Degree or Kind?

The BBQ Pit
1

I’m in the minority here, perhaps a minority of one or two, but I find Trump, Trumpism, MAGA, and all that truly reprehensible shit, label it as you will, to differ from the standard GOP line of BS that I grew up oppressed by only in degree, not in kind.

There is, I will freely admit, a huge chasm between, say, George W. Bush and Trump. Trump is a thousand times more dangerous, more disturbed, and more despicable in general than W. was on his worst day BUT:

It’s the same brand of bullshit. Cruel to people who are different from yourself, kowtowing to the interests of the wealthy and the uber-wealthy, uncomprehending and disdainful of science, blindly respectful of religious dogma (as long as it’s your religion), and mainly and most of all, utterly reliant on the votes of the bigots, morons, despisers of democracy, 2nd Amendment fanatics, homophobes, anti-intellectuals, America Firsters, and anti-choice extremists who comprise MAGA today.

I used to make fun of W. for his problems expressing himself in the English language, for his laziness in mastering complicated concepts, for his Good Ol’ Boy Don’t Know Nothin’ act that charmed his supporters, for his reliance on his aides to articulate his policies—but these are all traits I find in Trump today. Not nearly so extreme, but that’s my point. W. was a dummy whose blatant lack of qualifications for the Presidency could look presidential only in comparison to Trump.

And W. was just a dumber, less eloquent version of his father, who was only a less smooth version of Reagan, who was only a more genial version of Nixon. It’s all the same shit, as far as I’m concerned, but I hear many ex-GOPers denouncing Trump without the slightest understanding that he’s merely an exaggerated version of all the reprehensible politicians they’ve cheerfully and smugly supported for decades. It took a Trump to clarify what the GOP (and its supporters) stood for, as long I’ve been around. (I was conceived under Harry Truman.) The difference is purely in degree of reprehensibility but it’s all of a piece.

[Why the Pit? I figured this might get classified as a rant, rather than a true political inquiry, so I decided to put it here to save the mods time and effort, but I actually think this question, “Degree or Kind?”, belongs in Great Debates or, failing that, in “Politics and Elections,” so if any mod wishes to move it there, you won’t get a word of disagreement from me.]

2

I’m trying to figure out if there is an actual question in your post.

I will answer the “same brand of bullshit” above. It’s not. Trump REALLY turned up the racism and bigotry. Giving racists and bigots a way to… sound their voices. And Trump managed to turn the volume up to 11.

A huge part of Trump is “Blame everyone else” That’s the whole approach. Fixing it is hard work. So blame someone else.

3

Agreed. This is an effort by the so called conservatives to undermine the concept of democracy going back perhaps to the formation of our country before the Republican party even existed… They are the people who hate democracy because sometimes the outcome is not to their liking. Up high in that regard is the problem they have with others who are allowed to vote and benefit from freedom just like the good kind of people.

4

I’m a progressive Democrat, and I always have been. I’m old enough to remember the Kennedy/Nixon TV debate. During all these years I have disagreed with Republicans on many things, but I didn’t hate them, and I don’t think they hated me. It wasn’t personal, it was a disagreement about policy, and even wen Reagan or Bush was in office I wasn’t worried about anything illegal happening in the White House, Nixon notwithstanding, or the possibility of a preemptive nuclear strike. I thought the previous presidents were sane and had surrounded themselves with sane people to help them make the best decisions possible, especially under difficult circumstances.

What’s different with Trump is his divisive rhetoric and continual lying. He has no regard for the truth, and feels anyone who disagrees with him is an idiot and traitor to be dealt with harshly. While I didn’t agree Republicans in the past, I truly hate Trump and all his MAGA followers for all the reasons any sane person would, and the fact that there is a even chance that Trump, after saying all the hateful lies he has said, has a real chance to become president again tells me how screwed up this country really is. He alone has unleashed such hatred and bigotry that we have never seen before.

