How did this monster get created?

[yuiyoshida]

The decades of GOP lies that brought us Donald Trump, Republican front-runner
Donald Trump did not happen overnight. He's the product of a dangerous, cynical GOP strategy that dates back years



How did America get to such a place that someone like Donald Trump can command a lead in the Republican primaries? Trump is the product of a deliberate Republican strategy, adopted by Richard Nixon’s people in 1968, to attract voters with an apocalyptic redemption story rather than reasoned argument. It has taken almost 50 years, but we have finally arrived at the culmination of postmodern politics in which Republican leaders use words to create their own reality.

After World War II, President Dwight Eisenhower and men like New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller led the Republican Party with policies based in reasoned argument. They used the government to regulate the economy and to promote social welfare, much as Democrats did, although with a philosophy that emphasized social unity rather than class conflict. The policies of these “Me Too” Republicans infuriated Movement Conservatives on the far right, who insisted that all government activism was communism. In 1964, Movement Conservative spokesman Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater won the Republican nomination when Rockefeller’s womanizing spectacularly imploded his candidacy. Movement Conservatives used their hero’s nomination to advance a new kind of politics.

America’s moderate consensus was enormously popular, but Phyllis Schlafly, the president of the Illinois Federation of Republican Women, flat-out denied that reality. In her famous book “A Choice Not an Echo,” she insisted that studies showing that voters opposed Goldwater’s extremism were part of a “propaganda machine” that used fake polls, radio and newspapers to destroy anyone but the chosen candidates of an elite cabal. She explained that all government activism outside of military buildup was a conspiracy to bankrupt regular Americans. Financiers and banking interests fed off expensive policies pushed by an educated Eastern elite, and together these men were dragging America into the web of communism.

The world was really quite simple, Schlafly insisted, and it could be understood without any fancy education. It was divided in two, black and white, Communism and Freedom. Eggheads complained that Goldwater “had one-sentence solutions” for complicated problems, she wrote, but simple solutions were the answer. What should America do about communism? Stop it! The very fact that establishment Republicans opposed Goldwater’s nomination proved that he was the right man for the job. He was the “grass roots” candidate, the candidate for the little guy who voted his principles, not because he wanted a payoff.

http://www.salon.com/2015/07/19/how_did_this_monster_get_created_the_decades_of_gop_lies_that_brought_us_donald_trump_republican_front_runner/

[Uncle Joe]

1. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, yuiyoshida.

[yuiyoshida]

3. Most welcome Uncle Joe

I would really like to see people read this, its important!

[Uncle Joe]

6. I agree, yuiyoshida, it is important, fear trumps reason, reason trumps faith and faith trumps fear.

The Republicans had mastered the propaganda art of inducing or magnifying the emotional feelings of fear, hatred and suspicion, doing so would reduce or eliminate rational thoughts of we the peoples' true calling by making it suspect.

"Goverment became the enemy," reason, rational discourse and compromise were taboo.

In keeping reason subdued and the concept of "faith" placed exclusively in the religious corner; much of which was towing the Republican line, the peoples faith in government was diminished as a result, thus fear ruled the land.

Then it was just a matter of divide, distract and conquer.

Simple answers to complex problems were the order of the day and for that matter still is.

“Voters are basically lazy,” one Nixon media adviser wrote. “Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand…. When we argue with him, we… seek to engage his intellect…. The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable….” Nixon’s people hired advertising executive Harry Treleaven, who believed the new medium of television had changed the nature of politics. For him, politicians were no longer policy wonks; they were actors with a narrative.

Under Treleaven, Nixon’s people ignored policy positions and instead used television to create a candidate with a simple message: America was on the brink of disaster, and only Nixon could save it. They hired a brilliant young photographer to put together a series of television ads from stock photographs strung together to create a sense of doom; at the end a voice intoned “Nixon” over an iconic image of the nation. At the end of every ad ran the words: “Vote like your whole world depended on it.”

(snip)

It did. And so, after 1968, Republicans increasingly relied on their apocalyptic redemption story. America was in terrible trouble, because grasping minorities, women and workers wanted government policies that would suck tax dollars from hardworking white people. Democrats backed those policies because they would do anything to buy votes. It was up to Republicans to restore America to its former glory. In a time of dramatic economic and social upheaval, this story reassured voters left behind in the new conditions that the answers to their problems were simple, and that coming up with those answers required no great education or thought. It simply required the right principles.

http://www.salon.com/2015/07/19/how_did_this_monster_get_created_the_decades_of_gop_lies_that_brought_us_donald_trump_republican_front_runner/

Peace to you.

[yuiyoshida]

9. Well said...

Thank you

[Zambero]

2. Ironically, icon Goldwater would moderate over time

However, his party did not, passing him on the right with a vengeance.

[longship]

4. I am glad this article highlights Schlafly.

She is still at her schtick. She is a horrible person.
R&

[90-percent]

5. Monsters?

My concern is the monsters that are my fellow Americans that put him in first place in Republican polling. Some Americans can be mean, stupid and chronically fearful and selfish.

And is illegal immigration really a problem? Do my fellow DU'ers receive a negative direct effect from illegal immigrants. Are they on a rampant robbing and raping spree all over the USA as Trump pretty much stated explicitly.

And the insinuation that only inferior soldiers get captured, injured or killed is revoltingly insulting and cowardly and hypocritical.

Lastly, how long did Trump serve in Viet Nam?

-90% Jimmy

[Nitram]

8. Trump could only accomplish what he has with the republican base...

...because the GOP has pandered for so long to anybody who can get the low information bigoted conservative voter excited. Doesn't matter how extreme they are, if the local eat it up, the GOP loves it. Now they're stuck with this Frankenstein monster of their own making.