Yeah, there are no good Republicans. Reagan put the ball in motion by ripping away every chance at economic security for the past 40 years and the whole late-capitalism thing snowballed. It’s like Reagan was the friendly, smiling shopkeeper who was merely embezzling, then the mob came in for their taste, and finally Trump comes in at the end stage with a baseball bat to break the windows and loot whatever’s left in the store.
Also in the annals of No Good Republicans, I’ve become increasingly amazed at all the otherwise smart people on twitter who are SHOCKED that Trump’s lawyers and GOP Senators have the nerve to tell obvious lies in front of Chief Justice Roberts. Has it not sunk in yet that SCOTUS is partisan and Roberts is a Republican? That the only time he sides with the liberals is when he’s worried the Court’s decision is so egregiously bad it will be reviled within 10-20 years and hurt his legacy?
I mean, this is the guy who was pissed off about the North Carolina gerrymandering case not because of the gerrymandering, but because the GOP’s violation of the Stringer Bell Rule was so blatant it forced him to vote with the liberals for the sake of appearances.
I'm delighted to learn that you think Reagan was a prick. I always thought he was one. It completely mystified me how people could find an avuncular figure in someone who was obviously so self-certain and so malicious toward anyone who dared to disagree with him. He was just a lot smoother than Trump. Than again, so is a skunk or a three-toed sloth.
He was a decent actor in the old studio system, in the category of Nice Guy Who Doesn't Get the Girl. He kept playing the part throughout his political career, and a big part of the audience was convinced. Two big differences with Trump are that he was capable of reading his script before shooting, and never imagined he was the director, which made life a lot easier for his handlers and made them more effective overall. I still think with Trump and his arrogance and lack of discipline and fundamental incompetence Republicans have really fucked things up for themselves, however bleak things may look at the moment.
Reagan also had a wife who was committed to her own Republican sense of public propriety. (I'm not blaming Melania for poor wife skills. I can blame her for other things.) I think Nancy Reagan compelled him to behave and to present himself in ways that passed for acceptable. I suspect she and her astrologers would have smote down whatever aide allowed the president to lumber up the steps to the airplane with TP on his shoe. I guess this is a function of being "capable of reading his script before shooting, and never imagined he was the director, which made life a lot easier for his handlers and made them more effective overall." So, I agree.
I voted for the first time in the 1980 Presidential primary for GHW Bush because I hated Reagan so much. This was in June, so Reagan had the primary locked up, but myself and 2 others in my precinct voted for Bush. This was the last time I voted for a Republican for President, Senate or House, IIRC.
The similarities between Trump and Reagan also include fabricating self-aggrandizing stories out of whole cloth. Reagan famously claimed to have been part of a group that liberated a concentration camp during WWII, even though he never left the States and did nothing but make shitty propaganda and training films.
Reagan pioneered the "many people say" bit, and Trump has raised it to an art form.
And, of course, Reagan subverted the Constitution by selling arms to Iran to fund an illegal war in Central America, while Trump and the GOP have just decided that the Constitution is a meaningless impediment to full-on authoritarianism.
"In any event, as Trump has said, in one of those breathtaking bits of total nihilism he sometimes can’t help but expose, “I won’t be here” when it happens."
"I'll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office." —President George W. Bush, in an interview with the Jerusalem Post, Washington, D.C., May 12, 2008[19][20] ~ ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushism
Crimbeciles have to rub their victims nose in their shit. It's no fun otherwise.
Bravo, hear, hear, truly astute. Growing up during the 60s and 70s, I was already well on my way to political cynicism especially with regard to Republicans. My eyes were further opened by the writings of folks like Walter Karp to the depredations of politiclal elites generally. But the one thing I was still naive about was the role of what was then called "the press". You'd think Vietnam would have taught me a valuable lesson but I still had Frank Capra notions about how honest journalism could enlighten the public.
The complicity of the media in the catastrophe that was Reagan disabused me of that. I marvel at how Reagan passed what I think is still the largest tax increase in history in 1982 and yet was then and since lauded as the tax-cutting hero of the Republican Party. Now Trump, whose tariffs amount to one of the largest tax increases in recent times, and whose tax bill will cost middle and working class people a bundle, gets similar treatment when it comes to the actual destruction wrought by the morons "policies".
This is a great essay. So how come we're not reading it in the Times?
At the beginning of the revolution the vanguard knows ideology is mostly propaganda and the real important part is power. At the end of the revolution the only ones left are the true believers and the moral morons.
