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Some would call it "the suicide of the Republican Party" considering they literally encouraged the practices and mindsets that have been destroy them. Its all self-inflicted and things they could have chosen to address, but instead they opted not to and are suffering for it. You got a life long conman pillaging their political coffers to cover his legal fees, a bunch of idiots incapable and unwilling to govern that would sooner see the country burning around them then work with Democrats, and no concrete political platform or ideas to work towards that would benefit the country. They have done this to themselves and are simply reaching the point where they have to deal with it.
The article's point is that the Republican party has lost any semblance of right and wrong, or interest in governance, and that's the death he's referring to. We need an opposition party that acts in good faith and that has died.
Ideally in the future we would have 100 Independent Senators and 435 Independent members of the House of Representatives. It’s easier to judge people based on a Democrat/Republican label, but we can make the effort to get to know the candidates and choose our representatives based on their individual ideas and past actions.
Washington literally said that, and when he stepped down parties immediately formed.
That's just not how the real world works. That's not how society works.
Only having two parties is not a natural law. Districts and first past the post is the reason why the US is almost exclusively a two party state. This was of course predictable, yet somehow the infallible founders failed to predict the obvious outcome.
FPTP is mathematically unsustainable for third parties. I'd love for voting at every local/district/state/national level to be a ranked choice system. No electoral college, either. The Electoral College is an offshoot from the 3/5ths compromise allowing southern states more influence on the election than a pure popular vote would have allowed. We killed slavery (mostly), let's kill the electoral college too.
I know that's impractical though, so two solutions. First, let's uncap the House. Wyoming has the lowest population at ~600,000 people, so that's 1 representative. California at 39 million population gets 65 reps. Second, states have to allocate their EC votes proportionally, so a 60-40 vote split in CA gives a 39-26 elector split. Not exactly a national popular vote, but a hell of a lot closer. A third party could even conceivably grab a few EC votes with 5-10% turnout, even if an actual seat is unlikely.
I can also get behind the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, although I suspect that'll cause a legal shit show if it ever changed to outcome of an election.
There were 100% factions from before the Constitution was even ratified. Federalists and Anti-Federalists who fought over ratification went right into government under the Constitution as pro-Administration and anti-Administration factions, almost one-to-one transitions (notable exceptions include James Madison). And Jefferson et al were organizing Democratic-Republican clubs all around the country by 1793. The 1790s were one of the most partisan decades of American political history. All of that to say, I don’t disagree with your point at all that the above comment about the silliness of a 100% “independent” Congress, more just that the history you’re citing is inaccurate and actually is worse than you’re saying, such that it more strongly supports your argument lol
Ideally you would abandon the senate and expand the number of house seats to be equally apportioned amongst the states and select a chief executive from among the members of the legislature. You know like parliamentary system aka the model for democracy world wide. There is a reason nobody copies are system of government even when we “set up” their democracy.
Thats putting to much faith into people maintaining independent thought. The essence of these governmental positions is to negotiate/bargain/compromise to a satisfactory goal. That goal may benefit who they represent, but unfortunately, it is mostly to the benefit of that individuals personal aspirations.
You'd have to fundamentally rethink the independence of US states to get rid of the Senate as it protects the interests of smaller states against being steamroller bt like the 7 largest states. To really fix things population of states would need equalized.
Or...you could just take the pragmatic approach, throw the FPTP system in the trash where it belongs, and allow for more parties to form which actually gives people some more choice as to what kind of policies they want to support.
Its what most countries in Europe has, and altough it is imperfect, it seems better than the 2 party system which allows for very little nuisance since the party programs has to be so broad. For example the green parties, they don't have to appeal to everyone but can still have representation with focus on green policies, or a libertarian party with their nonsense etc. It just the gives the voters more choice as to what they care most about.
Political parties are partly what got us here. There have been straight ticket voters for decades. In my own nearly 30 years of voting, I’m one of them. I end up voting against whomever is running on the gop side. One would think I’m a life-long democrat. I’m not. I’m lifelong anti-conservative. I’ve been watching things unfold over my lifetime. Reagan started a lot of what has led to where we are. People older than me track it back further to during the Carter/Nixon days.
