Who would it be?
I think I’d go with Lee Atwater, personally.
Yeah, good call. Newt, maybe, but Atwater is hard to beat.
Rush Limbaugh
Others would be Roger Ailes and others responsible for Fox News.
I’ll go with the Perlsteinian answer of Nixon.
Was coming to post this myself, the ‘Southern Strategy’ has one of the most enduring realignments of politics we’ve seen. Gingrich et al were merely doubling down on this particular brand of politics.
Jerry Falwell
The founder/CEO of Twitter.
Ronald Reagan.
Rise of Trickle Down, Right-Wing Fundamentalist acceptance, and the deliberate disintegration of the middle class.
Yeah, ultimately it’s Nixon, who took the first major steps in making fringe elements the the core of a successful Republican coalition. (I don’t count Goldwater, because he was unsuccessful.)
But there’s plenty of blame to go around. So let’s spread some on Roger Ailes (Nixon’s admaker long before Fox News), Pat Buchanan (who as pretty much invented “the media is the enemy”), Ronald Reagan (when an image conflicts with the truth, go with the image), and Lee Atwater. And for that matter, even George Bush Sr. (who despite his Establishment image helped destroy the old mainstream Republican party, first by jumping on the bandwagon with Reagan and by association the evangelists, anti-womens’ rights people, anti-environmentalists, etc. etc and second by hiring Atwater thus further solidifying racists as part of the GOP base. Bush Sr.'s mantra was basically, “If you can’t beat the extremists, join 'em” with the results we see today. Jeb falling to Trump was a classic case of reaping what the Bush family had helped sow.)
Heh, but I’d probably put Zuckerberg as at least, if not more, culpable there.
Fair enough. I don’t use Facebook enough to know how it is there, but it seems to me that most “activism” happens on Twitter.
Why not just go all the way and say that Tim Berners-Lee has had more of an impact on 21st century politics than any other one person (which is true).
Facebook is a pretty amazing tool for creating totally impermeable silos reinforcing exactly what you already agree with.
Yeah, but that Gutenberg guy…
Mikhail Gorbachev.
Ended the cold war early, and the end of the cold war and beginning of globalization without a bogeyman to keep the rich honest was what really triggered extreme politics and decline of the middle class.
I think if we still had a USSR and Communism out there, they would have done more to help the American worker and we wouldn’t have the extremism.
Exactly. People like Berners-Lee, Zuckerberg, et cetera just created the forum, so I think it’d be more useful to stick strictly with people who dealt with the politics itself.
Nah. Without the USSR, you just find another bogeyman. Like the muslims, for instance. 9/11 and ISIS were a blessing for a certain part of US politics.
My go to list would certainly include Atwater and Stone but it really it does go back Nixon and the Southern Strategy.
Honorable mention goes to Bill Clinton and the signing of the Telecommunications Act in 1996 that did anything but promote healthy competition and shield consumers from monopolies. Instead it gave rise to monsters like Clear Channel that bought up almost every independent radio station in America to ensure that Americans could drive coast to coast and never be out of range of Limbaugh’s voice. It also allowed companies like Sinclair Broadcast Group to grow like a tumor in which local news was thrown out in favor of prepacked mystery meat from corporate HQ that had a conserviative bias to it to say the least. When Ted Koppel read the names of those fallen in the line of duty in Iraq it was Sincalir owned stations that refused to air that episode of Nightline.
Ah yes the good ole days of you are either with us, or with the terrorists, smashing Dixie Chick CD’s and ordering Freedom Fries in the drive thru.
King George III.