against Russia is a sensible way forward. With so many parts of the world looking increasingly volatile, it is not a surprise that shares of defense companies went up 15% right after Trump secured the White House.

This is a continuation of a pattern that had long since been present in the Republican Party, a party that had previously belonged to isolationists during the time between the two World Wars but had since become the party of foreign policy hawks beginning with Dwight Eisenhower. Specifically, Eisenhower ran in the primaries against Robert Taft, known for his isolationist sympathies which Eisenhower felt were inexcusable during the Cold War. Eisenhower even told Taft that "If Taft backed away from his isolationist stance and supported the internationalist wing of the Republican Party, Eisenhower promised he would not challenge him for the nomination," but Taft refused. Eisenhower also campaigned on bringing in end to the Korean War, attempting to convince the American public that there was a middle ground existed between the "unpopular domestically" interventionism of Harry Truman and the isolationism of Robert Taft.

The Republicans officially became the party of interventionist foreign policy during the Vietnam War, where "Hawks were more likely to be older and Republican or Southern Democrats." Lyndon Johnson had already appealed to the anti-Vietnam crowd during the 1964 Presidential Election through portraying Goldwater as somebody who would escalate the conflict, even possibly using nuclear weapons. The 1968 Presidential Election also saw anti-Vietnam candidates such as Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy seeing massive success, to the point where riots infamously occurred during that year's Democratic Convention due to the failure of McCarthy to get the nomination.

Although it would be overly simplistic to say Republicans supported all foreign interventions and Democrats opposed them, this narrative has been one many voters with strong views on foreign policy have come to believe. The anti-war icon George McGovern getting the Democratic nomination in 1972 along with many Republicans becoming villains of the anti-war movement continued to create this dichotomy.

Family values positioning, traditionalism, anti-abortion

See the main articles on this topic: Kinder, Küche, Kirche and Pro-life

“”If Planned Parenthood wants to be involved in providing counseling services and HIV testing, they ought not be in the business of providing abortions. As long as they aspire to do that, I’ll be after them.

—Mike "Deus Vult" Pence, who thinks HIV is a useful deterrent

Women make up just 9% of elected Republican members of Congress in 2016, which is down from 11% in 2006.

This is the most hypocritical thing about "conservatism" in the U.S. If you want to reduce abortions, comprehensive sex education and birth control is the way to go, as is addressing the social and economic factors that drive demand for abortion, such as providing maternity leave. Republicans have fought against all of these things, instead pushing "abstinence-only education" (which is a farce), banning birth control, and ratfucking Planned Parenthood. Don't forget their crusade to destroy the social safety net. (And then these retrocrat clowns will bleed public education so that those kids go to garbage schools, so they can claim public education is ineffective and continue the feedback loop.) Abstinence-only education and abortion restrictions are other examples of the state forcing people to either come to Jesus or suffer. (Or, more often, both.)

In another great display of efforts to appeal to women, many in the party have opposed renewals for the Violence Against Women Act, often with clearly-ancillary or questionable justifications. In 2012 and 2013, social conservatives opposed its renewal because the proposal at that time would also offer protections to domestic violence victims who are Native American, undocumented immigrants, or non-heterosexual (evidently, general protections for women are worth sacrificing if it means hurting some minorities). In 2021, most House Republicans voted against a separate proposal to renew the Act (172 GOP representatives voted against renewal, 29 of the same voted for it), and many rationalized their vote against this iteration by pointing to a provision that would ban convicted stalkers and people who physically abused their ex-spouse from owning firearms (called the "boyfriend loophole"). "Gun rights for wife-beaters" is a winning slogan, right?

From ERA to "Get back in the kitchen"

What is especially notable about the Republican Party turning to sexism is, to be blunt, it was not always like this. As an article for the Brenna Center for Justice notes:

The Equal Rights Amendment was first proposed in 1923, three years after the 19th Amendment guaranteed women the right to vote. While the text of the ERA varied over the decades, the goal remained the same: ensuring that women and men have equal rights under the law. In 1940, the Republican Party became the first major party to endorse the amendment in its platform. Through 1976, the GOP continued to call for the ratification of the ERA in every presidential election cycle save two: 1964 and 1968.

