You can doubt it all you like, but it is nevertheless a fact.
I love when modern Republicans ignore this and try to take credit for being in the party of Lincoln that freed the slaves.
The downward spiral started well before the Tea Party existed. And the change from living in DC was the result of structural changes in the way Congress is run (plus the need to raise ever more increasing amounts of cash for elections), not because of the TPers. The TPers certainly made things worse for the GOP, but in some ways they have “helped”, since they have often caused rifles in the GOP that prevented them from enacted some of their more destructive programs.
As for “libertarians” causing the problem (not your post, someone else’s), that’s pretty debatable. I say that as a libertarian-leaning guy who would vote Republican or Democrat in the past, but virtually never Republican now. I’m no huge fan of the Democrats, either, but I might as well be a registered, carrying member at this point because it’s almost impossible for me to imagine voting GOP anymore. Other than a few outliers, you basically get a choice between Crazy and Unbelievably Crazy.
The Republican decline started with the Civil Rights act and Nixon’s Southern Strategy. Racists in the South who would not become Republicans because of bitterness over the Civil War started voting Republican because they hated the Democrats now too but were always very conservative. Nixon used race as a wedge issue to bring them over. The second wave was Reagan in the 80s who slashed Taxes on the wealthy and made it legal to be paid in stock This was where the the corporatists became fully on board and money funneling upward became their defining policy initiative. The Bush 2 era fully pulled in the religious right to finalize the trifecta.
The reason they are so terrible now that they are in power is they have no interest in governing. Their party only wants to reduce taxes on the wealth and push income upwards. Nothing more, nothing less. The conservative movement sees this as the most stable form of government (a wealthy elite, a tiny middle class that does professional services and a large working poor that works to live and live to work). Every policy they hold is a means to this end.
I think it was David Brock, in the book “Blinded By The Right”, who floated the idea that back during the Cold War, we had a common enemy. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the GOP no longer had a bogeyman and decided that Democrats were now “the enemy”.
I personally blame Newt Gingrich, with his “Contract With America” and efforts to make words like “liberal” smear words, for much of the current state of GOP politics. And of course after being more or less irrelevant for many years he now finds himself again in a position of influence in the Trump WH.
I kinda think the emergence of the Tea Party has something to do with it. Their brand of never-compromise/death to bipartisanship, total war on liberals, the use of the term RINO to brand any Republican a coward, and the application of purity tests, suppressed any sane conservative schools of thought. Even during the W years, compromising and bi-partisan support for various legislation still existed. ISTM, the GOP strategy is to deny anything positive being accrued to the Democrats, blame the Democrats for everything that is wrong, and never admit a Republican could ever make a mistake or do wrong. All of that, and the non-stop fellating of the religions right, ensure they appeal to a large swath of the voting public motivated by social issues, base prejudices and fears, in many cases, to vote against their own good. Sadly, it worked.
The Crazies and Unbelievably Crazies are driving me crazy. Well, crazier I guess. There weren’t many repubs I could ever vote for, but at least here in the Northeast there used to be some. Now I have to hold my nose to vote and the stench on the GOP side is unbearable. As far as I can tell the Democrats are just going to copy the Republican extremist and obstructionist approach. Neither side has anything resembling a principle to run on any more. Not even a phony ‘only to get the votes’ type principle, they’re both full on into the ‘vote for me because the other side are minions of Satan’ strategy, which when successful turns into more legislation that is the quid for the quo of the bribes they take.
This, I’d say, is the heart of it. Obama tried to make things bipartisan and get the Republicans involved but they refused, to the point of Republican legislators suddenly denouncing legislation and programs they themselves had initiated just because Obama spoke out in support of same. The Affordable Care Act was essentially a Republican plan that Obama adopted, after which Republicans, including Mitt Romney who oversaw the parent plan in Massachusetts, turned against it.
Emphasis added. (Bold is not showing up well on my screen.)
This is why nothing works now. Because Republicans refuse to cooperate and compromise. Period. All the other conditions mentioned in the excellent posts just above were certainly true, but when Republicans (starting with the Tea Party and ending with McConnell) flat refused to do politics any more (politics being the “art of the possible,” which relies on quid pro quo) the situation quickly deteriorated into the nasty gridlock we have now. The fact that Republican legislators can ignore the current desecration of the White House is what astonishes me.
And this is the icing on the cake. One wonders if the Republicans would have dug their heels in quite so stubbornly if a white man had been elected instead of Obama. His being black AND well-educated sent the whole thing right over the edge.
