W, for all his many and profound flaws (and I live in Texas, where he was governor for a long time, so yes, I know), actually wanted the GOP to expand its appeal to non-white voters, and was consistent about that during his presidency. It was during his presidency that the rest of his party chose to double-down on its appeal to racists.
The GOP today is an apartheid party. They will try to succeed (and probably will, to some extent) not by appealing to people of color, but by preventing them from voting at all. Don’t forget that there are 250+ voter-restriction laws being considered or already passed by state legislatures.
2022 looks grim for Democrats. We each of us have to roll up our sleeves and do the hard work of keeping the majority in the House. The Republican Party is far from dead.
Sheesh George, they know they’re not going to win anything - why else do you think they’ve doubled down on the strategy of stealing elections? Republicans across the country are writing laws to disenfranchise non-Republican voters and overturn election results they don’t like, not to mention the gerrymandering. The one thing they’re increasingly counting on is getting into power despite the voters, not because of them.
And honestly I’m not sure they’re even clutching their pearls about where the party has ended up, so much as how déclassé it’s become. There’s a traditional sort of racist who doesn’t acknowledge the humanity of Black people but is scandalized over the use the n-word simply because it’s too low-class. They’re not so upset about the policies as much as the common crudity of it all.
Trump spent 2017-2019 laying the groundwork that enabled the record body count of 2020 (well over half a million dead Americans) and the honest-to-gods attempted coup of 2021 (final outcome TBD).
They dreamed the impossible dream—a US President worse than W.
It amuses me to see that the GOP has lost touch so much that even Bush can see it. Now if only the US can get rid of gerrymandering they can bury GOP for a good long while to give them a chance to dig themselves out of this 3rd world shithole they are wallowing in.
This! It’s pretty tiresome seeing all these Republicans acting like Trump was some anomaly or revolution in the party. He was the next small step forward in the path they’ve been on since at least Reagan.
I’m sorry, Trump is a wild swing - this is the same party that nominated Mitt Romney in 2012 and now boos and nearly censures him. The “country club” Republicans Bush refers to are on the outs, with major realignments in GOP stalwarts like the Chamber of Commerce and Big Business, the Mormons, the FBI and CIA, and the neocons like Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rice, Max Boot, etc.
And at this point with the amount of literal insanity in our dark timeline (with a big fascist boot stoking the flames), I am happy to have anyone get on the bus.
compare w to reagan or even his father and tell me it makes sense he was elected either.
the republican party gave up facts and principles long before trump explicitly put them aside. and the racism of the party has only gotten worse and worse over time. something that w’s oil wars only encouraged.
the one positive thing shrub tried to do was some amount of immigration reform, the party didn’t like it and it didn’t go anywhere. so at his most positive moments, his party rejected him. the signs were already there.
while people didn’t predict trump - so in that respect he seems wild - in retrospec it’s pretty obvious he won by doubling down on all the core republican “values” - and it worked.
Sorry Dubya but this is the essence of American conservatism. It’s always been nativist, racist, misogynist, and just generally bigoted. What conservatism as a whole conserves is the status quo at the cost of human dignity, conserving only the privilege that a few are offered (namely white wealthy men with maybe a smattering of other wealthy folks that are marginally tolerated because of their wealth).
We’re already seeing that they can continue to win. An anti-Trump Republican ran for Congress in a special election in Texas, and got 3% of the vote. Republican voters right now love the crap out of Trump. It’s great that some are speaking out, but the truth is, they do not represent the majority of their party. They are a really small minority, and Liz Cheney is likely to lose her leadership position soon, and she’ll probably be primaried the next time she’s up for re-election, as will Kinzinger and Romney.
Totally. There’s a strong undercurrent of annoyance that these “new” Republicans are giving up the game by saying the quiet parts loud, and that’s the real threat.
W was happy when the GOP was the exclusive province of his fellow wealthy country club members. Now he’s unhappy about all the low-class rif-raf who are wandering around the club buffet.