Over those decades, prominent Republicans across the country, including three presidents, pledged their support for the measure. Dwight Eisenhower became the first president to advocate for the ERA’s passage in a 1957 message to Congress. Richard Nixon also endorsed the ERA throughout his career, from his early years as a senator to his two terms as Eisenhower’s vice president to his five years in the White House. In a letter to then-Republican Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott sent days before a key vote, Nixon wrote that “throughout twenty-one years I have not altered my belief that equal rights for women warrant a Constitutional guarantee – and I therefore continue to favor the enactment of the Constitutional Amendment to achieve this goal.” Another Republican, Gerald Ford, played a crucial role in the ERA’s passage during his tenure as house minority leader, and he continued to voice his support for ratification during his brief tenure in the Oval Office.

The Reagan 1980 campaign's opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment is typically seen as the event which stopped Republicans from supporting it altogether. "The ERA disappeared from the platform in 1980, because Reagan opposed it," writes Martha Burk. Reagan's opposition to abortion also caused him to lose the support of many women voters, which he attempted to win back through promising to put the first female justice on the Supreme Court.

On the topic of abortion, Republicans have also turned away from their previous support of that. An article for New York Magazine notes that "abortion rights as we know them are, to a considerable extent, the product of Republican lawmaking at every level of government" because their was once a time where "Republicans were more likely to favor legal abortion than Democrats." The article goes on to note:

Beginning in 1972 with Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign, Republicans began actively trying to recruit historically Democratic Roman Catholic voters. Soon thereafter, they started working to mobilize conservative Evangelical voters. This effort coincided with the Evangelicals’ conversion into strident abortion opponents, though they were generally in favor of the modest liberalization of abortion laws until the late 1970s. All these trends culminated in the adoption of a militantly anti-abortion platform plank in the 1980 Republican National Convention that nominated Reagan for president. The Gipper said he regretted his earlier openness to relaxed abortion laws. Reagan’s strongest intraparty rival was George H.W. Bush, the scion of a family with a powerful multigenerational connection to Planned Parenthood. He found it expedient to renounce any support for abortion rights before launching his campaign.

Before this point, the dichotomy was quite different. Conservatives, who were primarily focusing their opposition on Johnson's Great Society at the time, were supporters of abortion primarily because they hoped allowing poor women to get abortions would cause fewer people to be on welfare. Going back to Reagan, he used to brag about how he "reduced the welfare roles by more than 300,000 people in three years" while Governor of California. However, it is widely believed this occurred because of Medicaid funded abortions during that time. Meanwhile, although liberals did not reject this idea, they felt that more people on welfare was a decent price to pay if it meant the unborn got to live. Jesse Jackson expressed this dichotomy when he, while arguing against legal abortion, wrote the following in 1977:

Politicians argue for abortion largely because they do not want to spend the necessary money to feed, clothe and educate more people. Here arguments for in-convenience and economic savings take precedence over arguments for human value and human life. I read recently where a politician from New York was justifying abortion because they had prevented 10,000 welfare babies from being born and saved the state $15 million. In my mind serious moral questions arise when politicians are willing to pay welfare mothers between $300 to $1000 to have an abortion, but will not pay $30 for a hot school lunch program to the already born children of these same mothers.

Big government with small government pretenses

See the main article on this topic: Reaganism

Face of a handsome devil, mind of a racist plutocrat.

“”The policies Republicans loathed were actually quite popular. So, to garner support for their attack on an activist government, they turned to a mythological narrative that drew on America’s long history of racism and sexism. They won voters not by convincing them of the merits of returning to a world in which businessmen ran the country, but rather by insisting that taxes redistributed wealth from hardworking white people to lazy minorities and feminists who wanted abortions on demand.