This is the closest post to what I directly witnessed happening. I describe it in a slightly more Big Picture way, though. What Nixon started, and firmly persuaded the entire party to adopt, was the idea that they should lie to their own rank and file, and play coy games with semantics, in order to fool people into voting them into power. This was based on the basic plan, that one they were IN power, they could then do all the fabulous things, and make all the truly wonderful changes which they were sure would benefit EVERYONE, and ignore all the lies and fake promises they’d made in order to GET that power. The hope was, that once it was a Fait Acompli, that Americans across the nation would cheer unabashedly, and thank the GOP profusely for their deceptions.
What they didn’t figure in, was that when a plan like that doesn’t succeed entirely in the first five years, that the party itself gets transformed by the followers and the next generation of candidates who only joined BECAUSE of the lies, and the original “wonderful” plans all fall by the wayside.
The success of Trump’s campaigns, first for the nomination, and then for the Presidency, are proof of this. Think back. During the primaries, all the other Republicans who started out with a shot, played things the conservative basic way, saying the right things, and hoping to have the followers who had been fooled by Nixon, Bush, and Reagan, just vote for them blindly as they had for the last three decades. But Trump overtly blurted out the exact stream of paranoia-enhanced lies and conspiracy theories that the GOP had been using as FAKE campaign promises, only Trump made it clear that he would ACTUALLY do all that stuff. Since the party had by then been assembled almost entirely from people who were trained to be angry at liberals and Democrats, without checking to see if they were going to hurt themselves by voting against them, they rallied to Trump, and put him over the top.
In short, yes indeed, when I was young, the Republicans were for the most part, the party of conservative responsibility, who believed in finding optimum solutions to whatever problems faced America. But under the guidance of Nixon and Reagan and Bush, they turned themselves into the party of no, the party of Anti, and the party of inaction.
Hence the present situation, where there are as many disagreements WITHIN the party, as there are coming from the Democrats.
The Tea Party, back when it decided to go from being a “movement” to declaring itself to be a formal Political Party, demonstrated very clearly, the problem that the GOP now has, in that process that they went through. If you go back and look (if you can’t recall directly), you’ll see that the Tea Party had built it’s energy and following almost entirely on people being angry about things, and blaming the other two parties for them. Mostly the Democrats, but both parties. Inevitably, when they sent their delegates to Washington to formally establish a platform and declare the Tea Party to exist, they discovered that they actually ONLY all agreed that they were angry. They didn’t agree at all, about what to do INSTEAD of what the other two parties were doing. So they ended up with a platform that is mostly about what they were NOT going to do, and what they were going to oppose.
Which is why they were a match made in heaven for what the GOP had done to itself. Hence the alliance.
You’re correct to the extent that the ACA provides improved “access” to healthcare by ensuring that insurance companies cannot discriminate against pre-existing conditions, or limit/cap coverage based on catastrophic illness.
What the GOP bill is designed to do is to essentially strip out those provisions and add insult to injury by defunding Medicaid to the tune of $800B+. Thus destroying people’s ability to have access to healthcare.
Now you tell me, is the GOP interested in improving healthcare?
And stop all this bullshit of “not likely to pass”. Just because they failed to hurt millions of people doesn’t make them innocent of attempting to do exactly that.
I have a family member who had no insurance for five years. The ACA expanded Medicaid and she had health insurance again. Yes, the ACA provided healthcare. Anything else is being pedantic.
I just read this and it blew my mind. Read, reread, and ponder the two underlined statements.
What we see today in the Republican party is the predictable outcome of Republican ideology.
In fact, the Republicans should never be allowed to drive the bus. They can be advisors, correctors, even navigators, but look what happens when they take the steering wheel into their own hands! Even THEY don’t know how the fuck to get the car back on the road!
The truly shocking part to me is the utter failure of the Democrats to consistently make their case to the American people that they are the party that better supports their interests.
Obamacare is very popular and is succeeding, with millions of formerly uninsured people now insured. . The Republicans want to repeal it (and now, not even replace it), which would result in an immediate rate hike of about 25%, and would put tens of millions of Americans out of the insurance market. Ergo, the Republicans are destroying healthcare.
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Nixon didn’t have to invent the Southern strategy. The fish-brained racist scum had long since abandoned the Democratic party and only the racist-but-unwilling-to-be-openly-so voters were left hanging. Nixon’s “silent majority” and Goldwater’s “In your heart, you know he’s right” slogans appealed perfectly to these bigoted cowards. From then on, attacks on public education and economic equality and social stability steadily fattened the wealthy Republican donor class and fed lower class white resentment: so far, the only winning combination they’ve managed.
However, it’s not as if the GOP was always this bad.
This is indeed a mystery. 
Parties used to have wings: liberal, moderate, and conservative. The Republicans had northeast Progressives and isolationist midwesterners. The Democrats had northern workers and Southern racists. That went all the way from the federal to the city level. Conservatism flourished in both parties and was a hate anchor on both of them and on the country.