For crying out loud, we're in a place where I'd love to have GHWB back. The only palatable Republican president of my lifetime out of six. That's a shit record.
(When I was a kid growing up in a deeeeep blue county, I would have made a case for Ford. But as an adult I see how his Nixon pardon set a frightening precedent for abuse of power. Which has me fairly nervous at this exact moment in US history, as I picture scenarios where Trump pardons everyone and Pence pardons Trump and Fox News joyously runs the headline EAT SHIT, AMERICA, WE WIN! And obviously, Ford should have seen at least some of this potential too, so, what a hack and a traitor.)
Also, Ford’s circle included some poisonous weeds—I’m looking at you, Cheney and Rumsfeld, but there were others—that overran the garden during the reign of the Crawford Caligula (although, mind you, for all that Bush 43 was regarded as risibly inarticulate back in the day, compared to Trump, “is our children learning” sounds like the fucking Funeral Oration of Pericles).
None of them would have been allowed in the GOP of the Reagan era, onward. In 1964 even a few Republicans thought Goldwater’s conservatism was too radical for the country. Nowadays he’d be considered too moderate.
Well, back then a lot more conservatives thought laissez-faire-ism definitely anti-conservative, and properly so. Being anti-black was too big a lure, though, as was laissez-faire's promise to make rich people even more powerful than before.
I'm pretty sure it was. We would have fragmented further and what little credit democracy was getting would have vanished in an age of unifying nations.
…and slavery was too much damn fun—well, for some people, ones it made powerful—to die a natural death. (See also: capitalism, socialism, Statist communism,property,propriety, plurality, surety, security, say what?….)
…and if they'd followed-through on their noises about Cuba and Mexico, they would have had to become even less democratic than they planned, and probably would have ended up with a positively dictatorial federal government.
Do you think they would have stuck to the prohibition against the African slave trade on which Virgina insisted. My guess: no way…so war with Great Britain within ten years.
Reagan was the worst president until Bush Jr, who was the worst until Trump. Nixon totally sucked, too. Funny not funny how every Republican president since Eisenhower was more and more disastrous.
I like your old Hollywood v. wrestling metaphor. I've been describing it as Gilligan's Island v. Survivor. Of course, we knew Gilligan's was a fiction, but it took the writers' strike to reveal how fictional modern "reality" TV is. Trump voters didn't get the word, apparently, and thought that was a real board room with a real CEO, not a cheap set with a bankrupt grifter.
There is an Iran ex-hostage in my town. He refuses to accept that Reagan, Rockefeller and Kissinger prolonged his suffering for their benefit. He blames Carter. Also, the mess in Iraq is Obama's fault. Jeez, these people!
What does it say about Americans that one party succeeds when it nominates people with experience and education, while the other succeeds when it nominates people who fake experience and education? This is partly a reflection of the media, which won't explain the difference between the real world and The Real World, and so it appears the electorate in off-years can't tell the difference. There may be a story in there about cheating, too, where the GOP feels entitled to its 8 years of Presidency and pulls out all the stops to make it happen and the oligarchical media plays along for the sake of "fairness."
But the media has absorbed virtually the entire public sphere in this country. If Savannah and Hoda don't talk about it, nobody cares. The takeover is nowhere near as total as the oligarchical media would have you believe - both the popularity of M4A and Trump is evidence constant media disapproval isn't as effective as its sold. But this takeover of the public's mental space really needs a modern analysis, somewhere between Lasch, Baudrillard and McLuhan.
Lewis Lapham used to worry about this, but a lot of his commentary in the early 90s was just "The Republic is in danger!" from the usual suspects. And while he was right, we need more than that.
You really have to go back to the 1960s to find more than one or two isolated examples of responsible civic-minded Republicans. Due to more than 50 years of repeated hammering and gouging of the American economy, infrastructure and social systems by the GOP, the country is really tottering. This is why the 2020 General Election represents the last hope for saving what remains of the country. I'm hoping that there really is enough voters who realize that GOP's policies are only working for the wealthy and habitual grifters. I'm not sure there are enough, in fact, but I'm just barely hopeful.
The revelation that the release of the hostages was delayed to influence the election (which, really, is not exactly a shocking revelation at all) and the general positive response to it from the wingnuts has made me realize that it's possible to retroactively own the libs.
