— Why the GOP Can’t Unite: Is it because Trump is like the Don Corleone of the Republican Party and still in control? Donald Trump has broken the GOP.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
— Why the GOP Can’t Unite: Is it because Trump is like the Don Corleone of the Republican Party and still in control? Donald Trump has broken the GOP.
Along with other fascist and extremist billionaires and the talk radio and TV hosts they employ, Trump has transformed the base of the party into something that resembles the Brownshirt movement of 1930s Germany with a vigorous embrace of racism, bigotry, and violence as performance art. That hard-right base has largely rejected the Reagan/Romney old guard of the party, although there are still millions of registered Republicans and hundreds of Republican politicians nationwide who haven’t yet surrendered to the Trump/neofascist ideologues.
While the Democratic Party has been actively abandoning its neoliberal Clinton wing and gone all in on the Bernie/Biden progressive policies that have helped America recover from Trump’s botched pandemic response, the GOP is experiencing an existential identity crisis. Will they go back to simply being the shills for big business and the morbidly rich, as they’ve been since the 1920s? Or will the Party finally purge itself of the remnants of the Romney moderates and go all in on oligarchy and fascism?
While it looks right now like it’s heading toward that latter outcome, I believe the failure of Jim Jordan’s effort to seize the speaker’s seat is a sign that the power of the MAGA wing is fading. On the other hand, a recent poll shows 31 percent of Republicans are willing to explore an “alternative form of government , ” which should give us all pause. The work now is for all of us who know people who’ve been sucked into the MAGA cult to do our best to de-program them. As Jen Senko — who wrote The Brainwashing of My Dad — discovered, the best way to pull that job off is to get them to stop watching Fox or other hard-right media and expose them instead to the fact-based world.
For people with elderly parents or relatives who are falling deeper and deeper into the cult, multiple callers to my show have testified they got great results by using the child-lock settings on their TV to make Fox and other rightwing channels unavailable. Whatever it takes, it’s worth it: Jen found that when her father lost Fox for a few weeks he stopped being upset and angry and turned back into the kind and loving man she’d grown up with.
Article is LOCKED by author/seeder
Tags
Who is online
106 visitors
The bothsidesers will now say "this is Alternet, they are as bad as (fill in the blank) on the right.
The difference is the content. Unless you want to claim that all political thoughts and beliefs are equally valuable, the content is what matters.
This article by the way, is written by the progressive talk show host and author Thom Hartmann.
"Along with other fascist and extremist billionaires and the talk radio and TV hosts they employ, Trump has transformed the base of the party into something that resembles the Brownshirt movement of 1930s Germany with a vigorous embrace of racism, bigotry, and violence as performance art."
Really? Seriously? That would be awful if it were true, but it's not. It's obvious that the author is a hard left progressive nut job.
Sounds like you need to get out more and talk to normal people.
Using far left alternet as a source only serves as a rational for the right to use their far right sources. In the end this is self-defeating as both make a mockery of 'free' speech by using it to further divide a rabid public. Change but several nouns and this could have been written by any radicalised nutter of any political stripe.
Yikes!
There is no comparison between the Democrats of today and the Republicans of today. People who dont understand that and express that fact can be considered "bothsidesers". Bothsidesism is not going to get us out of the current predicament, it will reinforce it.
Nor is allout verbal warfare, it's a trap.
Do you believe that MAGA is a cult?
I have just finished watching a 20 part series on the history of cults, they certainly fit many of the defining aspects.
Unlike the Kennedys, Trump never went after the Mafia.
It was Bobby’s way of showing independence from Old Joe.