Starting in the 1950s, the conservatives pushed the liberal wing out of the Republican Party and Civil Rights pushed the conservatives out of the Democratic Party. The Republicans could have rejected and marginalized them. They didn’t. They embraced them. It took a generation but eventually the Solid South went from solidly Democrat to solidly Republican. Party elites used the voting power that gave them to push out the moderates, so that the entire Republican party had wings of conservative, extreme conservative, and crazy conservative.
Parties with wings have incentives both to appeal broadly to all their members and to work with the wings of the other party. That no longer can happen. The parties barely overlap at any point. Where you live, down to the neighborhood level, is the best determinant of your politics. If you live in racially, ethnically, or otherwise heterogenous neighborhoods you are very likely to be liberal. If all you see around you is white faces you are very likely to be conservative. People have always voted for their neighborhoods (“All politics is local”: Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill). Now white, rural, lower-income, heavily Protestant neighborhoods have the edge of power and vote their interests. Most demographers say this will change over the next couple of decades, though.
So the answer to the OP is hell, yes. The conservatives were a force for evil throughout my entire lifetime. Today conservatism is a term swappable for Republican. Republicans literally made war against the rest of American starting with Nixon. (When you have an “enemies list” you are at war.) Reagan was worse. Bush 2 was called the worst modern president of them all, although I’ll always have a sentimental attraction to keep the name for Nixon. Yet we are now way past them. The GOP are this bad because their voters are this bad. They are the acne on the fact of America and need to be popped.
Was the GOP always “this bad”? Well, the Great Emancipator had his moments! 
Full disclosure, I am extremely liberal. To respond, I don’t think you need to contend the Dems have no problems - of course they do. And I think a response can admit some degree of hyperbole in the OP.
My biggest problem w/ the current GOP is that I don’t understand what they stand for, that isn’t - um - problematic in one way or another.
Republicans used to stand for a few things: fiscal conservatism; small government; a strong military. Also, generally resisting change on various social issues such as school prayer, abortion, gun control, affirmative action, etc.
For some time, I haven’t seen the attempts at fiscal conservatism or small government. Reagan and every Republican president/Congress since has spent as freely as the most spendthrift Dem. Yet they keep claiming they advocate reduced spending. To me, likely the biggest ongoing lie in politics.
Repubs support some reductions of regulators, but also advocated the creation of the DHS, and the Privacy Act, which increases government intrusions on businesses/individuals. And they favor increased law enforcement, and government interference in a woman’s body. So I don’t see how anyone would believe that the GOP supports a smaller government.
I guess they still support very high military spending.
But most of what is left, seems to be social issues. Religion, abortion, gun control, increased incarceration, opposition to gay rights… I think some degree of opposition to civil rights runs through many of these positions. It is fine for a politician/party to take a position on such issues, but IMO those really have limited importance in terms of governing the country.
I suspect another thread for the GOP is state’s rights. For most liberals - and past Congresses - it was felt that expanded federal action was needed because certain states were not adequately protecting their own citizens. And it appears to many liberals that the states’ rights argument veils a desire to disadvantage certain groups/classes.
Repubs often urge reliance upon market forces. Many people feel that there are some functions of government that are not well directed by market forces. And the market generally best serves the wealthiest/most capable. I don’t know what safety net/assistance we ought to afford our least able citizens, but much of the GOP position seems to - um - horribly heartless. Many Dem programs may be financially suspect, but at least they don’t seem to further harm our poorest/weakest elements. I think a legitimate function of government is to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority.
Finally, someone else suggested the strong streak of libertarianism underlying the Repubs. Which I think is true. I also note, however, my opinion that libertarianism only works well if you are comparably capable, healthy, and wealthy.
To a nonbeliever, it appears as though a significant streak of selfishness by those most advantaged underlies much of Repub policy. And the elements of racism, sexism, and intolerance seem pretty hard to deny. I’m not for a second saying the Dems have a wonderful platform for responsibly governing, but at least Dem efforts/policies seem to acknowledge EVERYONE, not just whites and wealthy people/organizations.
My gut feeling is that more Repubs are single-issue voters than Dems, but I may be wrong. And my impression is that the GOP is more beholden to the radical right, than the Dems are to the left. Case in point, ACA falls far short of single-payer, and is largely a sop to the insurance/drug companies. And my personal criticism of Obama was that he was not liberal ENOUGH!
Final point - I doubt many Repub voters actually believe/desire what we see in DC. Instead, they are in the same position of liberals, of voting for whomever is CLOSEST to their beliefs.
On what planet did all of this happen? Sure wasn’t here on Earth.
Let’s just take your first item: destruction of healthcare. That was cause by the implementation of Obamacare, which was a purely liberal action.
Got any other good jokes?