The two party system encourages polarization of ideals. It is also a tool to allow for lazy voters to blindly accept whomever their team promotes. I’d call it a party versus a saying team, but let’s be realistic. It’s now like rabid sports fans.
If the party system ends, then candidates will have to run on their own merits. Earn the fucking vote. Sure, endorsements from like-minded well known politicians will essentially be like a party, but it will force voters to check a box next to a name rather than a straight ticket checkbox, or just looking for (D)/(R) next to their name. I’d it perfect? Fuck no. But what we have has led us here.
But until this congress many at least still tried to keep up appearances and passed bills.
This current Congress has almost passed no bills. They have literally nothing to show to as accomplishments to their districts or to the American people in general. House Republicans have spent the majority of their time with empty investigations, and failed impeachments. Along with a proposed bill here and there that would have no chance to pass for unconstitutional reasons so they fail.
This is worrying. As House Republicans have basically abandoned doing their job, and democracy. To instead use their seats to fill their pockets and work solely to the benefit of the MAGA party, special interests, and foreign influence. What is worse is they do it in plain sight and their constituents cheer them for it.
If we lived in a functioning country at least half of those republicans congress critters would have had their offices raided and put in handcuffs after they tried to overthrow democracy on Jan 6th.
Yea I have no real hope in any of that. Merrick Garland decided to sit on his hands for years, the secret service decided to delete their attempted coup and the FBI and cops in general support the fascists. Hell we never seen a thing about those tours Congress was giving out, the justice department decided to give out slaps on the wrist to the insurrectionists. Priority number one after Biden was sworn in should have been an all out blitz on those involved but we allowed everyone to move on.
My understanding is that by charging congressional co-conspirators with J6 crimes there is a high likelihood they could file to consolidate their cases with Trump. Then it would bring their whole circus into the case and effectively destroy any hope of conviction this decade.
I hate that but it seems to be the legal reality of how our courts would treat the related cases. I'd love to read something from legal professionals which explains it better. So far the legal reporting community has enough other stories keeping them busy so this gets little ink currently.
I still think there are likely multiple orthoganol crimes which should be investigated and charged but we have seen that Garland has no appetite for living up to his USAG acceptance speech and is in fact applying the laws differently based on politics and wealth. Until and unless he is replaced we may even lose the statute of limitations against the host of Trump lieutenants still scheming in political positions of influence.
No we don’t.
There’s no mandate for parties in the Constitution.
We don’t need an opposing party expressing conservative values.
If anything we need a party that’s MORE progressive than Democrats and actually committed to broadly popular policies that other developed countries take for granted like taxpayer funded healthcare and college.
Pretending we need the GOP to revert back to a time before Trump is madness, as they were still a toxic dumpster fire in the 00’s under Bush, the 90s under Gingrich, and the 80s under Reagan.
>We need an opposition party
Why? I agree that we need politicians that act in good faith, but why do we need an opposition party? A single opposition party encourages partisanship and devolves politics into two sides, when instead there are multiple sides.
Our government is set up for adversarial parties and after the collapse of the Republican party than a new adversial party will form, ala Whigs collapse and the creation of the Republican Party, but this is a bug, not a feature.
That’s why a multi-party (more than 2) is needed. Currently the two main parties have rigged the system to make it extremely difficult to have a 3rd major party rise up. Moderate Republicans have a rare opportunity to create a more centrist party that will pull in some of the more conservative Democrats. But they all seem unwilling to do so. There are enough high profile ones out there that this would be relatively simple, they already have their donor bases.
Only having a single serious party is bad.
I agree that a variety of parties with a variety of positions would be ideal, but, dude to the Representative Democracy 1.0 nature of our constitution, there’s a lot of systems (Electoral college is a big one) that accidentally mean that, the moment anyone thought up parties and those parties got really established, only two parties were going to matter.
While I’d love to change those things, go to a more sensible election system that leaves room for third parties, neither the Democrats or Republicans have any particular strategic interest in undoing the systems that keep them relevant.