—Heather Cox Richardson, historian

Republicans will say they want smaller government while insisting on abortion or marriage restrictions, a more extensive security state, and more military spending.

Welfare for me but not for thee

Republicans justify specific policies by claiming they want smaller government when they really just don't want money going to the wrong people. Reagan cut the top marginal rate by over 40% and made deductions far more generous while simultaneously increasing spending. He found the secret sauce the GOP needs to keep winning: Cut taxes, but don't cut back on services your voters use, thereby driving the government deeper into debt.

To put it another way, Republicans' last push to privatize Social Security and Medicare was one of the driving forces behind the 2006 midterms that flushed their majorities down the toilet. This marks the second time going after Social Security caused Republicans to lose Congress, as when Reagan went after the program in 1981 "The next year, twenty-six incumbent Republicans lost their seats." They'd be insane to go near that again, no matter how much the Boy Wonder from Wisconsin loves the idea.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many Republican congressmen took full advantage of the PPP “loans”, some to the tune of seven figures, highlighting once again that Republicans indeed love the government giving away free money, as long as it’s for them.

Thanks, Obama

One of their favorite Boogymen.

“”A lot of us woke up every morning thinking about how to kick Obama, who could say the harshest thing about Obama on the air. We ended up where any hint of nuance or maturity just proved you were incapable of being the bull in the china shop that our voters wanted.

—Ed Rogers, Republican "mega-lobbyist"

Half of Obama's policies were positions the Republicans loved, then suddenly hated as soon as Obama supported them. Obamacare is the obvious example, but Trump won promising to spend $1 trillion on infrastructure. The $770b infrastructure program Obama passed (with only 1 GOP representative voting yes) had $330b in tax breaks and credits. In the words of former Republican Senator George Voinovich "If [Obama] was for it we had to be against it."

Although many laugh at how ridiculous the meme is, Republicans are simply conditioning people to associate failure with Democrats. Every morning the headlines at Fox bleat about the awful things Democrats are doing. It works well in countries where education standards are low and freedom of thought is suppressed, and it worked to destroy Hillary Clinton's chances. So, quite reasonably, the GOP thinks there are a few more drives left in the old jalopy.

This mindless hatred for Obama got so extreme that any Republican who even seemed mildly willing to not bash the President was considered too weak. Florida Governor Charlie Crist infamously lost any chance of having a future in Republican politics after he hugged Obama in 2009 while introducing him for a speech.

Penis envy

Supporting dictators like Putin, Assad, Duterte, and Kim is an important part of being a small government conservative. But Obama was the real tyrant for making us buy health insurance.

You may recall plenty of Republicans claiming that Obama wasn't strong enough in standing up to Russia during the Crimean incident and is a modern-day Neville Chamberlain. But that's a criticism of Obama being weak, not of Putin being strong. For a while, their stance has been that Putin is a strong ethno-nationalist and someone to look up to.

Trump's views on NATO and the UN are one of the most dangerous things about his presidency. The US isn't paying all this money as a charity; it buys global influence. Think of it like a rich vacationer passing everyone fifty-dollar tips for fetching a bottle of water or bringing fresh towels, so all the service people know that it's in their best interest to keep doing things that make him or her happy. If the U.S. doesn't fill that role, somebody else will, like, say, China. Indeed, there are signs this is already happening. Meanwhile, Trump will let Russia do whatever they want so long as Rosneft keeps sending his cut and his debts to Russian creditors don't come due. The word for this sort of caper is "corruption".

Live free or die

2016 shook everyone's faith that there's a correlation between economic well-being and voting patterns. There's clearly a correlation between perception of well-being and voting patterns, but that's a different thing.

Republicans refused to do their jobs for 8 years; they were rewarded with all three government branches. They didn't pay the price for shutting down the government, damaging the US credit rating with their debt limit stunts, the sequester, or refusing to pass any stimulative measures to help the economy. They certainly won't pay the price for raping the environment (a congressman who gets a 92 rating from the American Conservative Union can be kicked out of his district for acknowledging AGW). Flint happened because the city basically told the EPA to eat shit and mind its own business after the EPA said they needed to test the water quality. Michigan was saved entirely by Democrats and the Obama administration, and it voted for the party that wanted to let their main industry go bankrupt. Tangible, local improvements in life don't matter in elections anymore.

