I’ve said it before I’ll say it again. Of all the Republican weirdness in recent years, I truly don’t understand why they seem to have made a conscious decision to become the biggest-asshole-in-the-room party.
In recent years? brother they’ve been the “biggest asshole in the room” party since at least Nixon; they just have to keep outdoing themselves
It used to be that those guys were on the fringes of the party. Nixon was a crook, but he established the EPA and OSHA. That was just a normal thing for a Republican to do in the 1970s.
The GOP is a big tent party, and so they’ve always had room for the extreme right wing. These days, the tent is getting smaller, and unless you’re an out-and-out fascist you’re not really welcome. Unfortunately, half the country feels a stronger tie to that party than to their country, so they’re squeezing into that smaller tent.
It’s different though. Even W and his admin at least felt that they had to keep up a certain decorum. Trump said shit every day that Bush would have probably considered political suicide to even get caught saying in private, if a recording got out.
Nixon resigned when things were looking bad for him, Trump just doubles down. Like this entire campaign is pretty much him trying to get a crown because, for a while at least, it looked like that would be his only way of avoiding consequences for some of the shit he’s done. Though, to be fair, Nixon resigning might have been his way of avoiding the consequences because he knew he was getting a pardon. But even that shows a difference because Nixon never seriously considered just trying to pardon himself, at least not in public, while it was a big topic during Trump’s presidency.
Also Nixon resigned because he knew impeachment was a real possibility because even his own party wouldn’t risk their own political careers to protect a criminal president. With Trump, my pov is the rules need a complete overhaul because they can’t handle the level of bad faith present in the government now.
In hindsight, it was naive to rely on gentlemen’s rules to keep the government running smoothly, but those rules were at least followed in appearance until 2016 (though the conservatives did start using them in bad faith before that, like with Obama’s supreme court nomination).
Oh yeah it’s different; I said as much. They have to keep upping the ante to remain edgy, in their cold white fascist way. Trump didn’t give a shit about the subtlety though, he was like “I can steal this all away from these weak assholes and all I have to do is give the crowd what they really want”
Now we have a narcissist whose ego has been stroked by what he perceives to be the whole world. Very dangerous with all the secrets and codes, let alone everything else.
Because it works. Acting like a childish bully still gets the adoration from the “peaked in high school” MAGA voter base.
“Of all the Republican weirdness in recent years, I truly don’t understand why they seem to have made a conscious decision to become the biggest-asshole-in-the-room party.”
Recent? They’ve been doing this shtick since at least Newt Gingrich in the 90s.
The thing is, I was alive and an adult then, and I knew otherwise OK people who were single issue voters who therefore voted republican. I may have disagreed with them on a thing or three, but we could get along OK. It either wasn’t as pervasive, or somehow didn’t hit my sphere. (And I was living in the south at the time)
Now - everyone who I know is a republican is just a raging confrontational asshole.
I made the comment because Gingrich took confrontational politics and brought it to the National level. The era of Fox News and the 24hr news cycle was starting and he was the architect of the sensational hyper partisan angry Republicanism that we see today on right wing media. I don’t think Gingrich actually believed what he is pushing. He pushed it because it got the results he wanted.
Fast forward 30 years and now we have social media and the internet all vying for attention. Only the most extreme views that are controversial enough get noticed and commented on.
Some of the people I know who were Republicans have moderate enough views that they don’t feel the party is in step with them anymore. But I know Republicans who are true MAGA supporters and just parrot the grievances of their party. They all seem to emulate that anger
Speaking as another older adult in Canada and witnessing the slide in both countries my controversial opinion is it’s not about politics at all. Politics are simply a symptom of an underlying problem with the society we have built.
What you’re seeing is classic behaviour of when a person is unheard, stressed and angry. It is scientifically proven when you experience those struggles you are less likely to think clearly and what options you have become limited. You start looking at every problem like a nail and you’re a hammer.
Individually we all deal with adversity different and I’d argue one party is heavily weighed with those who struggle with dealing with the adversity meanwhile since the 60’s governments have been doing nothing to improve life and lessen the adversity people deal with.
Then you have all those people struggling… And you throw in predators taking advantage of them, feeding into their struggles and weaponizing them.
At some point we all need to acknowledge we can’t fix this overnight and these people for the most part aren’t crazy. They’re you just a few medical bills behind or a few months laid off from your job. Hurt people hurt people.
It’s the natural conclusion of the strategy republicans set into motion to manipulate their base.
It started just after Watergate. Nixon was facing massive calls for justice from both sides. Republican think tanks realized that their base of conservatives consumed news from all sources that informed their mostly unbiased decision to hold their guy accountable. So those republican think tanks devised a plan to create a conservative news outlet that explicitly demonized other news so that the conservative base would never turn on one of their own again. That strategy was realized in the 90’s with the creation of Fox News.
Since then, conservative media has been slowly transforming politics from the perspective of the average conservative into a team sport, where the main motivation isn’t “who runs the country better” but rather “my team is better than yours”.
It wasn’t so pervasive 20 years ago, but conservative media has found themselves with a base that now only responds to the outrage they’ve been conditioning them with, and that has created the raging confrontational assholes you see today.
Being a conservative doesn’t mean what it used to. And that’s because the Republican leadership robbed conservatives of that in order to maintain control of their base.