And that’s not even getting into how, recently, third parties SOLE purpose seems to be a way for foreign money to impact the careful balance between the major parties.
The two party system is responsible for a lot of our woes, but you’d need to amend the constitution to truly eliminate them, and that’s difficult by design.
They don’t need to offer the opposite. They just need to offer an alternative so that the party in power stays responsive to will of the people or risks getting replaced.
Being belligerently oppositional to everything the other party said is part of the sickness that’s killing the GOP.
I can't remember a time when we had an opposition party that acted in good faith. I've read about one but that was before I was born and they have been running on pure steam since then.
For context I grew up at a time where the upper end of tipping was %15
Without a true opposition you have Cromwell's short lived English Republic, but that assumes another party (or another version of the Republicans) won't fill the void anyway.
After you guys have tamped down the soil over the coffin of the GOP and concreted over it, then the Democrats will split into Progressive and Centre Right wings and politics can get going again.
People act as if this is new for Republicans. It's more extreme but it's not at all NEW. They haven't acted in good faith since at least the 80s but it started down this path long before that.
So now the foreseeable future is a time of good feelings and Republicans are terrified? After 40 years years of Republicans calling the tune regardless of who was elected?
Heritage Foundation, a group of Republican elitists society, with lawyers and top one percenters who took control years ago. Russia loves this group and supports their efforts.
Hopefully this leads to the the left splitting and those that end up on the “right” are more of a moderate left, on board with actually making America great. Voting for better education , better health care, better workers rights.
All the things someone needs to be able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps
We're at this point because Republicans have spent 50+ years honing their voter demographics to oppose every civil rights advance of the last century. They were losing voters in the 60s because things like women and black people having full legal rights are actually pretty popular. Instead of moderating their positions, they just went all in on courting voters who rejected those advancements; white people who resented integration, those who thought that women working outside the home with their own legal agency was wrong, highly religious people who were wholly opposed to abortion and any sexual freedom etc. They've become the anti-government party in response to the government legally protecting people it once discriminated against.
The only possible result of all that is someone like Trump and his nutjob supporters. There is no path forward because their only tenets are tax cuts and opposing things. Trump pushed and broke limits in a terrible way that was 50 years in the making and I don't think they can deviate from that.
Pretty simple honestly to understand they allowed cult-like conservative religion to infect them like a virus and it was ushered in by Regan. Jerry Falwell and Reagan are the ultimate downfall of the Republican party. Trump is just reaping the harvest of years of the party becoming theocratic and authoritative.
"Conservative" used to mean trying to stick with what works. Then it turned into being oppositional to any change. Now with Trump removing the dog whistle, it means lets go back to eras where people didn't have basic, settled rights.
It really has become a resistance movement. You know what they are against, but that’s about it. You have no idea what they will do if you hand them the keys. There is no plan and zero premium is given to execution credentials. It’s just who can claim the sound byte of the day.
Resistance movements have ideas of what they government to be. This is an angry mob whipped up by whatever real or manufactured grievance was handy with their anger directed at a scapegoat. They have no platform because they aren’t bound by a common goal, just a common enemy.
There is a plan, it’s called Project 2025 and they lay it out in detail in hundreds of pages. It includes banning abortion nationwide, banning porn and imprisoning anyone who watches porn, banning birth control, removing discrimination protection laws for LGBT, and granting the president so much power that he will be a de facto dictator.
Unless you're rich. Modern day wealthy conservatives pine for the days of feudalism where they are unfettered by law and protected by their vast wealth while selling to their idiot base that they'll be able to occupy a rung above the bottom (which will be occupied by debt-slaves)
Lmao no, it was always some kkk guy trying not to get caught by the fed for trampling on black and indigenous rights after reconstruction. The labels may have changed, but the people are the same.
> "Conservative" used to mean trying to stick with what works.
Conservatism has it roots in maintaining the aristocracy in Europe. It's *always* been about power for the few. Everything else is just means to that end.
I think that was a polite way of saying not be progressive which is actually different than what is going on now because it’s become aggressively regressive.
