Trigger warning in effect for some of you conks...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/rep ... mg00000009The GOP Is No Longer A ‘Conservative’ Party
They’ve become radical, and they want to remake America.
To most Americans, “conservative” is interchangeable with “Republican Party.” After all, the GOP has usually been the more conservative side of a two-party system for a century. We also tend to understand who a conservative is based on the root of the word: someone who is cautious and respects the status quo, or, put more strongly, someone who is resistant to change.
But the term has philosophical roots, too, separate from the party. Political parties are fundraising organizations attached to a policy platform. Over time, platforms change. The Republican Party has been around more than 160 years and has changed directions many times, as has the Democratic Party. At its founding, the GOP was abolitionist (a radical position at the time), pro-Union (that is, for “big” government over states’ rights) and for the expansion of individual rights. The GOP became firmly conservative only in the 20th century.
From a European perspective, however, both U.S. parties have been conservative since World War II (that is, both are on the right end of the spectrum of most modern parliamentary democracies), and at the same time, both parties have always been liberal, as inheritors of Enlightenment notions of citizens’ rights, individual liberty and representative government.
But gradual shifts in the GOP over the last two or three decades that culminated in Donald Trump’s election in 2016 have changed all that. The GOP is no longer a conservative party in any meaningful way. It is instead something else, and it needs a more accurate description.......
Where liberal democracy focuses on equal rights and opportunities for individuals to do what they want, short of imposing on others’ rights, socialism focuses on harnessing the productivity of all for the benefit of all, a collectivist perspective. Nationalism is also inherently collectivist because the nation is held above its component parts: the people. The core idea all fascists had in common was the supremacy of the nation over the lives or liberty of its citizens, as well as their nation’s superiority over others. The Nazi use of “socialist” in the full form of its party name, National Socialists, implied this collectivism but, by adding “national,” rejected everything else about socialism that made it socialism: its aim of economic equality without regard to divisions by ethnicity or religion. This appealed to voters who might have been tempted by the economic promise of socialism but recoiled from its rejection of their identity and traditional values..........
But 2016 has forced Americans to pay attention to virulent nationalism and everything that goes with it. America has always had a resentful, white-supremacist nationalism based on hating the “other” and rejecting liberalism. What changed in 2016 is that a major party embraced this fringe, handed it power and is now refusing to check that power with anything more than a furrowed brow. Whether motivated by cynicism, greed, fear, delusion, helplessness or true belief, by its inaction the Republican Party has abandoned the last vestiges of a conservatism that is skeptical of change, values individual liberty and accepts the premise of representative government. This Republican Party is a radical right containing elements of theocracy (Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and the evangelical base) and fascism (the extreme alt-right, who remain unrenounced by the president and who are represented in the White House by Chief Strategist Steve Bannon).....
Liberals and conservatives, in the proper sense of those words, are now both uncomfortably covered by the shade of the never-Trump tent. Both accept the premise of rights and representative government, and watch in horror as norms are flouted daily. A party that used to represent limited government encroachment on individual lives moved ― through a religiously motivated drive to control women’s bodies ― into a new present, where the president, Cabinet and Congress explicitly oppose the government they run in every respect but their personal domination of it. Their voting base ― largely white and evangelical ― cheer the undermining of democracy through voting restrictions and boo defenses of traditional American values, such as freedom of the press, separation of church and state, the right to protest, and checks and balances. These elected officials and their base voters are not conservatives in any sense that doesn’t warp the term beyond recognition.
