I have some wild-ass guesses. Here’s a rough sequence of events:
A. Watergate’s aftermath
The GOP became “the other party” after the success of FDR. It was probably a little more desperate than the Dems even in the 1940-1970 period.
Watergate gave it a real blow to recruitment. Nixon’s staff were the top of mainstream Republican Party politicians, and they were seen as corrupt. That it could recover at all should surprise us, and how it recovered from that gets us to today.
It really has very little to do with Reagan, despite his press. It has to do with the younger generation that became active in the party post-Watergate, and where they have steered it as more and more of the old guard have died off.
B. A culture of not caring enough about truth even enough to fix one’s own misconceptions
I think this younger generation following Nixon were more tolerant of massive corruption, possibly of obscurantism as well, and fed a culture of bald-faced lying without caring about the truth. Not a new thing; Orwell wrote about a form of it. But I think this contributed to the later problems.
Those who followed them have sometimes taken this and run with it. Some actively profess to believe things they know are bunk because, “it sells;” others feel free to say ignorant things they actually believe to continue to believe them because they are taught that truth, falsifiability, and reason simply don’t matter. Obscurantism does not serve a democracy well; the populace is encourage to stay ignorant and to vote stupidly. Thus democracy does not serve an obscurantist state’s needs either.
C. Meanwhile, economics lost touch with reality.
I was just reading this opinion piece: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/05/economics-in-the-crisis/
If Krugman is correct about the attitudes of “freshwater economists” favoring elegant models over empiricism and mocking those who bring in new evidence, then that means a lot of economists are becoming anti-scientific in a key way. If observation doesn’t matter to them, well, that feeds back to the political culture.
D. Gingrich (post-Perot) unified the party as a lockstep caucus.
In 1994, Newt Gingrich pushed through internal party caucus reforms that privileged personal experience less and the agreement of the caucus more. Want that committee chair, old man? Suck up to the younglings junior to you. Oh, and see point B; they don’t care about truth. But they do care about sectarian and ideological loyalty. Any new Congressman is stuck with that paradigm from Day One.
And on the state level, term limits demolish the advantage of personal experience. If the whole class comes in at once, who gets the assignments? The one who goes along with the party. So dissent is punished.
E. In 2004, W Bush was re-elected.
Electing Bush once was not so strange. What’s scary is him being re-elected, not only after trashing the Geneva Accords without being impeached, but after starting a second war while cutting taxes and thus running massive deficits. This proved that the masses Just Didn’t Care and politicians didn’t need to be lawful or even make sense.
The economic policies of the Republican party favor a minority of the population, but without a majority of the voters (more-or-less) they can’t get elected. Reagan was brilliant at using supply-side economics to convince non-rich people that money would “trickle down” to them from the rich, if only the rich weren’t taxed so heavily. There’s some truth to that, but the practice it hasn’t lived up to its promise. Other ways to attract voters are through appeals to religion and xenophobia. These attract the kind of social conservatives the OP describes as daft. Not all Republicans are like this, but without them, they wouldn’t have a viable party.
Some of the factors you’ve described have always been around.
Gingrich didn’t invent the lock-step principle; he just revived it somewhat. That used to be standard procedure. The party elders ran things and the juniors did what they were told and waited for their turn. This system weakened in the sixties and seventies when changes in election procedures gave politicians more independence from party control, which made it possible for a politician to defy his party line and still successfully run for office.
And lying goes all the way back. Sure, Nixon lied to everyone. But so did Johnson and FDR - lying isn’t a partisan issue. The big difference is the people who were lying used to know they were lying.
What’s happened with conservatives is that they’ve been lying to themselves. It started with people like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove telling lies about how they shared their values to the conservative base. The first stage of this was people like Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney, who were just cynically using these lies to gain power - they didn’t actually believe the stuff they were saying. But now we’re seeing the second stage: people like Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann, who rose up through the system being fed all these lies, believed they were true, and now want to take charge so they can do all the stuff they believe in.
At this point the data show that the net effect of “supply-side” economics was the opposite of advertised. Not so much “some truth” as “wrong direction.” And it’s those who still believe in it, along with the anti-environmentalist brigades, I consider particularly foolish. I find xenophobes & some other cultural conservatives offensive. But the “daftness” is largely in wearing massive blinders on economics in the last twenty years.
Well, OK, I do blame the pro-lifers for a lot, too. Sabotaging public health care in the name of life?
That’s a factor. The Republicans for decades have engaged in the political version of selling their souls to the devil; they decided to make the bigots, the religious fanatics, the Right fringe into their base and fed that base lies to keep them loyal and voting. Now the lunatics have come up though the party machine and are taking control. I’d put the first stage much farther back though; I think it started with the Southern Strategy of appealing to the racists who left the Democrats of civil rights, and then with the appeals to the Christian lunatics like Falwell.
