General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsSomeone should ask the question, "Why is the Republican party embracing extreme political groups"?
The answer is simple. They're doing so because they simply don't have an agenda to offer the American people that can win a majority of votes nationwide.
So, they have to play to the extremists in order to win elections at the margins, and given our political system, this strategy can work to give them governing majorities.
However, with that comes far right wing lunatics in our government.
Aviation Pro
(12,207 posts)....because they don't have enough 'regular' voters to win elections.
msongs
(67,462 posts)except wave their guns everywhere they go to initimidate and threaten ppl
PirateRo
(933 posts)Its all been just a jumble of lies topped of with the poison of religion and hate of the uneducated monsters they lean on today.
They all belong in prison.
OAITW r.2.0
(24,679 posts)In 2020, they didn't even bother to lie about it.
PirateRo
(933 posts)Just try reading the contemptible nonsense THEY call a plank. You have to twist yourself into knots. Its nonsense piled together to sell to rubes. It makes no logical sense, presents no thesis nor supporting statements.
And just look how quickly they kicked it to the curb. Not a hint of guilt because it was always bullshit wrapped in religious claptrap.
OAITW r.2.0
(24,679 posts)It's a great testament to the middle-class. And it was Dwight's influence to support the people that saved this country in WW2. He knew because he committed them to battle. The most Lincoln-like of our modern Presidents.
OAITW r.2.0
(24,679 posts)Dem2
(8,168 posts)It's called "flailing"
cilla4progress
(24,784 posts)money.
turtleblossom
(504 posts)Back then, they had folks like Strom Thurmond, George Wallace, Lee Atwater, Paul Weyrich (founder of the Heritage Foundation, which setup the House Freedom Caucus that now funds QAnon candidates).
And let's not forget Nixon and the Southern Strategy.
JustAnotherGen
(31,957 posts)It is blatant in some - and dog whistles in others - but it is the tie that binds together the GOP.
https://www.vox.com/22254482/republicans-voter-suppression-state-legislatures
The remedy is the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.
See what happens when black Americans are allowed to vote? When we get to vote - you see Georgia.
John Lewis VRA would stop their bullshit.
That's why the Democratic Party Senators cannot play nice with the GOP Senators. The VRA could guarantee we keep the house and senate in 2022.
sheshe2
(83,967 posts)Takket
(21,649 posts)WhiteTara
(29,728 posts)How the Right Wing Convinces Itself That Liberals Are Evil
If you spend any time consuming right-wing media in America, you quickly learn the following: Liberals are responsible for racism, slavery, and the Ku Klux Klan. They admire Mussolini and Hitler, and modern liberalism is little different from fascism or, even worse, communism. The mainstream media and academia cannot be trusted because of the pervasive, totalitarian nature of liberal culture.
This belief in a broad liberal conspiracy is standard in the highest echelons of the conservative establishment and right-wing media. The Russia investigation is dismissed, from the president on down, as a politicized witch hunt. George Soros supposedly paid $300 to each participant in the March for Our Lives in March. (Disclosure: I marched that day, and Im still awaiting my check.) What is less well appreciated by liberals is that the language of conspiracy is often used to justify similar behavior on the right. The Russia investigation is not just a witch hunt, its the product of the real scandal, which is Hillary-Russia-Obama-FBI collusion, so we must investigate that. Soros funds paid campus protestors, so Turning Point USA needs millions of dollars from Republican donors to win university elections. The liberal academic establishment prevents conservative voices from getting plum faculty jobs, so the Koch Foundation needs to give millions of dollars to universities with strings very much attached.
This did not begin with Donald Trump. The modern Republican Party may be particularly apt to push conspiracy theories to rationalize its complicity with a staggeringly corrupt administration, but this is an extension of, not a break from, a much longer history. Since its very beginning, in the 1950s, members of the modern conservative movement have justified bad behavior by convincing themselves that the other side is worse. One of the binding agents holding the conservative coalition together over the course of the past half century has been an opposition to liberalism, socialism, and global communism built on the suspicion, sometimes made explicit, that theres no real difference among them.
snip
Even more alarming to conservatives than the bias of the mainstream press was the number of liberals, radicals, and communists alleged to be in higher education. In a 1952 American Mercury article, a twenty-seven-year-old William F. Buckley accused liberal historians of a conspiracy against giving the American people the facts about Franklin Roosevelt, and claimed that they thus betrayed the American people. In his debut book, God and Man at Yale, published the year before, Buckley had dismissed academic freedom as a cynical shield wielded by left-wing faculty to protect themselves from the political consequences of their views; he advocated using the threat of withholding alumni donations as a weapon against the liberalism and leftism running amok in the academy. Buckley would soon become the gatekeeper of respectable conservatism by pushing back against the conspiratorial excesses of the John Birch Society. But he began his career by indulging in some of those rhetorical flourishes himself, along with a plan of action on how to fight back against the stranglehold of leftists on the academy.
Skittles
(153,226 posts)no question about it
iamateacher
(1,089 posts)Well said.
Bear Creek
(883 posts)Can't admit to a mistake and contort the truth to fit their narrative.
roamer65
(36,747 posts)Sooner we see that the better.
moondust
(20,017 posts)Pandering to wackos over God, guns, and gays in exchange for votes was the formula for a long time. Now they've added neo-confederates, neo-nazis, and all the Q/Proud/III%/anarchists/nihilists/sociopaths/psychopaths/whatever wackos. It's a fringe gang of lunatics that many half-sane people are leaving including a guy from AZ I saw earlier on TV who had previously donated more than a million $$$ to the Republican Party.