So when exactly did the Republican party start becoming "insane"?

The BBQ Pit
1

(Mods, please change title to “Republican”, durrr)

I’m a political moderate and independent who would easily consider voting Republican for the right qualified candidate. In my lifetime however, the Republican party has drifted not just rightward, but also in an increasingly loonier direction. I’m not referring to anything related to, for example, guns, defense, or abortion. These are difficult questions with intelligent people on both sides.

No, I’m talking about

  1. Spending an exorbitant amount of time and public money on brinksmanship, character assassination, and political theater.
  2. A philosophical platform centered more around how to defeat the Democrats and roll back their accomplishments than a plan for the direction of the country.
  3. A disturbing anti-intellectual streak.
  4. And of course, the candidate who publicly demands a wall at the southern border paid for by Mexico has the overwhelming lead in the polls.

When did this start and what caused it? I’m not satisfied to blame this on the election of Obama and the tea-party takeover - the trend started well before.
Will this eventually lead to alienating the growing young and minority voting groups and the implosion of the party? How could the results either way of the 2016 election effect this trend?

2

Hard to pinpoint exactly, but I’d say it started about 1980. The rise of NCPAC, of character assassination, of innuendo and outright lies, the time when the Republican platform consisted mainly of “defeat the opposition” rather than offering a serious plan for governing. And of course the time the R’s first crawled into bed with the religious right, which had been using these tactics for years but until then mostly just preaching to the choir… The Republican establishment offered them the chance for a national audience.

Reagan, of course played a large role with his divisive attacks on unions, academics, the underclasses (coded racism) the natural environment and “liberals”.

3

As I recollect and per my experience, the Republicans seemed to think the White House was going to be theirs in perpetuity after the election of Ronald Reagan and went batshit insane when Bill Clinton got elected and they haven’t recuperated since then.

They won the Presidency by huge huge margins in the Nixon days. Then Nixon got caught doing the Watergate thing and Carter was elected and the Republicans didn’t seem terribly surprised.

Then Reagan beat Carter in a blowout, beat Mondale in a bigger blowout, and furthermore took Congress from Democratic hands. “Liberal” became a dirty word; pundits were daying the Democratic party had lost its bearings and that its ideas were moribund. The religious right rose to power during this era as did the Goldwater-revival conservatives. By the time George HW Bush mopped the floor with Dukakis, they were strutting around acting like the government was gonna be theirs for the next millennium or so.

Subsequent history has been a real disappointment to the Republicans and they have not been very good sports about it.

4

The mystery is how they think that drifting ever-farther rightward into batshit-crazy territory is going to help them. It seems to get worse every election cycle. ISTM that right now the battle between liberals and conservatives is playing out internally within the Democratic Party, while the Republicans are busy trying to choose between a megalomaniac demagogue and an idiot savant.

5

Bush Sr. would have won by a considerable margin had it not been for H. Ross Perot who took a large number of conservative votes. Clinton won by default.

6

Building on AHunter3’s response, Clinton’s election played a big factor in the rise of right-wing talk radio, when there were all these talk show hosts trying to out-Limbaugh Rush Limbaugh for ratings.

I remember talk radio often being cited as a factor in the '94 GOP landslide. Here’s a NYT piece from just after the election, note the phrase said about Gingrich: “Conservative talk radio will go after him if he starts to sound like a moderate.” Then Fox News came along…

7

Yeah, the creation of the right wing Media Industrial Complex pays a big role in this. You have right wing media, and they attract right wing listeners. And to keep their right wing listeners, you keep telling them that all other media is biased, you should get your news and opinions only from right wing media. There’s a positive feedback ratchet where you sell your audience fear and loathing, which creates a fearful audience, which demands more right wing media, which ups the stakes for even more extreme fear and loathing. It sells politics as identity. You are a right winger, which means you only listen to certain radio stations, only watch certain TV stations, only buy certain products, and don’t believe in what those scientists claim.

And it’s a one-way ratchet, because it doesn’t matter what the other side says or does, it’s all lies and can be dismissed out of hand. It doesn’t matter what Obama’s actual policies or opinions are, because even if he says one thing you can’t believe him, he’s just lying so he can destroy America. And you have people radically skeptical of any sort of authority–except the authority broadcast on Fox News. Those guys you can trust. And you know you can trust them because they agree with you and say all the things you believe. Nevermind that you believe those things because you’ve been told to believe them.