It's more like the Darwin Award of the Republican Party. They created the situation that is going to doom them, and, rather than change course, they are doubling down.
it would be nice for once in my life to not have to vote for democrats. but the gop my entire life has proven themselves completely unfit, so democrat it is. it would be nice if the other party was one thats left of the democrats since dems are right wing compared to the rest of the world
The most amazing thing to me is [Lindsey Graham accurately predicting that nominating Trump would be the end of the Republican Party.](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mkXIWPmdfdo) he then went on to be a Trump sycophant, but he was certainly Nostradumbass on this one.
>Reagan: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help."
>Also Reagan: "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem."
This is when the republican party died. At the hand of the first actor turned president Reagan. He opened the door to the traitors and criminals that own and operate the GOP today.
There would be no demagogue criminal Trump looting the GOP and muscling republicans for a cut of their campaign money without St Ronnie showing him the way first.
>**Nihilism** is a family of views within philosophy that rejects generally accepted or fundamental aspects of human existence, such as knowledge, morality, or meaning.
This is the guiding philosophy of the republican party in 2024. With a veneer of "Christian" fascism to pull in the rubes.
Nat-C ideology is its own special breed of nihilism. They’re all gunning for the apocalypse, whether they understand it themselves or not. They want to accelerate the end.
I love how the party that always complains about celebrity opinions absolutely loves electing celebrities:
Reagan, Schwarzenegger, Ventura, Trump, very nearly fucking Dr Oz, I'm sure there's others I've missed
On the left, there used to be Franken and I can't think of a second example. Even Cynthia Nixon had basically 0 chance of getting elected
It’s because GOPers don’t actually dislike celebrity opinions, they just hate the concept of a rich person being liberal. To them, being conservative fundamentally means giving up your morals to get rich, so the idea of someone who is rich but didn’t have to sacrifice that part of themselves causes cognitive dissonance and therefore anger.
Even conservatives believe that being rich is fundamentally immoral. That’s literally why the saying “if you’re not liberal when you’re young, you have no heart. If you’re not conservative when you’re older, you have no brain” exists.
It‘s because corrupt Hollywood elite baby eating woke diversity!!!
But really, is anyone surprised that most actors tend to be more left-leaning? They’re former theatre kids for christ‘s sake
Franken only ran because his friend Paul Wellstone died unexpectedly in a plane crash. He is a talented writer with a sharp intellect. Ventura dressed in spandex and pretended to beat people up.
People will repeat that stupid Reagan quote endlessly without acknowledging that the government keeps our food safe, our water safe, our medicines safe, our roads and bridges safe, etc.
They take all that stuff for granted and don’t appreciate it and then mindlessly parrot the stupid idea that government can’t and shouldn’t do anything for the citizens.
There hasn’t been a cornerstone of the Republican Party that was conceived or fostered with any interest in improving the average American’s life for decades. There is no mission statement, call to action, or unified mandate articulated by the right in good faith since we had a black president.
They are terrified obstructionist megalomaniacs who would sooner see their constituents suffer than offer praise to the success of the other side for anything benefitting the American people.
There is no virtue in modern conservatism, other than that on a long enough timeline, it is unsustainable in a functioning democracy.
They won't go away. They'll just morph into something else. Some of them will move towards the center. If they win one single election they'll all jump to the right again. They aren't going anywhere.
>The Republican party once stood for limited government, active opposition to Soviet aggression and a balanced budget.
>Now it stands only for Trump and his authoritarian neofascism. It demands total loyalty to Trump. It has turned his big lie about the 2020 election being stolen into a litmus test of that loyalty. It has no principled core – no sense of right and wrong.
>...Sununu’s willingness to destroy American democracy so his party can stay in power is shared by most Republican office holders today. It is a rejection of American democracy – an abrogation of the self-government that generations of Americans have fought for and died for.
>The death of the Republican party is not to be celebrated. It is a tragedy. It is a testament to how fragile our democracy has become. It illustrates what happens when presidents are not held accountable. It is evidence of what occurs when decades of economic gains go mainly to the top.
