“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 just sucks that they are too stupid to see who is actually making their lives shit.
That’s a very compassionate view, and one I should try to incorporate into my own views on the matter. However, I want to be very clear about one thing:
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.
People in both parties are suffering. Many in both parties. This behavior comes from the party who insists that they are the only ones struggling, and is directed against the party that proposes solutions that would help everyone. I realize that sounds very one sided, and there absolutely are assholes on “both sides”, but only one party claims to have a monopoly on suffering and/or the only valid suffering, only one party is trying to interfere in the medical decisions and sexuality of people not like them, only one party is banning books, and only that party obstructs all attempts to improve the lot of everyone. Democrats are NOT PERFECT by far, but they are either trying, or doing a credible job of appearing to try. R does nothing but blame, obstruct, and ostracize.
Nonetheless, it’s become too easy to vilify these people (what with the constant examples of their asshattery) and that is something unhealthy that I should probably try to get a handle on, so I appreciate your viewpoint even if I think you are making some assumptions that don’t quite mesh with what I see around me.
This should be class “warfare” not D vs R, but it never will be while R focuses on attacking LGBTQ, women’s rights, etc.
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.