Party of No

“”His insight was that the way you beat Obama is by grinding things to a halt, which would hurt the Democrats more because they were the party in the White House and the party of government, and because it would undermine Obama's whole comity shtick. Which paid off beyond McConnell's wildest dreams by now electing someone who fed off voter anger with Washington dysfunction.

—Alec MacGillis

Since 9/11, the parties controlling Congress have gradually pushed the envelope of obstructionism. When one party does it, that sets a precedent for the other party to do it, and they usually go beyond the precedent. So over time, obstructionism in Congress just gets worse and worse, and due to gerrymandered Congressional districts, 90% of Congressmen are more worried about their primaries than their general elections. Obstructionism is rewarded, compromise punished.

After 2000, the Bush-McCain wing of the party ballooned the national debt to its highest level in American history. Their successor, Barack Obama,^{(not a Republican)} sought to clean up their mess by cutting the deficit by two-thirds. Since them, the GOP has done everything in its power to become known as the "Party of No":

• Trade Adjustment Assistance to retrain workers displaced by free trade: blocked by Republicans.
• Proposed free community college program: blocked by Republicans.
• Infrastructure Bill, proposing $60b on highway, rail, transit and airport improvements + $10 billion in seed money for infrastructure bank: blocked by Republicans
• Jobs Bill to "give tax breaks for companies that 'insource' jobs to the U.S. from overseas while eliminating tax deductions for companies that move jobs abroad": blocked by Republicans

Hence why they want to impeach anyone and everyone they disagree with. Just look at Obama and Hillary: They had a laundry list of "unconstitutional" or unlawful things the White House is doing, and every time the motion got shot down, they just moved on to the next item. It would not have been any different with Hillary; she would have been constantly threatened with impeachment. It's really one of the few plays the Rs run.

Meanwhile, since Reagan's day, the American people have been told that the federal government can't fix the problem; the federal government is the problem, so they don't mind that their Congress is deadlocked and obstructionist. They don't see or understand how this cedes power to the Executive Branch. More and more decisions are being made by the President or the many unelected bureaucrats working under him/her.

The rise of support for authoritarianism and Trumpism

“”The so-called Christian Right, for one, just have a different agenda. And I think big business is worried about them: the C.E.O.s don't want that kind of fascism [...] these Newt Gingrich-types might go too far and start cutting down the parts of the state system that are welfare for them—which of course is totally unacceptable.

—Noam Chomsky

“”They said I wasn’t born here. They said climate change is a hoax. They said that I was going to take everybody’s guns away [...] Donald Trump didn’t start it. He just did what he always did, which is slap his name on it, take credit for it, and promote it. That’s what he does.

—Barack Obama

Tea Party politics has always been proto-Trumpism: It's never been about small government so much as about populism and disdain for the Washington cabal.

The most logical place to mark the start of this particular "movement" is 2009 when the big money started moving to the Tea Party astroturf movement and Obama was doggedly trying to reform health insurance. But in actuality, conservatives have become more uncompromising because campaign finance laws keep getting weaker over the last several decades. Bachmann, Huckabee, Cruz, Cotton, Jindal, Santorum, etc., have been around for a while, and their right-wing pseudo-anarchist beliefs have become the norm. This is also a result of the GOP using the culture wars as political fodder: This time, Baptist voters weren't going to "fall in line" and vote for Jeb! or Rubio, and the GOP can't win without them.

The Democrats are disintegrating almost as fast as the GOP: their bases in Chicago, Seattle, and New York have finally turned on them, and the Bernie Sanders campaign was basically their worst nightmare. (There's also questionable voting practices in some red states.) The Republicans should be euphoric, but they're in a similar rut: a large part of their base is to the right of their leadership. Unlike the Democrats, the Republicans have lost control of those people. The House/Congress has been a colossal disaster under the GOP majority: They managed to get rid of their own Speaker because he wasn't conservative enough and actually made deals with Democrats to force their own incumbents out.

