Key moments of the degeneration of the Republican Party that got it to the batshit crazy state it is in today

Republicans are doing a bit of soul searching after their dismal efforts in Election 2022. Here are some key moments in the deterioration of that party that led it to where it is today:

1964 - Republican Presidential nominee Barry Goldwater implements the Southern strategy wherein the Republican Party stokes the tensions of whites in the south who are upset about desegregation and the civil rights movement. Racists in the south (and no, not all white southerners are racist by a long shot) who had been Democrats up until this time, became solidly Republican over the next 16 years. 

1980 - In his Presidential Campaign, GOP nominee Ronald Reagan brings lunatic evangelical Christians and other extreme Christian sects into the Republican Party by adopting a firm anti-Abortion stance and paying lip service to various other Christian values. Pope John Paul II sells out and helps move many Catholics into the GOP. Christianity in the US is warped as a result, giving up its advocacy for the poor and its insistence on kindness and non-violence to support trickle down economics and a militant Republican foreign policy, and the Republican Party is warped as a result eschewing a reasonable approach toward many issues for religious extremism. 

1980-1988 - Reagan abandons standard fiscal conservatism creating the first massive deficit spending in the US since the Second World War. Republicans will play lip service towards debt and deficit issues after this, particularly when Democrats are in charge, but will never act to do anything about them. (The only President that has balanced the federal budget since 1972 is a Democrat, Bill Clinton.)

1980-1988 - Reagan abandons traditional isolationist Republican foreign policy to run an aggressive interventionist and militant foreign policy. Reagan invades the island of Granada and provides massive support for Nicaraguan contra rebels in violation of a law congress enacted (The Boland Amendment) to specifically limit aid to the contras. Reagan provides support to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan so they can fight off an invasion by the Soviet Union. The Mujahideen would largely evolve into the Taliban that exists in Afghanistan today that sheltered Al Qaeda during and after the 9/11 attacks.  For the first time during the Reagan administration you hear the idea in the Republican Party that the state department should be abolished and foreign policy should be run out of the Department of Defense, a view many of them still have today.

2003 - Following the advice of a group-thinked cabal of neoconservatives called the Project for the New American Century, George W Bush invades Iraq without justification in an attempt to remake the Middle East into American style Democracies. This fails miserably.

2008 - Republicans are shellacked in elections that bring Democrat Barack Obama, the first Black President into the Whitehouse and also ushers in veto proof Democratic majorities into both houses of congress. Groups of Republicans begin to think they need to go on a listening tour of America to rethink Republican policies but are vetoed by none other than Rush Limbaugh who in March of 2009 takes to the airwaves to say “We don’t need a listening tour.” Thus an effort to remake Republicanism into something they get from reaching out to grassroots voters to find out what the voters want,  is squelched.

2016 - Republicans nominate and elect Donald Trump. No further explanation needed.

Election 2022 or as I call it: The Great Republican Gaslighting Exercise

 

Prior to this year, if you were to tell me that there would be midterm elections in the US where the Unemployment rate is down at 3.7% (basically full employment), the gross national product has increased every quarter of the current congressional session indicating an expanding economy and that the party out of power, Republicans in this case, would be successful at painting the Economy as “bad” I would have laughed at you. "There is no way that could happen" is what I would have said.

US Annual GDP Rate

Yet, here we are.

Republicans reading this are, I am sure, by this point shouting at the screen saying “Inflation!” “Inflation!!!!!!!!!!!” Yes, there is inflation. I will get to that shortly, but that is only one datapoint of many economic indicators. Historically in the US If the economy was expanding, i.e. the GDP growth I talked about earlier, and unemployment was low, we would all be calling that a good economy, which it is.

So, understanding that we are talking about economy where the top two indicators show it to be a good economy, let’s talk about inflation, the one aspect of the economy that isn’t where we would hope it would be.

 

Since the late 1960s, the Annual US Inflation rate has ranged from less than -2% in 2011 (deflation is generally an indicator of recession) to over 14% during the oil crisis of the late 1970s. It averages somewhere around 3 to 4 percent. The annual inflation rate in 2021 was 7% and it is currently at about 8.2%. Generally when we are talking about high inflation, we are talking about double digit increases (10%) or higher. We would prefer a lower inflation rate, but rates under 10% are not very high.

More germane to this election is, why is inflation high and should Democrats be held responsible. I can take your through this, but, spoiler alert, the answer is it is high because of what Trump and Biden (and congress during their Presidencies) did and had to do to right the economic ship after Covid, and no the Democrats and Biden should not be held responsible.

Let’s talk about my Covid assertions above. First, let’s remember, virtually all of the governments of the world shut down their economies for about six months due to Covid in mid 2020 and for the six to twelve months after that, the economies ran at a fraction of their pre-Covid output. So that is twelve to eighteen months of very low economic output, no money being earned by companies or people, factories not having orders and not producing, essentially very few goods and services being produced. If you had told me prior to Covid that something like this would happen, I would expect at a minimum that we would experience an economic depression in its aftermath with unemployment at 25% and persisting that way for some time and other severe economic impacts. After all, people still have to pay their rent and mortgage. Where was that money coming from? What would happen to banks if mortgages wouldn’t be paid for 6-18 months. How would companies keep employing people? How would people buy food? How would people pay for electricity, internet, phone, etc if they weren’t being paid? The government had to prop all of these things up for hundreds of millions of people.

