Who Really Fucked Up the Republican Party?

All of them

Definitely all of them, but the GOP started their downhill roll to total corruption during the Reagan years.

Jerry Falwell and his moral majority bullshit without question.

Everyone on that list added their own fucked up part, until it all culminated in Trump. Some would argue the deplorable, authoritarian nature of a certain segment of the electorate was there all along, Trump just revealed it fully.

This was probably before my time but whoever let the anti intellectual sentiment spread like crazy. That has probably done more harm than even tax cuts for the rich. It’s the reason why today we can’t even agree on basic facts and people like Trump as representing an ideal even if he is lying and is corrupt.

Reagan got the ball rolling on aligning the GOP with Christianity. That was the beginning of the end. If Christians adamantly believe in a sky fairy, they'll believe any lie you tell them if you repeat it enough.

I thought the Southern Strategy was the root of it all.

I think the 1980 Reagan campaign is generally considered the origin of the coalition that would be made up of white workers, the business elite, and social conservatives, which is basically what still holds the party together.

R2 and R3 I think both are correct, but the answer is more complex. Here is my thinking of what led up to the downgrade of the Republican Party:

1980 was an interesting election. There were three major candidates: John Anderson the Rockefeller Republican, George H.W. Bush the moderate, and Ronald Reagan the conservative. It was close, but Reagan won. In 1981, Reagan picked Sandra Day O'Connor, a Goldwater Republican, to the Court.

Reagan got into bed with The Moral Majority, particularly Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, and Pat Robertson. All they cared about abortion and "good Christian values." When Robert Bork was nominated to replace moderate Republican Lewis Powell on the Supreme Court, Bork's arrogance, air or superiority, and strong pro-life stances sank his nomination. The Senate, who was fairly bipartisan rejected him. Anthony Kennedy was picked and quietly confirmed instead.

Fortunately, when George H.W. Bush had to name a Supreme Court nominee (the liberal lion William Brennan was dying), he was too busy rebuilding the world after the fall of Communism to really care. He chose David Souter, a moderate New England aristocrat, much like himself, who could easily be confirmed in the Senate. The Right Wing Evangelicals who never warmed up to Bush forced his hand in picking Clarence Thomas when Thurgood Marshall retired. The RWE got their way. They wanted a knock out drag out fight in the Senate over abortion rights. They go it.

To make the matters worse, the Supreme Court heard Planned Parenthood v. Casey, an abortion rights case. In 1992, 8 of the 9 justices had been appointed by Republicans (Rehnquist, Blackmun, Stevens, O'Connor, Scalia, Kennedy, Souter, and Thomas). Byron White was appointed by John F. Kennedy, but he was a major dissenter in abortion rights. The Evangelicals finally had their "slam dunk" to get rid of abortion. However, O'Connor, Kennedy, and Souter voted to uphold abortion rights, along with Stevens and Blackmun.

Bill Clinton beat Bush in the 1992 election. He appointed Ruth Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer to the Court when White and Blackmun retired. In 1994, an Atlanta congressmen won House Speakership and he had one thing on his mind: "BEAT THE LIBS."

It all came to a head in 2000 with Bush v. Gore. In a clunky 5-4 majority but a 7-2 plurality opinion, the Court stopped the Florida recount and George W. Bush became president. Then 9/11 and Iraq happened. The Court overturned so many Bush policies that it was embarrassing. Then Rehnquist died and O'Connor had to retire to take care of her dying husband.

Enter John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and the New Wave of "CONSERVATIVISM."

R9 = OP

R9 Since you brought up the 1980 election with "three major candidates," don't forget that In the 1992 election when "Clinton beat Bush" there were also three major candidates. Clinton only got 43% of the vote. Bush's 39% and Perot's 19% combined total was nearly 58%. So while Clinton may have got the most votes, he didn't have a majority. And Perot appealed to more than three times the voters than Anderson did (1980).

The Tea Party.

Some of you youngsters may have trouble believing this, but before Reagan, MOST Republican politicians were in favor of save, legal abortion.

You betcha!

I picked Reagan, but Rush Limbaugh hastened the end of civil discourse.

After seeing the tremendous Reagan docuseries on Showtime I was astonished how it seemed to trigger the birth of MAGA.

[quote]Who Really Fucked Up the Republican Party?

