The Tuesday edition of Electoral-Vote.com examines the fact that Trump’s Republican party has abandoned almost all of the things they used to believe in and champion. Instead their core principle has become “support whatever Donald Trump says or does”. For example:
- How the GOP attitude toward and treatment of immigrants (both illegal and legal) has changed completely since Trump was elected.
- How after a long history of promoting job training and apprenticeship programs, the Republican Party is now only paying lip service to the ideal that America is the land of opportunity.
- Even worse, after a long history of being against regulations, Trump only seems to be interested in jealously removing regulations put in place by his predecessor, Barack Obama. Meanwhile, he is promoting many new regulations, for example against social media and high tech companies (who he claims have an “anti-conservative bias”).
- Conservatives no longer believe in conservation of the environment. This has been coming for a while, but remember that Republicans were once the champions of conservation (it is part of their namesake even). This was as recently as the presidency of Richard Nixon, who helped create the Environmental Protection Agency. Instead, the GOP has turned to using doublespeak, as their party platform is now that the best way to “conserve” the environment is to hand it over to businesses to develop. Most recently, Trump is starting to eviscerate the Endangered Species Act.
- When Obama was president, Republicans were dead set against deficits, warning us all the time about how deficit spending would destroy our country. But they now simultaneously cut taxes and increase spending, never worrying about deficits at all.
- Republicans used to hate Russia as our primary enemy. But even though Russia is still doing things that hurt the US — like sabotaging our elections, and building new nuclear weapons and other WMDs — Trump and the Republicans ignore this threat. Or even worse, they do things that will weaken our allies in Europe, which will give more power to Russia (and to China as well).
The article’s conclusion is that the Republican Party is having an identity crisis. They don’t know what they actually stand for, other than the hatred and bigotry spewed by Trump.
6 Comments
Many intellectual conservatives left the party when Trump won the election. There are many rightwingers who are redefining what conservative mean (basically conservatism is what Trump says and does).
The core argument here is entirely correct, it’s the context I disagree with.
Upon moving to the US in the mid 90s, with zero US political preconceptions, Republican hypocrisy became steadily apparent. It’s only become steadily worse.
Trump can’t create anything, but he has the con artists knack of exploiting opportunities to fleece the gullible. The Republican partly and it’s fans, beholden to nonsensical prejudices and pseudo intellectualism, provided a ready made target group to leverage.
Factually, conservatives took over the Democratic party in the 90s as the republicans veered off to unmoored extremism. The never trumpers, too little and far, far too late to save the GOP as a legitimate organization.
Our political terms are used up, and need replacing. Conservatives do not conserve, liberals do not liberate, progressives make no progress, and libertarianism is really propertarianism.
“The article’s conclusion is that the Republican Party is having an identity crisis. They don’t know what they actually stand for, other than the hatred and bigotry spewed by Trump.”
Nope, this is exactly who they are and who they want to be. They’ve been heading this way for 40+ years.
They are not republicans.
They are not even Republicans.
They are white supremacists
They are the White Nationalist Party.
They are terrified of their coming minority status in the USA because they fear they will be treated as they treated the “others.”
A good read is “On Tyranny” by Timothy Snyder.
Steve King, Heavy sigh. There is a large group in his district that votes as a solid block, his “reasoning” on no abortions for rape and incest play to that crowd, sad as that may seem, they love it.