I have studied history, and the current period in the US is eerily reminiscent of 1930’s Germany, and that’s solely because of who Trump is.

5

There is one major difference that I see - education.
Growing up in the 70s and 80s, Republicans held free public education as one of the greatest American inventions ever. It was the great equalizer. You chose what to do with your education after you graduated whether man, woman, white, black, brown, &c. No “equality” measures needed. We now know that that thinking is flawed but at least we did our best to ensure everyone had the best K-12 education at no cost.

Then it drifted into wanting public funding for our extreme indoctrination. That has led to public funding of charter schools and voucher systems. It’s still public funding of students but outside of the public control through school boards.

But now MAGA is the anti-education sect. The actively are trying to destroy the public school systems in this country. Teachers are the great enemy (battle cry of totalitarian regimes. coincidence, right?) and public education should not be the place for discourse or developing skill for questioning views and policies (see above. coincidence, right?). SCOTUS has ruled that free public education is not a guarantied right, but if it is offered by the state it is a right for every child and every state and the federal government provides it. I am shocked that some red states (let’s be honest, I’m talking about Florida) has not tried to reduce or even eliminate public education.

6

Trump might have a glimmer of a spark of an idea that the only way to stay of of prison, is to win. His lawyers, while incapable may have been able to get that through his scull.

But mostly, he want’s to stay in the spotlight. “ME, ME, ME” I think that’s how he was raised.

So becoming President solves all of that (for the most part). And it seems that he has SCOTUS in his pocket. But that’s another issue. They may decide that they are tired of that idiot. I wouldn’t count on it though.

7

It’s not really that big a leap conceptually from Willie Horton or Swift Boat to Trump’s current playbook. It is mostly a matter of magnitude.

8

“Welfare queens”, the opposition to LBJ’s Great Society, hell the opposition to the fucking New Deal.

There’s a convenient blind spot we’ve allowed ourselves to have. Like Germans in 1946 lamenting the terrible thing that Hitler did to the German people. Problem is, there wouldn’t have been a Hitler, or a Trump, if there wasn’t a populace eager to have someone to lead them to ‘’‘glory’‘’.

9

One theory I’ve contemplated—though I haven’t decided how much I accept it—is that the Republican Party has long had a Dark Side. McCarthyism, for example, was a manifestation of the GOP’s dark side, but it was seen, at least in retrospect, to be something of an aberration. What’s different about the Trump era is the degree to with the Dark Side has taken over the party.

10

Longtime GOP media strategist Stuart Stevens agrees with you. I just finished his book, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

11

Nothing but agreement from me. The republican party has always, in my lifetime, been pretty dark.

12

Both sides have had their crazies, but Trump realized you could skip the responsibility, governance, and warmed over libertarianism, and just serve red meat. Practical moderates used to hold the reins in the GOP. Gingrich weakened that in a big way; Trump finished them off. But Goldwater’s campaign was animated by the crazy. When Nelson Rockefeller proposed a resolution at the 1964 GOP convention to denounce extremism from both sides -Communist and John Birch - he was angrily voted down. That commenced the GOP’s decline, but there’s a lot of ruin in a party.

By the time 2016 rolled around, within-party Never Trumpers were of minuscule proportion. As Stuart Stevens asked, how could almost all Republicans disavow their longstanding principles overnight? The question answers itself: the GOP of 2016 never had any principles to begin with. It was all a lie.

I do believe that there is a bright line between 2016 and what came earlier, the obstruction of Mitch McConnell notwithstanding. Tom Nichols reminds us of the policy collapse:

In the Before Times, we still argued over politics instead of whether communist Muslims had taken over our Venezuelan voting machines with help from the Italian space program. I felt like it was safe to throw elbows and do some partisan high-sticking; I believed that we were all in a giant bouncy house called the Constitution, a place where we might bump skulls or sprain an ankle now and then but where there were no sharp edges and there were only soft landings.

I don’t believe that anymore.