Hope Hicks.

Oops, OP, I didn't see the "Up".

Well, it certainly wasn't me!

I beg to disagree r18.

Wasn't Lee Atwater behind a lot of the fuckery?

Then, he had his seizure, converted to Catholicism, and confessed his sins with numerous apologies before dying.

The first president who was so corrupt he had to resign or be impeached and removed from office was Republican Richard Nixon. His VP, Spiro Agnew, also was so corrupt that he had to resign from office as well. These two raging hypocrites also unleashed their Republican henchman bogus "Christian" Jerry Falwell and his bullshit Moral Majority money grab on the U.S. The Moral Majority unleashed rightwing Xian nutjobs into the political sphere. So yeah. Reagan was BAD, and he and his administration did incalculable damage. But the way was paved for Reagan by Richard Nixon.

R11 You're right, I thought about adding in Ross Perot, but my reply was getting lengthy. I think the 1980 election is more important than the 1992 election because the 1980 election was a movement.

It was the new wave of conservativism after Watergate, Ford's pardon, and weak Carter. Whoever won in 1980 and what they planned to do in the White House was going to shape American politics for a long time. If Anderson or Bush had won, the Moral Majority, Gingrich, Freedom Caucus, and MAGA movement would never have happened. The world would have been a better place. The Supreme Court would be different, too.

Granted, this is all in high brow political theory, but I know for a fact neither Anderson or Bush would have wanted to get anywhere close to Jerry Falwell. Anderson supported the EPA, gay and abortion rights, hardly a man "for the cause." Bush, with his well breeding, thought Falwell and Co were rude and tacky to be so vocal about such intimate things.

R21 I agree, but Nixon was not stalwart conservative. He had a lot of social programs and expanded the government. Ford was a Rockefeller Republican.

God is good, R20.

And many Democrats were not, pre-Roe, in favor of legalizing abortions, R13.

Don’t forget that it was Jimmy Carter who brought religion into mainstream politics, the Moral Majority formed in the 1970s.

R24, some Dems were not in favor of legalizing abortion, but most were. PRO LIFE was not a movement with political power and did not run the Republican Party.

Most Catholics were democrats back in the pre-Roe day, R25, & they were usually anti-abortion. Joe Biden was one such democrat. Pre-Roe, it wasn’t an issue that engaged the attention of national politicians. If you found any related opinion by Jack or Bobby Kennedy, it would not be in favor of abortion rights (their sister & BIL, Eunice & Sargent Shriver, were committed to the anti-abortion cause). As late as 1976, the issue hadn’t been fully engaged, allowing someone like Jimmy Carter, who was not then in favor of abortion rights, to win the nomination.

Not me!

Reagan fucked the middle class, which was strong after WW2 because the wealthy paid very high taxes. He then lowered them and taxed SS and lower income people. Reagan was an awful fuck. Ask his children.

Too bad Joe Biden has not yet been able to capitalize on that kindly granddaddy image that Ronald Reagan did for two terms in the 1980s.

R29, apart from his considerable faults, Reagan was known as the Great Communicator. Biden, not so much. Reagan was also some ten years younger than Biden when he took office & looked a good deal more hale & hearty. And we were a much less divided country in the pre-Trump '80s.

Everyone makes good points

The last Republican presidential candidate I might have voted for was Gerald Ford, but I wasn't old enough.

R30, I didn’t mean it literally point by point. Biden could be seen as a kindly older man people to up to if that was still a thing. I saw an interview with college kids yesterday and they were looking for Obama “cool” in their candidate. It’s all about style over substance.

Can Newtie be any different from his sister Candace? He must have been the younger girls' shlubby, embarrassing older brother left over from their mother's brief early marriage.

Though they both like pussy.

Ronald Reagan...

He said government was not the solution, he said it was the problem. It then spiraled downward and out of control. Reagan paved the way for Gingrich, the Tea Party, and now Trump.

You reap what you sow.

^ It should be noted that - at least in his first inaugural address - Reagan prefaced those comments by "In this present crisis".

I think many of the poll options contributed to making what tRump ultimately pulled off. But it was definitely tRump that took the republican party to the point of no return.

Reagan made stupidity popular.

Their voters.

None of the above. It was Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch. With some seasoning added to the pot by Lee Atwater.

