In just a few years the Republican Party went from the slow Reaganism death of one thousand cuts of government by the people and for the people to a Political Party embracing terrorist extremism.
“My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” — Grover Norquist
Sometime between 2004 & 2008 Republican's even some local Chester County Republicans, like former Sheriff Bunny Welsh’s began to embrace the philosophical stance of anti-government bombers like Timothy McVeigh.
Two facts precipitated the Republican Party’s rapid shift to terrorist extremism.
The election of a Black president, Barack Obama and the realization among ordinary people that:
The US white majority will soon disappear forever.
Trump’s former campaign manager Steve Bannon leads the world in a war against immigrants:
Trump’s feeble mind understands the extreme shift of the Republican Party into a terrorist insurrection party.
Republicans understand the GOP's shift from Reaganism to extremism. Democrats are mostly clueless.
And corporate media chose to ignore it:
"Donald Trump isn’t the destruction of the Republican Party; he is the fulfillment of everything the party has been saying and doing for decades. He is just saying it louder and more plainly than his predecessors and intra-party rivals...
Donald Trump isn’t the destruction of the Republican Party; he is the fulfillment of everything the party has been saying and doing for decades. He is just saying it louder and more plainly than his predecessors and intra-party rivals."
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Blowing the Biggest Political Story of the Last 50 Years
The shocking story isn't the rise of Donald Trump but how the GOP slowly morphed into a party of hate and obstruction.
Trump is an idiot who like the idiot “Chauncey Gardiner” in “Being There” Peter Sellers film) understands the power of TV/cable media.
Trump's blundering, scattershot presidency exposed the cracks in U.S. democratic government that allow an unscrupulous man to become dictator of the United States.
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Trump’s last stand is his call for armed insurrection at Biden’s inaugural.
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Hawley understands the extreme shift of the Republican Party from incremental destruction of government, “drown in a bathtub” to the Republican embrace of violent anti-government extremism.
Republican evangelical christian voters believe Trump is "The Last Emperor."
"The Last World Emperor originates in the apocalyptic sermon known as “Pseudo-Methodius,” written in Syriac between 685 and 690 after the Arab conquest of the Middle East. The prophecy speaks of a Byzantine or Roman king who would lead a successful war against the forces of Islam and establish a new era of peace. That calm would hold for a decade, at which point the forces of “Gog and Magog” would attack. Instead of resisting them, the king would travel to Mount Golgotha to lay down his crown, fulfilling the prophecy of Daniel and setting the stage for the Second Coming and a final apocalyptic battle between good and evil. The Last World Emperor and Daniel differ most notably in that the former demands a flawed secular hero as the champion. It therefore offers a model that allows the religious to cast secular political leaders as apocalyptic heroes, regardless of their personal failings."
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The apocalyptic myth that helps explain evangelical support for Trump
Like President Trump Senator Josh Hawley understands the extreme shift of the Republican Party base from Reagan to Alt Right/Fascist-Evangelist-Apocalypse/QAnon.
Hawley also understands how to manipulate media. He is not an insane idiot like Trump.
Can Hawley lead the GOP from a Mad Max apocalypse Party to something survivable?
On Dec. 18, Hawley went to the Senate floor to press for a bill providing for $1,200 checks, forcing a colleague to block him from passing it by unanimous consent. What ensued was a clash of the competing strains of contemporary Republican thought.
Hawley preached unadulterated American populism: “If we are going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on bailing out this, that and the other, surely — surely — we could start with reasonable, modest relief to the working people in need in this nation.”
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), a product of the tea party revolution — a plastics manufacturer who rode discontent with federal spending and regulation to election in 2010 — countered: “We all have compassion. We all want to fulfill those needs. We just don’t talk in numbers very often,” he said, before objecting to Hawley’s bill. “We are mortgaging our children’s future, and I think we need to be very careful about mortgaging it further.”
In the end, Hawley and Sanders won out: The checks — worth an estimated $166 billion — made the cut.
Sam Hammond, director of poverty and welfare policy at the center-right Niskanen Center and a former aide to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, said Hawley’s success could hearken the possible return of the “New Deal Republicanism” that went out with Richard M. Nixon.
Hawley’s facility with the grievance politics of the right, he said, has given him a special ability to appeal to a Republican base that, under Trump, appears to be growing less affluent, more diverse and certainly less interested in the dogma of Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises.
“You can use the cultural animus foil to hide a lot of plutocratic policy,” said Hammond, who has advised Hawley’s office. “But . . . it leaves you vulnerable to someone like Hawley who comes along and talks the talk just as well about the cultural elites and big tech, who stokes the culture war flames just as well but then channels that energy some other place.”
Sanders declined to comment on Hawley’s influence on the direction of the Republican Party.
“I will simply say that I appreciated the effort that Sen. Hawley made in working with me to do everything we could to get a $1,200 direct payment to working families in this country,” he said.
Hawley — who is widely seen as having presidential ambitions and has already started lobbing attacks at the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden — explained his interest in building a more cohesive framework for GOP populism in terms that would not sound out of place at a Sanders rally.
“My state, we are a working-class state in every sense. I see what I’m doing as trying to represent them and trying to articulate their values and their viewpoints and try to fight for policies and programs that actually benefit them,” he said.
“We’re rural, we’re urban, we’re multiracial. But you look at the working people across those different divides, they’ve got a lot of common interests. So I see it in that way. And, you know, I hope that there’ll be lots of people who will have a similar viewpoint. But we’ll see.”
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Josh Hawley led the GOP push for stimulus checks. Where else will he take his party?
