Excellent and descriptive essay on the State of the Union …
How the Republican Party Became a Haven of Resentment and Rage | The Conversation | by Randall Stephens
Today, communists are no longer hiding under every rock or bed, but Republicans, masters of the paranoid style, have plenty of targets to fit the pattern: journalists, Mexican immigrants, climate scientists, unions, academics, treacherous politicians, or gun control advocates.
White politicians and activists are driving a great deal of the political conversation, to the joy of voters who feel beset by forces out of their control. The language of embattlement runs through these circles like a raging river.
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The modern right’s ideological alchemy has already turned Kim Davis into a latter-day Rosa Parks, the founding fathers into born-again evangelicals, climate science into a hoax, and Reagan’s outlandish and discredited “voodoo economics” into the only way America can get back on track.On the latter point, incidentally, the right’s partisans might pay heed to how slash-and-burn tax cuts have worked out in my home state of Kansas. As of April, the Republican governor Sam Brownback’s land of Oz needed $400m to close the deficit.
Since July, pundits have been variously marvelling and panicking at the surprising rise and continued rise of Donald Trump – but really, it makes perfect sense. The party that cultivated the politics of outrage and bolstered stubborn anti-intellectualism is racing to the bottom of a bottomless pit.
The frontrunner (for now) is a Frankentrump of the GOP’s own creation. He is the embodiment of decades of anger, antipathy, and anti-establishment hostility.
Unfortunately for the Nation, Tricky Dick Nixon made a come-back for a murderous Christmas bombardment on Hanoi in December 1972 until he lost it due to the break-in at the Democrats’ headquarters in Washington DC by his CIA henchmen or ‘plumbers.’ The threat of impeachment forced him to leave office in August 1974 and left a stain on the Office of President of the USA.