Republicans have recently rebranded themselves as a "worker's party" to deal with the shift toward automation and foreign labor. It seems that the party lines are shifting to globalism vs. nationalism rather than just left vs. right; but with the Tea Party in Congress and Trump's cabinet of vultures, people are going to get more of the same. "Trump Republicans" or "Ryan Republicans", whatever: both groups are about massive tax cuts for the rich that will, magically, pay for themselves by generating laughably delusional economic growth rates.

There has always been an undercurrent of authoritarian behavior from Republicans beginning with, at the very least, Richard Nixon, who explicitly said, "…but when the President does it, that means it is not illegal…" This all came to a head under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who used the 9/11 attacks to expand executive power under the auspices of fighting terrorists, including authorizing torture in black sites and warrantless surveillance of citizens. Many state Republican parties have undertaken voter suppression, stopping votes from counting, gerrymandering, gutting the Voting Rights Act, stopping recounts (as seen under Bush v. Gore), and unprecedented obstruction while in power, to make sure government never works. It wouldn't take long before this decades-long fostering of anti-intellectualism, identification of enemies, and vicious demonization of their enemies would lead to something far worse brewing over the years. Donald Trump is the most extreme and eager expression of this brand of authoritarianism, as his own dictatorial impulses are paired up with overt racism, an incitement of violence, glorification of the whites-only good old days, vicious scapegoating of minority and oppressed communities, and a machismo cult of personality that has created a very American style of fascism that isn't going away anytime soon.

An analysis by international political scientists of support for authoritarianism within the two main US political parties from 1970-2018 found that opposition to authoritarianism among Democrats was high and unwavering during that period. The same study found that Republican opposition to authoritarianism was slightly lower but similar to Democrats from 1970 to the mid-1980s, but that support for authoritarianism steadily increased after that until the mid-2010s when it began a steep rise, culminating in the election of Trump. "This is a prime example of what political scientists call asymmetric polarization — a growing partisan gap driven almost entirely by the actions of the Republican Party." The turning point in the GOP rise in support for authoritarianism was likely the Tea Party movement, which began in earnest in 2009. The increased GOP support can also be found in two sub-indicators: increased demonization of the opposition and increased incitement of violence by GOP leadership (both beginning in the mid-2000s). Authoritarianism within the Republican Party will likely increase as time goes on. Notice how senator Mike Lee had an increase of support among Republicans despite tweeting in October 2020 that that the United States is "not a democracy" and that "democracy isn't the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity [sic] are."

In October 2020, the V-Dem Institute reported that the Republican Party has followed a similar trajectory to authoritarian parties such as Viktor Orbán's Fidsez, Narendra Modi's BJP party, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's AKP. On the other hand, the Democratic Party has changed little in its attachment to democratic norms and has has remained similar to centre-right (and to some extent centre-left) parties in western Europe.

Ties to Mammon

A picture of a suitably ugly Mammon, like the soul of the GOP.

Despite their claims of being in the service of God, in recent times, the Republican Party has shown a stronger belief in Mammon, the fictional personification or deity of greed in the Bible. Some within the GOP try to mask Jesus as one of them, altering his teachings to serve their political platform. A prime example of this would be one idiot and his "bible." Others are more open with their agendas, such as Sen. Jim Bunning. Even some right-wing ministers encourage deceit. The closest, thus far, of the GOP stating who they really pray to would be Glenn Beck encouraging his viewers to be greedy and leave their church if they talk about helping the poor (which he compared to Nazism). And these people believe they deserve a place in heaven.

The GOP's decision to gut the Congressional Ethics Council was assumed to be due to then-untold planned Republican mischief. Come 2021, they'd be proven right.