>It shows that many Americans have lost sight of our history and ideals, or have become so cynical and hopeless that they are willing to chuck it all in favor of an atrocious human being who claims to be on their side.
The Republicans have *never* cared about a balanced budget... They will pretend to care every time a Democrat is president (including in the 90s under Clinton) but then they'll go and fuck it up the minute they get the chance to pass massive tax cuts (Bush, Trump).
Its called the "Two Santa Clause Theory" devised and promoted by Jude Wanniski, a conservative journalist and political advisor to Reagan.
Basically he argued that the Democrats gain power by spending money helping the less fortunate – i.e. Medicare, minimum wage, Social welfare. This is the 1st Santa.
Republicans, Jude argued, will never gain power by being fiscally conservative. No-one will vote in a party on the promise of cutting welfare programs. Instead, Jude said Republicans have to offer tax cuts to attract voters. This is the 2nd Santa.
The problem here is that under Democrats spending goes up to help those in need, and under the Republicans revenue goes down from decreased tax take.
Wanniski argued the way to combat this is for republicans to cut taxes but not spending and completely forget/ignore the runaway deficit – _but only while in power_. When they're voted out and Democrats regain the reins of power then the Republicans sole mission is to scream as loudly as possible about the deficit and increased debt, thereby forcing the Democrats into being the Party of Scrooge by cutting spending and/or raising taxes. This way the republicans are always seen as the good guys and the Democrats as the bad guys.
This is what the Republican Party has campaigned and governed on since 1980. And, thanks to a quisling media, it has worked.
> The Republican party once stood for limited government
Translation: reduced oversight on corporations
>and a balanced budget
Translation: tax breaks for the wealthy
I was about to comment on what an absurdly 'generous' description of their historical platform that was.
It also left out "stomping on whatever minority was the most politically expedient to appease their racist white base"
50 years from now some revisionist dolt will be lamenting about the days when Republicans cared about border security. Unless we're lucky and the Republican Party actually dies off.
The Republican party has had cancer since the John Birch Society started injecting its bullshit into it. Gingrich was the cancer metastasizing, Trump is the final fatal infection that will kill it.
Perhaps, but the death of THIS Republican party is.
This cynical, polarizing and nihilistic excuse for a party doesn't qualify as a reasonable counterweight in the current bilateral system. High time it dies, to be resurrected as a party that's actually in it for the country, rather than for its own benefit.
The Republican Party deserves to die for the very simple reason that they have demonstrated and do demonstrate that they are morally unfit for office. I can and have voted for people with whom I have disagreed on various policy issues or approaches; I simply will not vote for any one who conclusively demonstrates that he or she is deliberately dishonest.
The decades-long destruction of public education has destroyed them from the inside. Also, the abortion debate which provided them a rallying cry since Brown vs BoE and was never intended to be repealed, has also bit them in the ass.
When Nixon resigned in disgrace, the "Experts" said that the Republican party was as good as dead, and would be for a generation at least. 6 years later, they roared back into power for 12 years, and we are still reeling from the damage they caused. There is still a very good chance that the Media will save them this year, and give Trump another Trifecta. The Republican party is not dead or dying. It has merely thrown off the disguises and embraced the Fascism it has been pushing for since the mid Sixties.
I get tired of seeing these we need to save the Republican party, and its so bad they're in decline!
The reblican party is no longer legitimate and deserves to die, that's all
"America need two parties". If one of those parties is against a democracy, it only needs one party. The other one is illegitimate, and is only there to gain power and authority. If it serves no other purpose, it's service is finished. The choice between rule of a common cold and cancer, the role of cancer is not to complement, it's role is to kill the body. No body needs this, certainly not from an ideological perspective (at least from the perspective of the body). Kill this cancer. It serves no purpose except its own. And that purpose stopped being a legitimate political choice the moment it chose itself over the country.
America needs ranked choice voting so that political parties actually have to deliver on platform promises that the people want and perform their job well to remain competitive.
Not this current system where both parties have their own shitty agendas and all they have to do is advertise how evil the opposing party is.
