To what degree is the rise of an extreme candidate like Trump the Republican Party's own fault? There's a great article (in Dutch, sadly) I read this morning that tried to explain the rise of Trump using the insights of Thomas Mann and Norman Orstein: [...] Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party. That quote is from 2012. The article further argues that the polarizing politics of the Republican Party has lead to candidates getting ever closer to the end of the political spectrum. "Trump is what you get when your party abandons all moderate politics." Do you think there's truth to that?Today, thanks to the GOP, compromise has gone out the window in Washington. In the first two years of the Obama administration, nearly every presidential initiative met with vehement, rancorous and unanimous Republican opposition in the House and the Senate, followed by efforts to delegitimize the results and repeal the policies. The filibuster, once relegated to a handful of major national issues in a given Congress, became a routine weapon of obstruction, applied even to widely supported bills or presidential nominations. And Republicans in the Senate have abused the confirmation process to block any and every nominee to posts such as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, solely to keep laws that were legitimately enacted from being implemented.
One hundred percent. The Republican Party used to be all about fiscal conservancy and social issues weren't their bag. Remember - Richard Nixon not only started the EPA, he wound down the Vietnam War and launched the HMO act, which was sponsored by Ted Kennedy. When the Democrats managed to run him out of office, however, the sting of "Dirty Tricks" and the annihilation of Barry Goldwater combined to convince the party to listen to Lee Atwater (and others) to appeal to the baser instincts of uneducated whites through the Southern Strategy, religious conservatism and other similar gambits. The only way to get the poor to vote against their own self-interests is through broad values appeal and the Republicans were perfectly willing to become the party of God, Guns and Glory. Lee Atwater learned from Nixon, Karl Rove learned from Lee Atwater. The Tea Party? Didn't exist prior to a black man becoming president. Trump is what you get when your party abandons all moderate voters. Something like 80% of the country believes that abortion should be legal in some cases at least, for example, and the number one concern across all spectrums is jobs. Yet the republicans are still about repealing Roe V. Wade and are willing to make Obamacare their Waterloo.