I was a Republican for a very long time. Over 26 years to be exact. But the party I supported was the party that tried actually to improve the lot of average Americans in many ways. The Republican Party used to be a center-right party, conservative but mainstream. Now it’s the home of extreme views. The Republican party used to care about the environment; it favored universal healthcare. A mandate to buy insurance was a Republican idea. Even Richard Nixon-no galloping liberal he, understood the need to fix the American system, and he indeed would never have dared gutting Medicare the way that the Zombie-Eyed Granny Starver wants to. And even on taxes- the party was not insane. Under the old Republican philosophy, the purpose of taxation is to raise the revenues needed by the government. They believed, in theory, that the government shouldn’t spend money it didn’t have, so sufficient revenues were needed.
But now? All the men of stature and maturity have been driven out of the party or have died, and what is left, is a group of spoiled children egged on by an increasingly overweight, selfish, and ignorant electorate, kept ignorant by a self-serving bubble of its truths and making up its versions of the universe.
If you don’t think so, you might want to check this out before speaking. The party I knew is dead-killed by deranged crazy people.
We marvel today at the utter blind stupidity with which the European powers stumbled into a cataclysm. Centuries from now, historians, probably working on houseboats floating above what used to be Delaware, are going to look back at this period in our history and wonder how we tolerated a political party gone so completely mad, much less how we continued to empower it, election after election. They are going to marvel at how all the institutions designed to check the spread of the madness refused to look at it and call it what it is. These people are going to think American democracy was some sort of weird contagion that overcame the country, like ergot infecting the nation’s wheat fields. They’re going to believe we all just went crazy and ate ourselves.