I don’t necessarily ascribe it to party.
After all, Trump’s real base isn’t anything like the Republican Party of 1974.
We have to recognize a few things here:
- When Newt Gingrich began using certain demonizing terminology against Democrats in the 1980s, it shocked even his fellow Republicans.
- But by the 1990s, the GOP, after betraying H.W. Bush because he had to raise taxes, had come around to Gingrich's playbook. "Get Clinton" was the 8 year mission.
- W. Bush promised to be a "uniter, not a divider" and that "Republicans and Democrats have worked together to do what is right for the American people" in his victory speech at the Texas House of Representatives in 2000. However, prior to Bush's inauguration in 2001, Tom DeLay (House Majority Leader) told him: "We don't work with Democrats. There'll be none of that uniter-divider stuff."
- Directly after Obama won the election in 2008, Paul Ryan and his "Young Guns" developed a policy in the House that officially declared that the GOP's mission was to opposing anything and everything proposed by Obama. This is how they earned the "Party of No" describer and how they could actually argue over tomato paste being a vegetable.
- And throughout the eight years of Obama's Presidency, this "Party of No" behaved as an obstacle that did our democracy and economy no favors. Aside from raging about birther conspiracies, it encouraged Conservative voters (through Fox News, etc.) to cling to extremist politics against "the Left."
- After gaining control of both the House and Congress in 2014, this "Party of No" went on to sabotage the American economy with their behavior and the affects were seen in 2016 when our GDP dropped off the trend of recovery. Amazing how in 2017, it magically got right back on track.
- But in 2016, they reached the conclusion to what they had done to their voters and what they, themselves, created. They openly begged them not to vote for Trump, a champion birther, who embodied all of the GOP's nastiness, hatred, and extremism, as presented through FOX News. Eventually, the GOP had no choice but to embrace an anti-thesis to traditional American Conservatism because it had turned its constituency into a manipulated mob that ignored the fact that they were rubbing shoulders with neo-Nazis and White Supremacists at political rallies.
So, this is absolutely a Party thing, because the Party had been creating this culture of irrationality for a couple decades. But you are right, this is no longer the Party of Reagan and this did largely come out of the Civil Rights Marches when Conservatives and Liberals drew to one side or the other. The GOP sold themselves to extremist politics, through Gingrich's leadership, which consequently satisfied the alt-Right's mood and shoved the political Right further from the center. Maybe one day something drastic and pathetic enough will happen that will shake Conservatives out of their self-induced trances. But Conservatives did follow the GOP's script until they outgrew the GOP's game.
They’re the talk radio, Fox News reactionary right wing.
People whose parents and or grandparents listened to Father Coulin on the radio, and joined the John Birch Society.
The GOP sold itself to the isolationists and the racists beginning after the Nixon impeachment.
At first, it was with dog whistles.
But with the rise of talk radio and later Fox (talk radio with pictures), they adapted to the news as lowbrow entertainment that folks like Limbaugh and Ailes were selling.
They became the first party in over a century to put an obviously unqualified crackpot at the top of a national ticket, simply in the hope of attracting the loyalty of the right wing lunatic fringe.
Then they put another carnival barker up for President.
We are watching how well that turned out.
It looks like you may have read
How Democracies Die by Levitsky & Ziblatt. I would recommend
the Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power by Hett. It focuses entirely on German society in the 1920s and the 1930s, but one can't help but see today's American Conservative, FOX News, and GOP behaviors throughout.
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