Comparison to other right-leaning political parties

Not only in the United States but also in other democratic countries, there are political parties with extreme right-wing elements, even though they are establishment conservative, not non-mainstream far-right populist parties.

For reference, the political environment of Japan, India, and South Korea has similarities with the United States. The biggest opposition of these extreme right-wing conservative parties is the indigenous left-liberal party, not the European-style social-democratic or democratic-socialist party: Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, Indian National Congress and Minjoo Party of Korea. (In the case of the INC, it officially advocates a social democratic tradition, but is generally regarded as a liberal and centrist party.)

Liberal Democratic Party (Japan)

Logo of the LDP.

See the main article on this topic: Liberal Democratic Party (Japan)

LDP is the Japanese version of the Republican Party. The LDP is also a mainstream conservative party similar to GOP, but far-rightists occupy a significant stake in the party. And like the GOP, it is debatable if the LDP are a center-right party anymore, as opposed to being far-right. They also gain popularity in the polls for their aggressive rhetoric and actions against Koreans, as opposed to the Western far right's obsessive hatred of Muslims.

The Nippon Kaigi, the biggest supporter of the party, is similar to the Tea Party movement, and the Netto-uyoku, the militant wing of the movement, are a major parallel to the alt-right. The current Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who is considered a RELATIVE moderate within the Japanese conservative camp, is also a member of the Nippon Kaigi.

People Power Party (South Korea)

Logo of the PPP

See the main article on this topic: People Power Party

PPP is the South Korean version of the Republican Party. They are notorious for defending the military dictatorship of the Park Chung-hee period. Moreover, like the GOP the PPP are extremely homophobic, transphobic, and antifeminist.

Just as the GOP represents the interests of Wall Street, and not the people, the PPP represents the interests of Chaebol, not the people. Since 2022, Yoon Suk Yeol, now South Korea's president, has often been accused of being "K-Trump" (K 트럼프).

Bharatiya Janata Party (India)

The BJP party symbol. Beware the prickly thorns.

See the main article on this topic: Bharatiya Janata Party

BJP is the Indian version of the Republican Party. They are also India's mainstream conservative party, but they focus on far-right Hindu fundamentalism, including Hindutva, and show a tendency to right-wing populism.

See also

• Banking crisis and recession - Happens too often when they are in power to be an accident.
• Liberal Party of Australia - the bogan version.
• Conservative Party of Canada - the sledneck version.
• Conservative Party (UK) - the British version, complete with their own version of Reagan and clone of Trump.
• Club for Growth, not to be confused with the Hair Club for Men.
• RINO
• K Street project
• Chickenhawk
• Log Cabin Republicans, a weird subgroup of Republicans who seem to believe the exact opposite of the Republican Party seem more in line with their younger counterparts.
• International Democrat Union
• Theocracy Watch
• A list of Hollywood Republicans
• 2016 Republican Party presidential nomination‎‎

External links

• Vote Republican!
• All rise for the official GOP theme song.
• The GOP: Totally not racist.
• Why Do Republicans Defend Torture?, New York Magazine
• Why Republicans Keep Telling Everyone They’re Not Scientists, The New York Times
• Here's Why Congressional Republicans Let Ted Cruz Lead Them Off a Cliff, Business Insider
• Time for a Bull Moose: The Risk of Generational Realignment and a Path Toward a “New Republican” Party, Harvard Kennedy School Review

References

United States political parties

American Independent Party - Green Party of the United States - Reform Party - Socialist Party USA - Yippie - Federalist Party - Communist Party USA - Democratic-Republican Party - Know Nothing - Republican In Name Only - States' Rights Democratic Party - Revolutionary Communist Party (US) - World Socialist Party of the United States - Socialist Workers Party (US) - Progressive Labor Party - Workers World Party - Falconist Party - Prohibition Party - Libertarian Party - Party for Socialism and Liberation - Veterans Party of America - Constitution Party - Democrat In Name Only - Black Panther Party - Greenback Party - Christian Liberty Party - Democratic Party - White Panther Party -