Post-Trump Republican Party

She gets money because she gets all this press every time she says something outrageous. If the media ever figured out how to deal with trolls, she’d lose oxygen.

How can they be bankrupt when the democrat president keeps giving them free socialist monies?

Sorry to continue this tangent, but it’s interesting…

Pretty sure the Orthodox believe the bread and wine become the Body and Blood, but don’t try to explain how. Transubstantiation is a very scholastic kind of formulation–classic medieval Catholic attempt to reconcile Christianity and Aristotle–and the Orthodox see no need for such philosophical games.

Fun story: Luther and Zwingli (the proto-Calvinist) once met to hash out some of the doctrines of the Reformation. Zwingli proclaimed the bread and wine to be symbolically the body and blood of Christ. Luther angrily scratched out on a tablet with chalk the words of Jesus (well, in Latin translation) at the last supper and pointed at them emphatically: “Hoc est corpus meum.” Luther seemed to think that was pretty definitive, and so do the Catholics and Orthodox.

So really it’s whether they follow the gourd or the sandal (or shoe!)

What Monty Python missed is that these debates take about three hundred years really to get going.

Right because Jesus never spoke figuratively.

“Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”

Look guys you can’t start a deep, esoteric theological debate without summoning Tom.

Steve Stivers announces he’s resigning his House seat (Ohio 15, I believe – central Ohio) to take work in the private sector.

That’s another non-crazy Republican representative leaving government who is likely to be replaced by someone who probably far more strident and more likely to embrace some crazy. Hope not, but this is a solid GOP district so…yeah.

It seems like to me that the GOP steered themselves into this course in 2016 and then locked it in during the four years of Trump. I really don’t know how they pull back now. It’s not a matter of political differences, they’ve pretty much declared total war on anyone outside the Trump constituency. Not just Democrats and liberals, but non-crazy Republicans like Mitt Romney.

Hopefully I’m totally wrong but from where I’m sitting in 2021 it just feels like this is going to have to play itself out. The GOP will continue their descent into an anti-democratic authoritarian party because the way they’ve demonized everyone else, it’s going to be really hard to work with them or pull them into the fold. I’m guessing we’ll see more and more overt attacks on fair elections like we saw in 2020, like we’re seeing in post-election legislation in several states, until it gets to a breaking point. I don’t know what that breaking point entails and I really don’t want to find out. I feel like I’m going to find out, regardless.

When Trump dies, perhaps that will be an opportunity for an exit ramp. Although I’m sure his scions will be coming on strong.

Agreed. I think at this point it’s victory or death for the Republicans, and the Dems have to realize this and realize the level of danger they’re working with, and make sure the first doesn’t happen- no matter what the cost.

By the time Trump dies- you’ll see true believers come out- they got a whiff of what they wanted, they’re not going back to diet fascism.

They are the baddies, but it’s gonna be a long time before they realize it, if ever.

It is hard to remember but Jennifer Rubin used to be a conservative columnist.

I agree with her take on the transformation.

A recent quote from a former president: “It’s hard for Americans to understand, and I can’t really understand, why a mother becomes so desperate or how a mother becomes so desperate that she’s willing to put her children in the hands of a coyote, a smuggler. And so there’s been a lot of devastation in Central America: political upheaval, earthquakes and gangs and drug lords, and the people are totally intimidated and so they’re streaming to our border.” He added that “it’s an easy issue to frighten some of the electorate” and then condemned the GOP as “isolationist, protectionist and, to a certain extent, nativist.”