I’ll never understand the concept that the GOP is or used to be ‘the party of good ideas’. That is as divorced from reality as you can get.
I think part of it is the fact that authoritarianism is correlated to dogmatism, so the more dogmatic thinkers are taking over the party and affecting the POV. Back in the 60s the authoritarians were in the birch party or on the ends, now they are the center of the GOP.
The “liberal media” meme has made conservatives unable to incorporate new information into their world view. ANYTHING that challenges their worldview, even live footage of their own candidates and elected officials speaking with no annotation or commentary from the left, is the fault of “The Liberal Media.”
Who’s the loudest guy on the street? It’s the guy over there holding a sign that says “The End is Nigh”. You know, the crazy guy. You know he’s insane, but he’s the most visible thing on the block.
Fox News gives the political version of that guy a voice, 'cause he brings in viewers. Eventually you’ve got the craziest of the crazies, all trying to out-crazy everyone else. The louder they speak, the more they’re rewarded for that speech- no matter what they’re actually saying.
And now you’ve got an entire political party, all trying to out-crazy each other, 'cause they want *their *name to be the name everyone knows. There’s no punishment for anything they say or do in the pursuit of that goal, because “There’s no such thing as bad press.”
Why is it only Republicans that (currently) have this problem? Because they’ve got this one “news” station that tells them that none of this is their fault- no, anything bad that happens is due to “liberals” and the “liberal media”.
(I just posted this to another thread, but it’s highly germane here, so excuse please.)
The present-day GOP cultivates a perverse kind of loyalty. You don’t just listen to the voice that yells the loudest; you show it every deference and above all, stay in line. Of course, the line can be damn difficult to follow if you have any principles of your own, because the loudest voice this week might contradict that of last week.
This is a key element. The present Republican party and base look at this all like a big game, and make decisions based on the uniform. It’s a real party before country kind of organization at this point.
Look at all the things that their leaders were for before they were against, in just the last couple of years, like individual mandates and cap and trade. They have no principles and their base doesn’t know or doesn’t care to call them out or hold them to account for it. It’s like a big chorus of “The Company Way” from How to Succeed in Business (“supposing the company thinks… I think so too!”)
And anything that might make a sensible person change their mind is the corrupt product of malevolent forces unfairly plotting against them. The liberal media, the biased world of academia, political correctness… They have always been able to somehow walk the tightrope of being comfortable in knowing that most everyone thinks like they do while also being constantly persecuted.
But as I posted above, I don’t think it’s just people playing the game anymore. Now the game is playing the people.
It used to be politicians saying, “this is what I’ve got to say in order to get elected.” But now we have politicians saying, “I’m saying this because I actually believe this is true.”
Only when it’s self-serving, is the problem. I found out Dick Cheney has been pro-gay-rights for years, but then I found out he has a gay daughter. While it’s nice that he isn’t anti-gay like most Republicans, it’s pretty safe to say that if he DIDN’T have a gay daughter, he wouldn’t give a shit about gay rights.
Jon Stewart also did a funny number on his show about some blonde Republican pundit on Fox (I forget her name). She was on record saying that pregnancy leave was an unnecessary entitlement, until after she came back from pregnancy leave! She had a sudden change of heart (surprise, surprise) and started blasting people for having the same opinion she used to express! Total bitch.
Most Republicans are hypocritical, self-serving fuckwits who suffer from a serious lack of perspective. Although some believe in certain forms of “welfare,” it’s only after an event has affected them personally that they give a shit. Also see: The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion. And Santorum, who is all about abortion, but only for his wife. These assholes are fucking crazy.
Seriously? And then we cue the endless chorus of variations of, “Not that I’m aware of.”
This thread is a shining example of open-minded discussion. Sometimes I think this board is the Free Republic of the left. I dismiss certain discourse in the way I do the Rolling Stone’s editorial voice, or Rush Limbaugh’s commentary. The sort of idiotic nonsense that asserts, “I am always right and my opponent is always wrong–wrong and with evil motivations. Always.” There is no need to actually support the thesis–let’s just accept it, and then offer theories on why it’s so.
As a practical matter, it’s just much easier to rely on more nuanced sources.
I notice that too. A couple I know are totally ant-welfare, except when it comes to UHC. Back when he was in college he considered medicare a giant waste, when he got a job and was in the real world all of a sudden the reliability of medicare (with low copays and no caps) for all started seeming desirable. Now both support medicare for all. They are still hostile to programs that benefit other people though, but welfare that they benefit from, that is ok.