Bill Clinton ruined the Republican notion of a permanent republican government in the US. During the Reagan/Bush years, they really did think they would rule forever and the democrats would always be relegated to a permanent opposition who cared about people rather than profits. They thought propaganda, which let’s be frank is what people like Atwater served up, would keep them on top, manipulating the voters to vote against their own interests.

But Clinton changed all that. He showed that democrats could campaign slickly too. At first it seemed like a fluke — HW Bush was a weak candidate — but when Clinton seemed headed for an easy reelection in ‘96, they decided something needed to be done.

That’s why Ailes left working for the Republican Party and went to work for Murdoch. They decided that the voters needed more than propaganda just during campaign cycles. They needed it every. Damn. Day.

It worked.

I say Barry Goldwater. Even though he lost the election by a landside his campaign was ground-breaking, sparking a war within the Republican Party itself. Moderate Republicans were appalled at his rhetoric--“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” and Goldwater hated them right back.

He was anti-income tax, anti government, anti civil rights legislation, anti the elites of New England, anti intellectual, he was a smarter, more mature Trump.

"Positions that seemed far to the right in the 1960s moved gradually to the mainstream, from originalist interpretations of the constitution to limited government and a distaste for the mainstream media—which his supporters dubbed “the rat-fink Eastern press.”"

Agreed with R41. True, he was not a religious nut and he was pro-gay. But he was the first knock against the Establishment Republicans. And it was all slowly donwhill from there. And then Reagan pushed the normal Republicans over a cliff. For more insight, please read this book.

R41 and R42 So, was H.W. an establishment elite? A Rockefeller Republican? A Goldwater Republican?

I think he was a Rockefeller Republican elite who pretended to be more conservative than he really was.

R43, I do think that. I'll probably get shit for saying this but H.W. was easily one of the better one-term presidents ever, along with Carter. He absolutely did pretend to be conservative than he was because by the time the 90s were here, the Republican party already drifting way right. Remember, he was from New England and there is no way you could be that conservative in that area of the country.

R44 Glad we agree. He was a moderate WASPy New England Republican. He wisely stayed out of social issues because (1) he wasn't really affected by them, (2) he didn't really care, (3) he believed it didn't win elections and was mostly a fools errand.

Let the right wing evangelicals implode on themselves. I admire that.

Let's not forget he ran the CIA...

Reagan was appealing to future MAGATS right after he'd won the nomination in 1980 and chose to give his "States Rights speech" at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi.

R47 agreed. A lot of current Trumpers were 20-40 during Reagan Revolution

R43, R44 - HW Bush was a pro-choice moderate in 1980. Once he became Reagan's running mate (there was outrage from the pro-lifers), Bush turned on a dime and changed his opinion to match Reagan's. No matter how moderate and "normal" HW Bush really was, HE GAVE US CLARENCE THOMAS and that overshadows anything good he did while in office.

Clarence Thomas was the ultimate token pick. They knew they needed a black guy after Thurgood Marshall, but also realized there was pretty no black Republican to pick. So they looked around until they found this barely qualified fucker.

* pretty much no black Republican

R50, Clarence Thomas was all that, but he was the bone Bush threw to the ultra right wingers - that was the main reason.

The John Birch Society and Goldwater tried to move the then-centrist party to the far right but failed miserably. Nixon did so successfully under a basically centrist policy program, instituting e.g. environmental and consumer protections and diplomacy with communist countries while getting votes through racist dog-whistles and rat-fucking. After the blip of Watergate, the Reagan years entrenched those methods and threw centrist policy out the window and the party's been in a race to the bottom ever since.

[quote] Remember, he was from New England and there is no way you could be that conservative in that area of the country.

What? George H. W. Bush left New England in his twenties and made his career and political base in Texas, which was increasingly conservative. His policies as president were anything but moderate (though more moderate than his son's).

Right, HW completely gutted the protections in place for workers and consumers, using his monkey Dan Quayle. He was no Rockefeller Republican. He wasn’t an extremist but by the same token didn’t have the same liberal-at-home stance as a RR.

Dan Quayle remains a very odd choice. He did behave well in the matter of Trump trying to be a dictator and stay in office forever, at least advising Pence not to do that shit. But still, it remains a very odd choice for vice president. No idea what George H.W. Bush was thinking with that pick.