Bill Clinton? Barack Obama? Nope, that is George W. Bush. And therein lies the story of the modern GOP’s descent into noxious white supremacy…

Progressives are correct in identifying the antecedents of Trumpism in Richard M. Nixon’s Southern Strategy, but the difference between the party of Nixon (who, for example, set up the Environmental Protection Agency), Ronald Reagan (who championed immigration reform), George H.W. Bush (who signed into the law the Americans With Disabilities Act) and Bush 43 and the party of MAGA racists is not merely one of degree. It is an entirely different animal.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/20/george-w-bush-shows-how-far-gop-has-fallen/

It is desperation plain and simple. The people running the show for the GOP now understand that their time is coming to an end, their power diminishing, and it scares the living shit out of them. Within 10 years the majority of Americans under 40 years of age will be non-White. Within 25 years it will be the majority of Americans period who are non-White. For the past two decades now the number of Americans who identify as Christian has dropped by double digit percentage points, and the number of Americans who don’t identify as religious at all has increased to around 25% of the population, and it is much higher in Americans under 40.

For 250 years White Christians have essentially controlled every aspect of America, from government to education to industry to the military and police forces. The Republican Party has seen this change coming for a long time, and has tried to extend and solidify their power in under-the-radar ways for decades. Now the end is literally in sight (we elected a black President!), so they’re shrugging off the camouflage and saying the quiet parts out loud while embracing religion, nationalism and authoritarianism and hoping they can mix it all together into a cement they can use to anchor themselves into positions of power by passing blatantly racist legislation at State levels while obstructing progress at Federal levels. The only difference between now and 20 years ago is that they’re no longer pretending to be representing all Americans, they are no longer hiding the fact that they are only representing White Christian Americans and that White Christian Americans are the “real” Americans and everyone else is the enemy, be that immigrants, the media, corporations and other Americans who don’t fall within their preferred demographic.

This may work for them in the very short term, but it is not going to end well. There was a time when the Republican Party may have had an opportunity to reform itself, reach out to new voter demographics and through that reform remain a powerful political force. That time passed a long time ago, even before America elected Barrack Obama and sent the GOP into a racist frenzy. Now that hate is all they have left, that “us against them” rhetoric is the only strategy they know how to utilize, and the problem with that strategy is that once you’ve managed to put the majority of the country into the “Them” category, your own days become numbered.

Good fucking riddance.

On the other hand, George Bush refused to vote for anyone for President in 2016, and won’t say who he voted for in 2020, and almost certainly voted for down-ballot Republicans on the rest of his ballot. This is just part of the shtick he’s always been playing: he’s the ‘compassionate conservative’, the one who wants the conservative agenda while pretending to feel bad about it.

Bush was one of our worst presidents ever, and did a lot of horrible things, but at least I can say two things about him:

  1. I didn’t worry every day that he’d destroy democracy, just that he was putting us on the path to it (this turned out to be right)

  2. He felt he was doing the right thing for America, and that he wanted to do right for America.

I never thought those things counted for much, but then we had Trump.

He’s going to rot in hell to alongside Trump, but he went there on a road paved with some good intentions, unlike Trump who is going to the 9th circle.

As for 1, he was basically flouting the law and undermining democracy every single day from 9/11 probably until he left office. As for 2, I can’t see how what he felt mattered. I’m quite sure e.g. Mussolini thought he was doing the best thing for Italy.

The difference is that while Bush only flouted law and undermined democratic norms in order to service misguided geopolitical aims and enrich his buddies, Trump flouted law and undermined democratic norms in service of self aggrandizement and to enrich his family.

Trump did something useful though. There was a lingering sense in the back of my mind that Bush wasn’t actually as big an idiot as he seemed. That he must have some sort of political savvy and folksy charm or he’d never have been able to become President. Trump laid to rest the idea that any of those qualities are even remotely necessary. Cash+idiot blustering=Republican nominee. Bush was exactly as dumb as Molly Ivins always said he was.

Sure; but in both cases it was a danger to democracy, and in fact I worried about the state of our democracy every day under Bush, just as I did under Trump.

Right, my response was meant to be a little tongue-in-cheek. You know me–I’m firmly in the Bush-was-at-least-as-bad-as-Trump camp. I 100% predict that we’ll see paeans to good-old Donald’s wacky doings in a few years, and the misery of the Trump years will disappear down the memory hole faster than… well… the misery of the Bush years did.