13

I do think that Trump does represent a difference in kind. Not so much in his agenda, but in his tactics. The main thing that Trump did was to elevate the conspiracy minded right wing entertainment media to the front of political discourse. While at the same time throwing out an necessity for a fabrication to have any basis in reality.

Pre-Trump there would be shadings and spin of facts to fit an agenda but by and large the left and the right lived in the same reality. The swift boaters at the very least acknowledged some aspects of the story of Kerry’s military service. They don’t just say that Kerry never went to Vietnam, or was a spy of the Vietcong. And rather than amplified Bush the attacks were (at least officially) criticized by Bush. Also pre-Trump I can’t find any Republican elected to national office who supported Birtherism.

Now one might argue that the rising tide of conspiracy minded right wing media made in inevitable that eventually it would take over, and reach prime-time, but Trump was the first to catch the wave, and rather than dabble tentatively with the idea of giving voice to conspiracy, plunged in full force on day one.

14

I don’t think Bush Jr. and Trump are cut of the same cloth, although they were both incompetent.

Pre-Trump, Republicans, including Bush, were at least fairly consistent. For instance, even as recently as 2014, many Republicans denounced Russia’s actions against Ukraine (Crimea) and you could count on Republicans to be on the same page as Democrats when it was an issue that benefited Republicans. Had Covid happened during Bush’s presidency, I have no doubt he would have told people to mask up, get vaccinated, do social distancing, etc.

Nowadays, it’s all about “own the libs.” Whatever the libs do, we will do the opposite - even if it’s something that would benefit us. I have no doubt that if Democrats had opposed Ukraine, for instance (the 2022 invasion,) that Trump Republicans would be sending lots of aid to Ukraine just to own the libs. If Democrats had told everyone to ignore Covid measures, Republicans would be telling everyone to mask up and get vaccinated - just to own the libs.

It’s literally nothing but “What the libs support, we will oppose.” To the point where I sometimes seriously wonder if Trumpers would support abortion if Democrats started opposing abortion.

15

For all of GWB’s faults he would never have said this, would have been horrified at the very idea of using Presidential powers to do this:

To paraphrase P.J. O’Rourke
Bush was wrong about absolutely everything, but wrong within normal parameters.

16

Did you look at my title? :smile:

At some point, the GOP changed. I think what changed was the concept of “shame,” specifically “shame at being caught in a blatant lie,” and I’d put it at around the era of Pat Buchanan working for Nixon, gaining strength with Gingrich, but not fully flowering until Trump. The great realization was that the GOP base simply did not care about lying–in fact, Trump realized, lies often gained you support, rather than losing you support. At worst, being caught in a lie–or many, many lies–was a wash. After this truth came to light, the GOP understood they could spout literal nonsense, gibberish, ridiculous slanderous fairy tales, and they wouldn’t lose a single vote, and very likely gain some, changing the whole game from that point forward.

17

Sure. Degree or Kind? Does have a question mark. But it’s pretty unclear for a title to a thread.

18

I mean, Nixon was a habitual liar. I once, paraphrasing W. H. Auden, referred to him as “a low dishonest dickhead,” but finally he had enough of a sense of shame at being caught in a lie to resign the Presidency, which is a crucial difference between him and Trump, who was caught in many more lies, and even more horrific lies than Nixon was. The past few days, since I wrote my initial post, have underscored this point: Trump is now repeating his gibberish in several venues, each time making less syntactic and logical sense than the time before, and each time his defenders angrily and self-righteously claim that he is making perfect, brilliant, world-class sense instead of what GOP defenders, at their worst, would have done in the past, which is to parse out bits of sense (because there would have been some) or admit their champion was having a bad day. But Trump has never in his life had a bad minute, according to his cult’s spokespersons, so all they can do is double-down on his falsehoods. This doesn’t bode well for the future of political discourse in this country.

19

I think it was less shame than being told that Congress had the votes to both impeach him and convict him in the Senate.