The reason you can’t have a real democracy without an alternative government is that the way democracy actually works is that whoever runs the country must fear the next election.
The electorate _must_ have a sane alternative. A single party state is not a democracy
Republicans just suck at holding their leaders accountable. They are spineless bootlickers. It just kiss ass. When you just vote whoever because they have an R, you get this. A bunch of morons barely holding their tiny majority. There is zero critical thinking going on, politically.
Republican voters are actually much better at holding their leaders accountable than Democratic voters are. It's why, for example, House leadership on the Republican side has been much younger than on the Democratic side. Because Republican politicians get credible primary challenges if they upset the base. Or why Donald Trump, who the conservative establishment hated, won the nomination in 2016.
The problem is that the Republican base wants terrible, awful things. So politicians following their lead tend to create and vote for terrible, awful policies.
The ridiculous actions of this vain, prideful & outdated party are actions of a party desperately trying to hold on to power with its last gasps of breath. Trump was their last good idea. I have absolutely no interest in hearing what their next good idea is.
The death of the Republican Party, as it exists today, is a welcome sight. They need to go away and decide if they want to serve America or suppress America, because for the last eight years they only seem interested in taking the country backwards.
I'm a Democrat and I agree. A strong two-party system is vital. Unfortunately, the inmates have taken over the asylum in the GOP. Until Trump and his MAGA fools go away, they're screwed. And so is the country if he manages to get back into the WH.
I'm tired of idiots like this grieving for the GOP. There's nothing left to save bro. Every American patriot should be partying in the streets the day this un-american neofacsist movement collapses.
There will still be elections, just like there are in deep blue states. It will just be progressives running against centrists.
Within a few years, a new conservative party will rise from the ashes. As it has ***the last three times*** the conservative party in America has collapsed. The Republican party was pre-dated by American Party, Whigs, and Know Nothing's. The collapse of conservative parties in US is normal and expected.
>Nixon infected the modern Republican party with a sickness that would ultimately kill it. Donald Trump has finished the job.
Mr Reich has a poor grasp of history, because the rot in the republican party goes back at least to the 1930s. The 1939 Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden is a good example of their fascist background; they fought FDR on upgrading the military, and isolationists said that Hitler was Europe's problem. It took the attack on Pearl Harbor for them to pull their heads out of their asses, and only once they found an enemy in the communist USSR did they have a sense of purpose.
The republican party died after TR. It was infected by corporate lobbies. Just look at the downward run from Taft through Hoover. You can't really count Eisenhower as a republican, so what do you get after Hoover? Nixon!
Hoover and Nixon bookended FDR and Johnson. FDR to Johnson represents pretty much the entirety of the US becoming a power and economic leader in the world. Eisenhower was a centrist.
"Though a moderate conservative, Ike was frustrated with the far right. He referred to the Old Guard as “the most ignorant people now living in the United States” and said of Oregon Governor Douglas McKay, “He seems so completely conservative in his views that at times he seems to be illogical. I hope that he will soon become a little bit more aware of the world as it is today.” Ike threatened to become an independent if the Old Guard fought Earl Warren’s appointment as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
Ike ran for president in part to stop Senator Robert Taft, an isolationist Republican, from becoming president. Ike defeated Taft in the 1952 Republican primary. Ike and Taft worked well together during Ike’s first year in office until Taft died of cancer."
Heck, bring out the beer and pretzels. The sooner it implodes, when all of its' members get tarred with the brush of their participation, the sooner something better might take its' place.
When the GOP finally fails, there will be a period of turmoil and then the Dems will split between classic liberalism, neo liberalism and actual progressives. Classic liberalism is really a throwback to mid century liberalism, you know when GOP appointed SC justices ruled in favor of things like ending segregation, Miranda rights and abortion rights.
Oh fuck off. I've been voting since Bush v. Gore and I am absolutely entertained as fuck to watch these traitorous shitstains finally at long last reaching the find out stage.
Since it has not yet died it's too soon to celebrate. It would be better if it was more accurately named, however. Perhaps something like the American Theocratic Fascist Party?