8

What is “insane” is subject to the prevailing attitude of the time.

In the 1940s, there were many Americans in favor of Operation Meetinghouse, the firebombing of Tokyo that burned tens of thousands of Japanese people to death. Today that sort of military approach would be considered a war crime.

So, who or what was really insane? The action/policy? The people? Or both?

9

My background includes social studies, history and technology. So IMHO, until I get someday to teach for real, I think one very important sign of the change took place in 1995.

http://io9.com/a-key-reason-why-u-s-politicians-dont-understand-scien-1575132934

I remember that Newt said later that suddenly he noticed how they could find experts that contradicted the mainstream, and from then on the Lysenkos of the world have their ears.

AFAIK Neil Degrease Tyson is an independent but had a soft spot for the Republicans because they were able to fund science even with all that pandering to insane ideas. No more.

10

Things like that, or slavery, institutionalized racism, the use of nuclear weapons against Japan, the unconstitutional internment of Japanese-Americans during WW II, and many other things that (hopefully) wouldn’t happen today, are indeed examples of the prevailing attitudes of the time.

But that’s not what we mean when we speak of candidates, parties, or their policies being “insane”. It tends to mean either (a) being dramatically out of step with contemporary prevailing values, or (b) simply being counter-factual – i.e.- complete nonsense.

Examples of (a) might be promoting anti-Hispanic racism and advocating the mass deportation of Mexicans, promoting mass Islamophobia, banning the immigration of refugees, or advocating policies that reduce access to health care for children and the needy, and examples of (b) might be advocating an equivalence in teaching of creationism and evolution, or an equivalence between anthropogenic climate change vs. the view that the climate is in God’s hands and all is good.

11

My pet theory traces it to the 1970’s:

Watergate drove away a great number of those who would have been the next generation of principled Republicans. The sort of pol, and the sort of voter, who were generally in favor of corruption, blatant lies, and abuse of power remained–and they set the new tone in the party.

Reaching out to “white, socially conservative evangelicals” was supposed to help their numbers, but that eventually meant not only appealing to, but recruiting from, some kind of wacky people. Conspiracy theorists, racists, Pat Robertson fans, and so forth.

Nixon already had influential Church-of-Christ,-Scientist types in his administration. In the wider secular culture, they became villains. In GOP-oriented circles, they became some of the martyrs of the persecution of the conservative “good guys” in Watergate. Fundamentalist churches spent twenty years handing out books by Chuck Colson and comic books by Al Hartley. Eventually, they had a religious movement of vaguely Nixonoid “holy warriors” who would stand up for an unrestrained executive and for Nixonian lawless authority against those eeevil libruls.

I’m less certain about this next part, but I suspect it’s part of the story. The worldview became flavored by “Christian Scientist” idealism, as follows:
[ol]
[li]Reality to a “Christian Scientist” is essentially subservient to Mind.[/li][li]Therefore, a non-teleological universe, as in Gouldian evolution, is horrifying and nigh-unimaginable.[/li][li]Therefore, unintended consequences (like AGW) cannot be believed to exist.[/li][li]And Magical Thinking is assumed on some level to work, just like praying away disease. (The only people who get sick are those to want to be sick, or something.)[/li][li]And of course Socialized Medicine is just as offensive to a “Christian Scientist” as public funding of abortions is to a Catholic.[/li][/ol]
Now, it’s not just Christian Scientists. Racists get their nods in policy platforms, Catholics get to see public schools defunded, Baptists get lip service to the idea of prayer in schools (or vouchers for their own sectarian schools), and presumably some proportion of evangelicals are voting for a belief in weird *anti-government *conspiracy theories.

The fact that this involves playing to a bunch of wacky religious biases that are historically arrayed against each other, and encourages balkanization, doesn’t seem to stop it. On the contrary, the GOP is essentially using its constituents hatred of each other–of other GOP voters of the wrong faith–to keep the persecution complex going.

All in a “Nixon was right” culture. :confused:

But, you know, I may be making all that up. I sound like a character in* Illuminatus!*

12

1964

The Democrats coined the response jibe “In your guts, you know he’s nuts.” And people nodded in agreement.

