Two points before I begin. I expect most of my fellow country folks will know most or all of what I’m about to write, as my primary audience for this short series is the people in other countries who are wondering how this nation could have gone so mad. And as I was writing this piece I realized I had bitten off way more than I could chew. There’s much too much to cover in one blog post. Each topic is more than worthy of an entire book and there are some areas that I simply won’t be able to touch upon at all. This is at best a preliminary outline. And not all that well organized. That said… 

Before the shift of the racist bigots to the Republican Party, the two parties had been only vaguely split along ideological lines. The Republican Party was mostly conservative, but it had a liberal wing as well. The Democratic Party had become the liberal party under FDR, but it was still dogged by its Dixiecrat racist southern whites. In order to get anything done, that is, in order to govern, the members of the Senate and the House had to reach compromises. As I said previously, the political parties served one purpose, to get their candidates elected. They were not strongly divided politically, at least not the way they are today. 

Once the Republican Party had gained all those white racist bigots as voters, they needed to keep motivating them to come to the polling booths every election day. They did this in a number of ways. 

There were the explicit appeals such as the infamous Willie Horton ad that George Bush Senior ran against Michael Dukakis in 1988, but there were more subtle appeals as well. The Republicans became the party of “law and order” knowing full well that their bigoted white voters would interpret that as a “dog whistle”, a coded reference meaning the GOP was gonna keep those Black criminals behind bars—for a long time. And they were as good as their dog whistling word because whenever they got the chance Republican politicians increased the penalties for crimes like simple possession of drugs (likely to be committed by Blacks), while at the same time tending to ignore white collar crimes (because those tended to be committed by donors to the Republican Party). Even though white collar crimes are far more damaging to society than drug possession.

Republicans also found a winner with guns. Not so much because the American people supported “Second Amendment remedies”, but because a large part of their funding came from the NRA and gun manufacturers. Meanwhile gun violence kept increasing in America, particularly gun violence in the schools, and the Republican answer was “thoughts and prayers”. 

Then there was the women’s health issue, more commonly referred to as abortion. Republicans were against it, as they discovered there was a whole bunch of religious voters for whom this was a single issue, and the GOP could keep stoking it for all it was worth for years. They didn’t really have to do anything about it because the voters were religious, so they were used to believing in nothing with nothing ever happening and never giving up the faith. In fact it was better if Republicans did nothing, so there’d be no backlash from the voters who really cared about women’s health.

Then there were tax cuts for the rich. This was the only issue that conservatives really cared about, and for the most part they got their wish, a little here, a lot there.

But meanwhile, there were other things brewing.

For years there had been something called the Equal Time Rule. The idea was that as the air waves were a public resource, the federal government could control them, and therefore in order to maintain a radio or television license, a broadcaster needed to present both sides of any controversial issue.

Well, this never sat well with conservatives. They finally got their way and the rule was abolished during the Reagan administration. This opened the floodgates for rightwing hate mongers like Rush Limbaugh and others to present their venom to the public. The propaganda was always one-sided because liberals aren’t interested in being spoon fed hate and crackpot ideas.

It wasn’t long before rightwing immigrant Rupert Murdoch saw an opportunity to both make more cash and spread more rightwing propaganda and so Fox “news” was born.

Oh, and another thing. The Republicans saw to it that the restrictions on owning multiple media outlets were eliminated. You see, like the Cylons, the conservatives had a plan. And they played the long game.

This was in the 90s during the Clinton administration when right-wingers were already having a field day making up crackpot theories about the Clintons being murderers or worse. 

And then along came Newt Gingrich.

Clinton had been elected at least in part on a wave of hope that he could bring about a universal health care plan, but those hopes were dashed when the Republicans discovered they could kill the plan by spreading bald-faced lies without having to come up with a plan of their own. 

And so the modern Republican Party was born. It was no longer interested in governing, other than perhaps in lowering taxes on their rich donors. All they cared about was winning elections and destroying the Democrats. If they destroyed democracy in the process, well, maybe that was a feature, not a bug.

So the right wing had their own propaganda network, filling a vast electorate up with nonsense. 

This piece has already gone on long enough, but I need to backtrack to bit on at least a few more topics.

During the his administration, Ronald Reagan emphasized over and over again in speech after speech that there were two main enemies of the American people: liberals and the federal government itself. That was an awful thing for a president to do, someone who is supposed to be a leader of all the people. He basically turned both liberals and government into dirty words.

The alliance that the GOP formed with Christians, in particular the evangelical Christians, didn’t extend merely to the issue of women’s health (i.e., abortion), but they discovered they could exploit hatred in many other ways. There are few things that evangelical Christians hate more than gay people, so there was the gays in the military, gay marriage, and most recently it was expanded to trans people. Christians really love to hate people and Republicans love to exploit that hate.

