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.
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