Good ol' Ronnie brought his CAMP wars to those of us growing some illegal herbs out here on the west coast. Fun stuff - the federal government was making war on us. I got it up close and personal once when I was sitting in a draw up in the coast range not far from my garden when a column of heavily armed soldiers and police came down from the ridge above. 20+ dudes with m-16's, shotguns and other bad looking stuff that is clearly intended to kill people. Fortunately, like all heavily armed Americans you could hear them from a fucking mile away. No wonder we got ambushed so often in Vietnam...
Anyway, I found a good hiding spot in some heavy brush and watched them go by - I left the area and never went back. Considered that lost garden just the Cost of Doing Business. That's why I'd always do three or four patches.
That's when I figured out that Republicans are fascists with a nice sounding name. Glad everyone else is finally catching up to that conclusion. Fuck every Republican, including the old grandmas and grandpas that keep voting fascist. I might not like the democrats sometimes (ok, a lot of the time), they're corporate toadies much of the time, but at least they're not murderous fascist pigs.
No, I think Reagan still has a halo in a lot of quarters.
I think the oil shocks and the rest of the world having rebuilt had most to do with an end to it being easier not to worry all the time, but also
0.) true fear of the Bolsheviki got a lot of the rich to at least pretend enough sympathy and solidarity with the rest of us to cut us a better deal, and
1.) I recall seeing that there was a Rand[?] report trying to answer 'Why did "the 'Sixties" happen?' and the answer was 'prosperity well-distributed enough that white people, at least, weren't afraid all the time'; my paranoid side _insists_ that the Secret Chiefs saw that and said 'Thought so! Well, we won't be having any of _that_ again, then.'.
One good thing about the "I won't be here" quote: it means that at least Trump has considered the possibility of leaving office.
"All good citizens will vote for Donald Trump's Animatronic Corpse in 2040!"
Yeah, there are no good Republicans. Reagan put the ball in motion by ripping away every chance at economic security for the past 40 years and the whole late-capitalism thing snowballed. It’s like Reagan was the friendly, smiling shopkeeper who was merely embezzling, then the mob came in for their taste, and finally Trump comes in at the end stage with a baseball bat to break the windows and loot whatever’s left in the store.
Also in the annals of No Good Republicans, I’ve become increasingly amazed at all the otherwise smart people on twitter who are SHOCKED that Trump’s lawyers and GOP Senators have the nerve to tell obvious lies in front of Chief Justice Roberts. Has it not sunk in yet that SCOTUS is partisan and Roberts is a Republican? That the only time he sides with the liberals is when he’s worried the Court’s decision is so egregiously bad it will be reviled within 10-20 years and hurt his legacy?
I mean, this is the guy who was pissed off about the North Carolina gerrymandering case not because of the gerrymandering, but because the GOP’s violation of the Stringer Bell Rule was so blatant it forced him to vote with the liberals for the sake of appearances.
Party before law; law as a tool to promote GOP policy: The Roberts court. Not that the establishment media would say so.
Morning In Make America Great Again (MIMAGA)
I’d rather have a mimosa.
God, yes, please.
People forget, but MAGA was a Ronnie catchphrase, too.
Touch me in the morning?
I'm delighted to learn that you think Reagan was a prick. I always thought he was one. It completely mystified me how people could find an avuncular figure in someone who was obviously so self-certain and so malicious toward anyone who dared to disagree with him. He was just a lot smoother than Trump. Than again, so is a skunk or a three-toed sloth.
He was a decent actor in the old studio system, in the category of Nice Guy Who Doesn't Get the Girl. He kept playing the part throughout his political career, and a big part of the audience was convinced. Two big differences with Trump are that he was capable of reading his script before shooting, and never imagined he was the director, which made life a lot easier for his handlers and made them more effective overall. I still think with Trump and his arrogance and lack of discipline and fundamental incompetence Republicans have really fucked things up for themselves, however bleak things may look at the moment.
Reagan also had a wife who was committed to her own Republican sense of public propriety. (I'm not blaming Melania for poor wife skills. I can blame her for other things.) I think Nancy Reagan compelled him to behave and to present himself in ways that passed for acceptable. I suspect she and her astrologers would have smote down whatever aide allowed the president to lumber up the steps to the airplane with TP on his shoe. I guess this is a function of being "capable of reading his script before shooting, and never imagined he was the director, which made life a lot easier for his handlers and made them more effective overall." So, I agree.
Rick Perlstein’s books on the GOP from Goldwater through Reagan are well worth reading.
I voted for the first time in the 1980 Presidential primary for GHW Bush because I hated Reagan so much. This was in June, so Reagan had the primary locked up, but myself and 2 others in my precinct voted for Bush. This was the last time I voted for a Republican for President, Senate or House, IIRC.