It says something that the governments of the world were able to take action and prevent a complete collapse of the economies given those circumstances. And what is it that the US and other governments did to prevent this collapse? They injected trillions of dollars into the economy. After March of 2020 and up until the end of his Presidency, Trump injected three trillion dollars into the economy to shore it up during and after this shut down of the economy. In the beginning of his Presidency, Biden injected another three trillion dollars into the economy. Now, as I indicated, the fact that the economy could be salvaged at all in the US and elsewhere given the circumstances is still surprising to me. But if you think you can inject that kind of money into an economy that isn’t producing goods and services and not have some specific expected impacts, particularly where inflation is concerned, you don’t understand economics. In fact, most brokers on Wall street were predicting massive inflation in Fall of 2020 regardless of who won the Presidential election since both Biden and Trump were promising additional rounds of large stimulus were they to be elected. It was understood by both parties and their economic experts that this would be required to keep the economy going.

So one large component of the inflation we are experiencing globally, not just in the US is because governments had to rescue the economy after Covid. In fact, the US is experiencing less inflation that most of the other large developed countries. Here is a graph of the inflation by commodity group of the other G7 countries. They all are experiencing inflation, as expected, but the US is generally doing better than the rest of the group.

 

Also imagine, if you will, all this money that had been injected into these economies, but there weren’t many goods and services to spend it on. Factories took a long time to spin up again and get to full production. Shipping companies had to get their container ships up and working again sailing the pacific from Asia to the US and other routes. So you had all of this money and not many goods and services, that is a recipe for inflation and governments couldn’t do too much about that.

I would be saying this regardless of who had won the White House in 2020. It is a miracle that the economies of the US and the other countries of the world did not fail completely in the wake of the Covid shutdowns. Disruptions to entire economies on the scale of what we saw with Covid are rare. In fact I am not sure anything like that has happened since the industrial revolution ended in the mid 1800s.

It is completely bizarre, given the circumstances, that anyone is blaming the party in power for inflation. I suppose if you know absolutely nothing about macroeconomics, if you don’t even understand that adding tons of money to an economy without adding goods and services will mean inflation, then I guess it might be understandable. I find it hard to believe that people are that ignorant of economics. For sure, Republican and Conservative pundits who are selling this to grassroots voters know better, they just don’t care that they are lying. That isn’t a surprise to me, that’s how those folks operate.

If it goes like the polls are predicting, this will be the first time in American history that a party with positive GDP growth and an unemployment rate this low will be punished by losing congress. And it will happen because of ignorance.

The Herschel Walker saga is the latest example of how religion and politics poison each other

 How Politics poisons Religion

Once a religious group decides it is in bed with a political party or political leader, it must accept all the ways that party or person differs with that religion’s values. For instance, in terms of Evangelical Christian and the Republican Party:

• ·         Christianity talks about how one should help the poor and that being rich makes it hard to enter heaven. Republican values empower the rich to get richer and are not just indifferent but outright hostile toward efforts to help the poor. Christians who support the Republican party and its candidates are forced to overlook this.
• ·         The death penalty is an obvious problem for Christians. But the death penalty is part of the Republican party platform. Christians who support the Republican party and its candidates are forced to overlook this.
• ·         The Republican party does not believe in funding universal healthcare. Reagan famously pulled funding for state mental health facilities resulting in the hordes of mentally ill homeless people we see on the streets of major cities today. Prior to Reagan, those people would have been off the streets and in mental health hospitals getting the treatment they need. There is zero doubt where any of the Abrahamic based religions, Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, stand on this. According to each of those religions we should be helping the sick. And frankly, the atheistic/agnostic/humanist position is in complete agreement. It is horrible for a society capable of doing so not to help the sick. Christians who support the Republican party and its candidates are forced to overlook this.
• ·         Abortion. This is poisoning in both directions. So, Christians are anti-abortion. But when Republican politicians like Walker and Trump have either had one or pressured their paramours to get one, Christians must overlook it and support the candidate anyway. Usually you hear the pathetic justification “Oh, they prayed for forgiveness so it’s OK” as in “Abortion is bad! Abortion is bad! Walker and Trump pressured someone to get one? Oh, well, I am sure they prayed and were forgiven.” Of course, that consideration would not be given to a Democratic candidate in the same position, even if they somehow provided proof that they prayed for forgiveness.

How in turn Religion Poisons Politics

• ·         Since Reagan brought the evangelical Christians into the Republican Party, you have had a host of candidates like Walker with questionable credentials and questionable conservatism, but they call themselves “Christians”, so they get nominations instead of someone who is smarter and better represents conservative values. It’s no surprise that the death of intellectual conservatism started with Reagan. You no longer have Republicans in the party like Jack Kemp or William F Buckley. The smartest Republican of the last 20-30 years, Jon Huntsman Jr, a Conservative with a track record of economic and foreign policy experience and talent, got no traction at all in the 2012 Republican Presidential nomination process. Why, because he isn’t a religious zealot who wears his religion on his sleeves. These polls of party identification and education and religion over time show what has happened: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/06/02/in-changing-u-s-electorate-race-and-education-remain-stark-dividing-lines/ the Republican party has become more religious and less educated and the Democratic party has become less religious and more educated.
• ·         Abortion. Conservatism, particularly the Libertarian side of it would say that Government should keep its laws off human bodies and their decisions. You see them saying that when it comes to vaccines and masks (along with a heavy dose of science denialism and anti-intellectualism). But Republicans are forced to support laws against their values when it comes to abortion to placate the Christians they accepted into the party.

Those are just the examples that come to me off the top of my head without a lot of research. I am sure we can come up with more. This is all an example of how power corrupts. The saying goes that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I would say that religion and politics are two sources of power that when combined corrupt each other absolutely.