Then there’s the Supreme Court. By making up his own rules on the fly, Mitch McConnell was able to install a super majority of right-wingers on the Supreme Court. Is it a coincidence that they are mostly Catholic? Anybody who has been paying attention has noticed that those right-wingers have thrown all the previous norms aside and have granted that rapist in the White House extraordinary powers.

And yes, I know that this is supposed to be about politics but in the last few decades religion and politics have become so intertwined that I’m not sure where one begins and the other ends. I simply can’t help pointing out once again the complete lack of moral leadership the Catholic Church displayed when its pope refused to differentiate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump and didn’t endorse a candidate. Plus more than 50% of Catholic voters pulled the lever for Trump. 

So, are all Republicans racists? That’s an interesting question. I remember hearing an interview with a Republican voter a few years ago where he was saying that he hated being called a racist just because he was a Republican. I felt like shouting at the screen the he shouldn’t be voting for candidates that espouse racist policies!

But the truth is that things are a lot more complicated. 

Remember that I said that once upon a time the parties were not divided entirely in ideological terms. Plus many people inherit their party affiliation in the same way they inherit their religion—from their parents. They go to the same church that their parents went to and don’t ever give it a second thought, and they vote for the same party that their parents voted for without thinking too much about it.

They only time they might think about is when things are going badly for them, like when there’s a recession or inflation goes sky high or unemployment goes through the roof. Then they might think about voting for the guy in the other party. You know, throw the bums out.

At least that’s how it used to be. Sort of.

These might be called low information voters, people who don’t follow politics closely or at all. They may very well have not been aware of the changes going on in the Republican Party. At least not at first.

But given all the propaganda that the right wing has been tossing out for decades now, I think it’s safe to say that those people who identify as Republicans these days, do so because they agree with some or all of what it stands for. 

Are they racists? 

Well, what else does the Republican Party stand for these days? I mean, other than lowering taxes for the very rich.

Uh, oh. I just realized I didn’t explain how that rapist made it into the Oval Office, which was supposed to be the reason for this post. So briefly… 

When Barack Obama was president, there was a ridiculous, and completely unfounded controversy about his birth certificate. At the center of that controversy  was Trump, who would appear on CNN claiming he had investigators in Hawaii who were uncovering new information every day. That was complete bullshit, of course. Finally, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which Trump attended for some reason, Obama produced his birth certificate to Trump’s great embarrassment. Some say that that was when Trump decided to run for president.

He did so merely as a vanity project with no expectation of winning; he thought it would raise his profile so that he could get back on the “reality” TV show circuit again. The problem was that in the Republican primaries that year, there were something like 99 different candidates. OK, maybe not that many, but there were a lot. And the voters never coalesced on any one serious candidate; there were plenty of crazies in the race getting lots of publicity. And through it all, Trump with his crazy talk about the border maintained his followers and ended up winning.

Even then, no one thought he’d win in the general election. The news media came down extremely hard on Hillary Clinton because they never liked the Clintons because they had never been able to get anything to stick to them. Especially the New York Times. But they mostly gave Trump a free pass because they knew he didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning.

And Hillary did take the lead. Except the Republicans kept harping on her emails when she had been Secretary of State. It was a non-issue, of course, but they kept up the drum beat. They had a compliant FBI Director in James Comey, a Republican who had been put there by Obama.

A small digression. If I could offer Democratic presidents one piece of advice it would be this:

NEVER EVER PUT A REPUBLICAN IN ANY POSITION OF AUTHORITY! 

It will almost always come back to bite you. But they never learn. For some reason Democrats think that a spirit of bi-partisanship is good. Fuck that shit. Republicans don’t do it, why should you?

End of digression.

Anyway, James Comey, once again throwing all norms out the window, made a big deal out of her emails even though he finally admitted just before the election that there was no there there.

And although she won the popular vote, she lost the antiquated electoral college. The electoral college is a remnant of our racist slave holding days when the founders didn’t trust the people to vote for the president directly.

That’s how the rapist won the first time. Keep in mind that many Republicans voted for him, not because they liked him, but because of all the decades of propaganda that led them to believe that any Democrat would be far worse than the worst Republican.

The second time Trump benefitted from a world wide “throw the bums out” mood. The inflation that had been caused by the pandemic, poor reporting by the news media, Latino and Black males liking the “macho” arrogance of Trump, the poor performance of Biden at the debate, Biden’s age even though Trump was nearly as old, a Black woman running as a Democrat even though she ran a pretty good campaign, plus a few other factors.

Sorry this was so long and I still didn’t completely cover everything. Back to regular blogging tomorrow. Assuming anyone is still reading this.