Most of us have heard most of what they’re saying.
Having two political parties isn’t inherently, or doesn’t automatically have to be, the problem (though I would prefer more viable parties).
Everything really did get dramatically worse when Newt Gingrich brazenly announced that the other side wasn’t a group of colleagues to be negotiated with and have dinner and drinks with; they were enemies to be treated as enemies, stopped at every opportunity, and crushed whenever possible. They were to be painted as evil and an existential threat to all that we hold sacred and the lives of ourselves and our children.
They do that through horrid straw man arguments, outright lies, and dramatic, hyperbolic exaggerations of the other side’s positions. Because their audience lives in a nearly perfect information silo, they are vulnerable to this kind of misinformation and demagoguery. They literally don’t know any better.
They take fearful people, make them ever more afraid, and then give them a laundry list of Bad Things That Democrats Do, and make them thoroughly terrified. And they’re totally made up.
Then, they send their candidate out to say, “I, alone, can fix it.”
It was a very long run of political Mutually Assured Destruction before that, but Newt … went nuclear when nobody else really had.
He’s still doing it today, and his followers have taken pages straight out of his playbook.
I’ve been a registered Independent for decades, but today’s Republican party is simply disgusting.