The similarities between Trump and Reagan also include fabricating self-aggrandizing stories out of whole cloth. Reagan famously claimed to have been part of a group that liberated a concentration camp during WWII, even though he never left the States and did nothing but make shitty propaganda and training films.
Reagan pioneered the "many people say" bit, and Trump has raised it to an art form.
And, of course, Reagan subverted the Constitution by selling arms to Iran to fund an illegal war in Central America, while Trump and the GOP have just decided that the Constitution is a meaningless impediment to full-on authoritarianism.
"In any event, as Trump has said, in one of those breathtaking bits of total nihilism he sometimes can’t help but expose, “I won’t be here” when it happens."
"I'll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office." —President George W. Bush, in an interview with the Jerusalem Post, Washington, D.C., May 12, 2008[19][20] ~ ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushism
Crimbeciles have to rub their victims nose in their shit. It's no fun otherwise.
And Bill Barr went further, denying his reputation will mean anything, since he'll be dead.
And it may happen sooner than he expects, too. These shitheads all think that because they've never seen a broken country, they must be unbreakable.
Too many people who watch TV don't think very much, but they do vote.
Bravo, hear, hear, truly astute. Growing up during the 60s and 70s, I was already well on my way to political cynicism especially with regard to Republicans. My eyes were further opened by the writings of folks like Walter Karp to the depredations of politiclal elites generally. But the one thing I was still naive about was the role of what was then called "the press". You'd think Vietnam would have taught me a valuable lesson but I still had Frank Capra notions about how honest journalism could enlighten the public.
The complicity of the media in the catastrophe that was Reagan disabused me of that. I marvel at how Reagan passed what I think is still the largest tax increase in history in 1982 and yet was then and since lauded as the tax-cutting hero of the Republican Party. Now Trump, whose tariffs amount to one of the largest tax increases in recent times, and whose tax bill will cost middle and working class people a bundle, gets similar treatment when it comes to the actual destruction wrought by the morons "policies".
This is a great essay. So how come we're not reading it in the Times?
Upvoted for the shout-out to the late, great Walter Karp. “Liberty under siege” indeed.
James Bennet sent it back with a note in the margin: "Not enough Bothsiderism"
At the beginning of the revolution the vanguard knows ideology is mostly propaganda and the real important part is power. At the end of the revolution the only ones left are the true believers and the moral morons.
The last good Republicans were Lincoln and Seward. It’s all been downhill since.
While not as great as Lincoln, I would take Grant or Teddy Roosevelt over any Republican since.
For crying out loud, we're in a place where I'd love to have GHWB back. The only palatable Republican president of my lifetime out of six. That's a shit record.
(When I was a kid growing up in a deeeeep blue county, I would have made a case for Ford. But as an adult I see how his Nixon pardon set a frightening precedent for abuse of power. Which has me fairly nervous at this exact moment in US history, as I picture scenarios where Trump pardons everyone and Pence pardons Trump and Fox News joyously runs the headline EAT SHIT, AMERICA, WE WIN! And obviously, Ford should have seen at least some of this potential too, so, what a hack and a traitor.)
Also, Ford’s circle included some poisonous weeds—I’m looking at you, Cheney and Rumsfeld, but there were others—that overran the garden during the reign of the Crawford Caligula (although, mind you, for all that Bush 43 was regarded as risibly inarticulate back in the day, compared to Trump, “is our children learning” sounds like the fucking Funeral Oration of Pericles).
Dirksen &co. were vital to getting the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts passed.
And undoing both should be credited to who?
None of them would have been allowed in the GOP of the Reagan era, onward. In 1964 even a few Republicans thought Goldwater’s conservatism was too radical for the country. Nowadays he’d be considered too moderate.
Well, back then a lot more conservatives thought laissez-faire-ism definitely anti-conservative, and properly so. Being anti-black was too big a lure, though, as was laissez-faire's promise to make rich people even more powerful than before.
The party of Lincoln actually died with Lincoln. (Note that I'm not so sure fighting the Civil War was in fact right.
I'm pretty sure it was. We would have fragmented further and what little credit democracy was getting would have vanished in an age of unifying nations.
…and slavery was too much damn fun—well, for some people, ones it made powerful—to die a natural death. (See also: capitalism, socialism, Statist communism,property,propriety, plurality, surety, security, say what?….)
If we'd let the Confederates go, they'd have been back for half of California and the entire Southwest.
