A longtime conservative consultant says the Tea Party has morphed into the Troll Party.

[kpete]

How the Tea Party Got Hijacked by Trump’s Troll Party
As the candidates gather at the Reagan Library for the second 2016 presidential debate, a longtime conservative consultant says the Tea Party has morphed into the Troll Party—and it’s a fight for the soul of the GOP.

All my life, the Republican Party has been my political home. Helping it succeed has been my work for decades. It was never perfect, but families never are.

............

The Troll Party puts nationalist, anti-establishment bluster before the tenets of our constitutional republic.

..........

The Troll Party, following the great traditions of actual and wannabe revolutionaries, shifted its focus from the external to the internal enemy. As with most “liberation” movements, the constant search for traitors in their own ranks is usually a sign they’re entering a phase Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, or Miscavige would recognize. The witch hunt for apostates takes precedence over accomplishing their stated political goals.

.......... They don’t want simply to burn down the Establishment. They want to burn down its infrastructure, and salt the earth around it.

...........

Nothing is more important to them than Trump as an avatar for their rage. They’ve become a fun house mirror version of everything we once mocked Obama supporters for being: cultish, immune to facts, swift to attack apostates, glassy-eyed and swaying as if the Great Man was going to lead them to the Kool-Aid troughs in the hot Guyana sun. They’ve become like Scientologists, only more fanatical, more vengeful, more sealed in a hermetic political domain where nothing matters but fury, acting out, and punishing the unbelievers.


.........They’re not a solution to Washington’s dysfunction, and they don’t want to be. They demand the Republican Party be broken and recast as Trump’s Party. As a lifelong Republican and conservative, I see the Troll Party as nothing but a small, grim, deeply negative vision of a republic whose best traditions they’re willing to abandon to appease their boundless anger.


MORE:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/16/how-the-tea-party-got-hijacked-by-trump-s-troll-party.html

[stone space]

1. Morphed? (nt)

[hifiguy]

7. My first thought as well.

When WERE'NT they cave orcs, xenophobes, bridge trolls, fly-eating lunatics and inbred duck-fckers?

[Jim Lane]

9. I think "morphed" is correct.

You ask when they weren't cave orcs, etc. (Insert obligatory objection to your defamation of all the fine upstanding cave orcs you've insulted.)

Which President sent in the 101st Airborne to force the desegregation of the schools in Little Rock? It was Eisenhower, who also federalized the National Guard after the Governor, a Democrat, had ordered Guardsmen to block out the black students who tried to go to school.

Which President signed into law the National Environmental Policy Act, which established the EPA and required all executive federal agencies prepare environmental assessments and environmental impact statements? It was Nixon.

The modern Republican Party didn't fully emerge until the Reagan Administration.

[hifiguy]

10. It had been a long time a-brewing

as Rick Perlstein describes in his must-read trilogy* - arguably since the aborted Business Plot against FDR. The oligarchy spent 40 years - the FDR, Truman, Ike, JFK/LBJ and Nixon years - building their machine in explicit collaboration with nutbar religulous idiots.# They then made their move against the hapless Jerry Ford in 1976 and took over the party by 1980; the result was the Zombie King Raygun presidency. And it has been going to hell in a handcard ever since.

* Before The Storm
Nixonland
The Invisible Bridge

# See Kevin Kruse, One Nation Under God.

[M.G.]

2. Interesting, but confuses Trump's support with the real problem

This is an OK piece, but the author is overly focussed on attacking Trump and his supporters.

Trump's an obvious clown, but his rise is a very minor symptom of the real problem - conservative pigheadedness and aversion to rational politics and analysis - which should have been evident to any serious person more than a decade ago.

At the level of national politics, Conservatives have been largely immune to reason for many years. Don't blame Trump for taking advantage of that. Blame Fox News, hosts of assorted radio charlatans, and crass catering to religious fundamentalism and know-nothingism - that is to say, the entire national Conservative political complex.

[Populist_Prole]

4. I thought the same exact thing

The Trump thing is just a latest visual indicator in a long line of symptoms. The tea party has morphed from a faux non-partisan, faux populistic "throw ALL the bums out" group to nothing more than a re-branding of the extreme right wing of the republican party long before Trump came along.

[JHB]

3. Here's the thing, Mr. Rick Wilson...

To use a slogan you may have heard, You Built That. Your party won power by feeding and nurturing the Troll, holding it close and whispering sweet words in its ear if only it supports you, and NOW you're aghast that the Troll has had enough of your promises and demands you stop stringing it along, finally put a ring on its finger and lie down with it, fleas and all.

This hasn't exactly happen overnight. What do you guys think you were doing back in the 90?
Sweet Jesus, the Republican Party has been purging liberal and moderate Republicans since the 70s. And let's not forget that Goldwater was a magnet for the people who saw commies under every bed and thought Kennedy was training Cuban troops in Georgia to launch a Communist takeover of the US (so the Jade Helm crap is nothing new).

You've been selectively blind for, what now, all of your adult life? Welcome to "useful idiot"-hood.

[forsaken mortal]

5. Has the idiot ever asked himself why so many repubs are wanting to burn down the establishment?

The "conservative traitors" might have good reasons for wanting to do so, even though their solutions and ignorance wouldn't replace it with anything better.

[drmeow]

6. Cry me a river

oh writer of this delusional and insulting load of crap: "the GOP was the one party even vaguely amenable to limited-government conservatism," ... except for the huge unsustainable military parts ... "to at least some adherence to the Constitution over the social preferences of the moment," ... except when adherence to the Constitution interfered with YOUR either religious or anti communist ideology ... "and to the constraints on government power that our Founding Fathers so cherished." ... except when our party is in power.

You are clearly a HUGE part of the problem, you created this monster, and I hope you disappear along with your party. Don't let the door hit you.

[hifiguy]

8. A good analogy is Doctor Frankenstein

complaining that the Monster he built is tearing the castle down on top of him.