Roger Ailes and Robert Teeter recommended Quayle.

Honestly, this all sounds like assholes desperately floundering around trying to explain something they really can't justify, years later:

[quote] He wanted someone who has a feel for domestic policy _ since his own forte is international affairs. Quayle's work as the prime Senate sponsor of a bill known as the Joint Training Partnership Act seemed to give him that credential.

[quote] Several people close to Bush also told me that in meetings he held that year with Republican members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Quayle's comments on defense and arms control issues had struck the presidential candidate as sensible.

[quote] Finally, on purely political grounds, Quayle came recommended by such influential Bush strategists as Roger Ailes and Robert Teeter as an energetic and effective campaigner. After what the country saw of a tense, ill-at-ease Quayle in the 1988 campaign, that is hard to imagine. But he is, remember, the challenger who defeated incumbent Birch Bayh in the 1980 Senate race _ the same Birch Bayh who had previously beaten back such prestigious rivals as William Ruckelshaus and (now Sen.) Dick Lugar.

The simple answer is that the Republicans figured out that they could only get votes by getting the votes of the longstanding paranoid strain in American politics, including all the racists, discriminators, and religious kooks, and keep them by gerrymandering enough districts and undermining the free vote in other ways.

Quayle made Bush look more presidential. Anyone next to Quayle looked more presidential...

George H.W. Bush. A flat out psychopath who as a teenager sabotaged an opponent for a sailing race by diving under his boat in the middle of the night and detaching the center board - a bit of toxic masculinity he bragged about the rest of his life - he not only was the dumbshit who enabled the Bay of Pigs, but he hired Karl Rove after KR was caught fixing a young republican election because he wanted an enforcer who would break any law and avoid any compromise in attacking opponents, which has become the hallmark of republicanism. He also raised one of the worst people ever to run for president, his son, and hired crooks and charlatans and used his ugly fat wife to intimidate other people.

Oh and he was in Dallas November 22, 1963 although he later pretended he wasn't.

At the time it was widely reported that Bush chose Quayle because he was young and handsome and that would make the ticket more palatable to female voters.

I remember my sister — then a fiery liberal but now a trumper — being outraged at that time that women would be so condescended to and taken for granted.

That would be Republicans Dear

According to DataLounge, it was Mamie Eisenhower's hairdo.

Before she retired to take care of her husband who was dying in 2006, Sandra Day O'Connor told David Souter:

"What makes this harder is it our party that is destroying the country. He is destroying the military with adventures we are not prepared for. We have colossal deficit spending, and the only way he got reelected was by getting states to vote on same-sex marriage. I thought Republicans were stood for a strong military, a balanced budget, and Barry Goldwater never gave a damn with who you slept with."

Her Republican Party, and Souter's, had gone.

I honestly think it began with the Southern Strategy of the 1960s - which was started to steal Dem voters away due to Southerners' racism and dislike for blacks having equal rights and sharing schools.

Once you see how loyal racists can be, you turn around and say - ok, who else? The next group was going after the churches and religious people Believe it or not, politics and religion weren't so intertwined at one point.

Now you have to appeal to Southern racists and religious nuts above everyone else, so you have to get a lot of donated money and blow-hard mouthpieces to go on media 24/7 to spew lies and twist arguments to make them not seem so awful.

Their problems are all about appealing to people's fear for votes - and creating NEW fears if the old ones aren't working.

Barry Goldwater definitely did care who you slept with. The revisionism with poisonous conservative tards that we see every day m akes me sick.

R68 Actually, no. Goldwater became a gay rights "activist"

Republicans through the 19th and 20th century had the big business vote. In the 60s the Democrats' turn to civil rights gave them an opportunity to get the "populist" vote, i.e. the reactionary bigots who hadn't previously voted Republican much since the Republicans had stood for emancipation and so on. That's when they put together a complete program of economic exploitation.

[quote]Barry Goldwater definitely did care who you slept with.

That's because it wasn't a topic for discussion in the 1960s. It wasn't acceptable to talk about these things in public except for a joke and an elbow in the gut when having an after work drink. Goldwater became gay friendly decades later when one of his relatives came out - and when it WAS acceptable for politicians to discuss the topic. To a much lesser extent it was the same with religion. Other than a mention of "god bless," or something innocuous, religion was a private matter for a politician in public before the late 1970s. That's why Jimmy Carter and Reagan's born again stuff got so much attention and changed the deck.