…and if they'd followed-through on their noises about Cuba and Mexico, they would have had to become even less democratic than they planned, and probably would have ended up with a positively dictatorial federal government.
Do you think they would have stuck to the prohibition against the African slave trade on which Virgina insisted. My guess: no way…so war with Great Britain within ten years.
Reagan was the worst president until Bush Jr, who was the worst until Trump. Nixon totally sucked, too. Funny not funny how every Republican president since Eisenhower was more and more disastrous.
I like your old Hollywood v. wrestling metaphor. I've been describing it as Gilligan's Island v. Survivor. Of course, we knew Gilligan's was a fiction, but it took the writers' strike to reveal how fictional modern "reality" TV is. Trump voters didn't get the word, apparently, and thought that was a real board room with a real CEO, not a cheap set with a bankrupt grifter.
There is an Iran ex-hostage in my town. He refuses to accept that Reagan, Rockefeller and Kissinger prolonged his suffering for their benefit. He blames Carter. Also, the mess in Iraq is Obama's fault. Jeez, these people!
What does it say about Americans that one party succeeds when it nominates people with experience and education, while the other succeeds when it nominates people who fake experience and education? This is partly a reflection of the media, which won't explain the difference between the real world and The Real World, and so it appears the electorate in off-years can't tell the difference. There may be a story in there about cheating, too, where the GOP feels entitled to its 8 years of Presidency and pulls out all the stops to make it happen and the oligarchical media plays along for the sake of "fairness."
But the media has absorbed virtually the entire public sphere in this country. If Savannah and Hoda don't talk about it, nobody cares. The takeover is nowhere near as total as the oligarchical media would have you believe - both the popularity of M4A and Trump is evidence constant media disapproval isn't as effective as its sold. But this takeover of the public's mental space really needs a modern analysis, somewhere between Lasch, Baudrillard and McLuhan.
Lewis Lapham used to worry about this, but a lot of his commentary in the early 90s was just "The Republic is in danger!" from the usual suspects. And while he was right, we need more than that.
Preach it brother.
You really have to go back to the 1960s to find more than one or two isolated examples of responsible civic-minded Republicans. Due to more than 50 years of repeated hammering and gouging of the American economy, infrastructure and social systems by the GOP, the country is really tottering. This is why the 2020 General Election represents the last hope for saving what remains of the country. I'm hoping that there really is enough voters who realize that GOP's policies are only working for the wealthy and habitual grifters. I'm not sure there are enough, in fact, but I'm just barely hopeful.
The revelation that the release of the hostages was delayed to influence the election (which, really, is not exactly a shocking revelation at all) and the general positive response to it from the wingnuts has made me realize that it's possible to retroactively own the libs.
Good ol' Ronnie brought his CAMP wars to those of us growing some illegal herbs out here on the west coast. Fun stuff - the federal government was making war on us. I got it up close and personal once when I was sitting in a draw up in the coast range not far from my garden when a column of heavily armed soldiers and police came down from the ridge above. 20+ dudes with m-16's, shotguns and other bad looking stuff that is clearly intended to kill people. Fortunately, like all heavily armed Americans you could hear them from a fucking mile away. No wonder we got ambushed so often in Vietnam...
Anyway, I found a good hiding spot in some heavy brush and watched them go by - I left the area and never went back. Considered that lost garden just the Cost of Doing Business. That's why I'd always do three or four patches.
That's when I figured out that Republicans are fascists with a nice sounding name. Glad everyone else is finally catching up to that conclusion. Fuck every Republican, including the old grandmas and grandpas that keep voting fascist. I might not like the democrats sometimes (ok, a lot of the time), they're corporate toadies much of the time, but at least they're not murderous fascist pigs.
Well, that's it, isn't it? Democrats will kill you, but they're not actively looking for new ways to do it like the Republicans.
No, I think Reagan still has a halo in a lot of quarters.
I think the oil shocks and the rest of the world having rebuilt had most to do with an end to it being easier not to worry all the time, but also
0.) true fear of the Bolsheviki got a lot of the rich to at least pretend enough sympathy and solidarity with the rest of us to cut us a better deal, and
1.) I recall seeing that there was a Rand[?] report trying to answer 'Why did "the 'Sixties" happen?' and the answer was 'prosperity well-distributed enough that white people, at least, weren't afraid all the time'; my paranoid side _insists_ that the Secret Chiefs saw that and said 'Thought so! Well, we won't be having any of _that_ again, then.'.