The GOP had had some real doofuses: Borah, Vandeberg, Robert Taft, Everett Dirksen. Even some bastards like Joe Mcarthy. But 1964 was when they started baying at the moon.

13

I think that major political parties tend to have phase-shifted cycles of craziness, and I’d agree that the right started moving into one in the 1980s when the left started pulling back from one.

Nowadays we tend to forget (especially those of y’all who didn’t live through any of it) just how seriously scary the Left struck many people as being, up to the late 1970’s or so. There was the Weather Underground actually bombing and kidnapping people after issuing a formal declaration of “war” against the US government, for instance.

Yeah, they were pretty much marginal loons, but they were leftist marginal loons, and the naturally directed pushback against them came from the right. Same for other factions of the SDS as well as the Black Panthers and even the dreaded “Women’s Lib”. Some very vocal extremists were pushing positions that really did resemble mirror images of modern right-wing nutbaggery such as Christian Dominionism, anti-government militias, etc.

In the late Carter years much of the left-wing extremism either got overtaken by the political center to become part of the “new normal” (e.g., near-universal coeducation/integration and bans on race and gender discrimination in employee hiring, etc.), or disintegrated into schismatic chaos and ultimately jail and/or death for many of its proponents.

I agree that this kind of insane dysfunctional extremism never got anywhere near as high up the hierarchy of official Democratic politics in the counterculture era as its modern counterpart has reached in the mainstream of the Republican party. That, I think, is due more to the technological and social fragmentation of news media nowadays than anything else.

Hmm, or maybe not? Conservative extreme wingnuttery has operated in a top-down format before this, e.g., in the McCarthy era. Maybe there’s some structural reason why cycles of crazitude get co-opted at higher levels of power and authority in Republican politics more readily than they do among Democrats. I dunno.

14

The mainstreaming of the internet led to those email forwards where you could send some bogus horseshit to a hundred people who tended to pass it along as if it were true. I’m sure there were left leaning ones but I don’t recall anybody sending me any. I did get a gazillion right leaning ones. Now Facebook has taken over that area.

15

Since most of you are part of the insane left, normal Republicans look crazy. Plus with regards to positions for the insane left. They teach at universities in the non-STEM fields.

16

I would disagree that this was symptomatic of political “cycles”. It was a confluence of three dramatic social factors all happening at once: the baby-boomer wave coming of age, the horrors of the Viet Nam war that were not just a national disgrace but threatened their very lives, driving a wedge between the privileged and the drafted, and the ongoing stresses of racism and desegregation. In a span of just a few years, JFK, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy were all assassinated, students at Kent State were shot in cold blood, cities burned, the White House was surrounded by bumper-to-bumper city buses as an emergency barricade, and the nation was literally on the brink of civil war. Those were not ordinary times, but the worst that the official left managed to do was nominate George McGovern for president. Everything else was grassroots turmoil. Today, the idiocy of the right comes top-down (look at the current crop of Republican presidential candidates) and is inflamed by the shameless propagandizing of right-wing media.

I have no problem with thoughtful conservatives bringing intelligent points of view, and I might even agree with them, or I might not, but still appreciate their arguments. I do have a problem with raving lunatics like Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachmann as Republican candidates in the last election, or The Donald or Ben “grain silos” Carson in the present one.

17

Ike hated McCarthy. He had to throw a bone to the right wing, so he made Nixon his VP candidate based on Nixon’s success against Alger Hiss. Ike then was ready for Nixon to quit the race over unethical contributions, no matter the discredit it brought the overall campaign. But Nixon pulled off the Checkers speech, which had Ike biting nails. Though he had to keep him, he always treated Nixon like an idiot stepchild.

18

Piffle, it is clear that you are not aware of Kerry Emmanuel, Barry Bickmore, James Hansen, Richard Alley. Scientists that were republican or but they are nowadays mostly independents as they have become subject of a lot of hate, from the truly insane right.

Unfortunately a lot of that insane right was allowed into positions of power. The sane republicans that are not in power know what is at stake.

http://www.citizensclimatelobby-mn.org/CarbonTaxSupporters_RepublicanEconomicAdvisors.htm

But many that could make a difference are kept out of power thanks to powerful groups that are supporting what were the fringes until recently.

19

let’s not let the door hit them in the rear. as they go extinct.

20

This is probably not true.

Cite.

Cite.

Cite.