Yeah well in the 1980s Goldwater wasn't a racist either. But in 1964 he was.

That does sound like a more realistic explanation r63. We're going to do fuck all for actual women's rights or any real women's concerns, so let's just get their pussies wet and hope for the best.

It sounds like Goldwater believed in the Constitution rights of ALL people. Even if he personally disagreed with their lifestyle, they had a Constitutional right to do/fell/think a certain way. He would be a Libertarian today.

Imagine a Republican or Democrat today saying I disagree with your lifestyle/believes, but I respect your Constitutional rights to do as you please without making you feel stupid or inferior.

me, bitches.

I think he was more or less a Libertarian in his own day, but libertarianism can be very slippery. I don't know that he ever called for repealing sodomy laws or anything like that in the 1960s, or said these guys rioting at Stonewall have a point. But later he definitely did come out for leaving gay people alone, and repealing the ban on gay people in the military, etc. Good. Great actually. Sometimes all we can ask is that people stop clinging desperately to their stupid bigotries just cause mommy and daddy and the preacher man told you to.

R75 What about Lewis Powell? He was moderate Republican and was a swing vote in the 1970's and 1980's. He was regarded as a gentle and admirable man.

During Bowers v. Hardwicke, a landmark case where the Court upheld sodomy laws, he said he never met a homosexual. Unfortunately he had a law clerk who was a closet homosexual. Years later when he figured out his, what he called egregious error, he profusely apologized and sent him a gift. Powell was horrified of his behavior to the clerk and his decision in Bowers.

Sandra Day O'Connor regretted her Bowers vote, too. She was in the majority for Lawrence v. Texas. She also applauded Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark case that ruled same-sex marriage as Constitutional. Both Lawrence and Obergefell were written by Anthony Kennedy.

John Paul Stevens and David Souter was in the majority in Lawrence, too.

Powell, Stevens, O'Connor, Kennedy, and Souter were appointed and are/were registered Republicans the entire time they were on the Court. WOW.

Lewis Powell and Potter Stewart, an Eisenhower appointee, both ruled in favor or Roe v. Wade.

"“In a Constitution for a free people, there can be no doubt that the meaning of ‘liberty’ must be broad indeed.”

Damn, should have specified, I meant Goldwater at r76, responding to r74.

@R28 Reagan had a Democratic controlled House during his entire Presidency. You can’t solely blame him.

r77, the Powell memo was basically the blueprint from the early 70s to today for everything the 1% is doing to acquire more power and wealth. It's why unions have declined, the GOP las lurched to the right, and the Middle Class has declined.

R81 I forgot about that. However, do you think he did more good on the Court than on the memo?

Well he certainly didn't do any good in the Memo. Whatever good he did on the Court basically served to whitewash what the Memo accomplished.

R83 Good points.

Without Reagan there would be no Trump.

And somewhat without Nixon there would be no Trump. I think what Nixon really did was turn elitism on its head. No longer was it about the rich fucker who could close the factory and destroy your whole town on a whim. Now it was all about those smarty pants bastards in Hollywood and Harvard who were laughing at you, and the only way to get back at them was to elect some fucker they hated and damn the consequences. Nixon of course was very intelligent himself, but he opened the door to the whole idea that electing a moron or fucking doofus was the best way you could get back at THEM.

Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Right Act too. He did not believe in everybody's Constitutional rights. You have to remember what a cesspool of Corruption Arizona was during the whole of his career. His buddies were people like Richard Kleindienst.

Phyllis Schlafly. She studied Josef Goebbels so she could adapt his propaganda techniques for the conservative cause. A manly-seeming dyke, she blamed her gay son for her not being a bigger deal. She almost single-handed stopped the ERA, and she made St. Louis the cesspool of idiocy it is today.

My vote is the John Birch society. That Koch fucker’s father founded it. Also rumored to be behind the Kennedy assassination. They’ve been bankrolling all the white Christian nationalist think tanks, the Klan etc. since the 50s.

I believe JBS was Opoeration Gladio's American component, funded by NATO but the evidence would be in Belgium.