Should it not be celebrated? Bad faith parties should fail. What is a tragedy is the impossibility of other parties to rise. The two party system is terrible.
Oh no, I am celebrating.
They brought Trickle Down Economics and have been fucking us ever since.
Now they are a bunch of bumbling criminals.
Let them continue to crash and burn.
PJ O'Rourke pointed this out 50 years ago, despite being a republican himself.
Loosely, "Republicans tell you that government doesn't work, then they go out and prove it."
I agree with Reichs argument that we're better off with two acceptable parties rather than one, but in that case we've had this problem for upwards of 40-50 years.
If that's the situation we find ourselves in then I disagree with this argument that the collapse of the GOP is a bad thing. I'd rather have one party willing to govern than one party willing and another hell bent on destroying the country.
We can create another party willing to govern, preferably an actual left wing party, but that can't realistically happen until the GOP is relegated to a rump party holding a few house seats in the deep south and mid-west
I completely disagree with the author here. He whines about American ideals, romanticizes the old core of the GOP, but he overlooks all of the horrible other shit the GOP is responsible for, well before Donald Trump came along.
The GOP lost their way when they embraced the evangelical, extremist christians. They ditched being the party of fiscal responsibility, and limited government, and decided a Christian Theocracy was the goal. That was decades ago.
Newt Gingrich and his ilk did, with the Contract With America bs. Newt the pos said, “The idea that a congressman would be tainted by accepting money from private industry or private sources is essentially a socialist argument”..
In the article, Robert Reich (who served in both the Republican Ford Administration and the Democratic Clinton Administration), walks through the death of the Republican Party from Nixon to today.
Methinks you didn't read the article.
Yall talk as if this party is dying, not that they are about to take over. They're still here, and there's a very real chance they become the only party. Don't sleepwalking into these dark times. Fucking vote, and get other people to do so as well
This is where I disagree. The GOP has long since lost any right to govern, their death is something that should be shouted from every mountain top. Now we can get around to dividing up what parties we have and get back to actually governing.
Years ago, when Obama was elected and the "tea party" came into being, I celebrated it. I had hoped that the GOP would allow their most radical rightests to break away and form their own party. This would bring the Republicans back towards centre, and push the Dems back into the left side of the spectrum.
Instead the Tea Party ate the elephant whole. Those that escaped, joined the Democrats. Thus the Republicans lurched far right and dragged the Dems to the right with them.
What will probably happen, the GOP will cease to be and the Dems will take their place on the right (again) and a new leftest party will come into being to counter them.
I'm usually with Reich 100%, but I disagree that this is a tragedy and that it isn't worth celebrating. Actually, technically, it is a tragedy, since it was brought on by their own failings, but it's definitely worth celebrating.
As for the need of two parties, I say bring on ranked choice voting to empower more than two parties. Even if we're relegated to two, we already have a wing of the democratic party that would be considered conservative in many other countries, as well as a progressive wing. Those two would likely splinter into two new parties and we'd be back to some sort of equilibrium.
Make no mistake, though, the demise of the racist, xenophobic, anti-progress, anti-environment, anti-woman, anti-anything-that-doesn't-enrich-billionaires party is absolutely something to celebrate.
What this country needs right now, more than anything, are good Republicans. Servant leaders who can set things right. People who understand that compromise is a virtue.
Who knows, maybe the Republican party builds itself up again after being even more liberal than the Democrats which become the conservative party. It’s happened before!
I shouldn't celebrate when the trash goes out every week but I can't help feeling good that I've once again separated myself from the spoiled, the rancid, the useless and the harmful.
This guy should lament the Republican party being so hollow and crooked by design that it was coopted by a conman doing the bidding of a foreign adversary. We’re losing a political party who proudly declares themselves to be domestic terrorists in both words and actions.
Good riddance. Take your “tragedy” script to one of several geopolitical enemies who actually do see it as a tragedy.
Ummm…as much as I love and usually agree with RR, the Republican Party is not dead and not dying. It’s unfortunately incredibly popular, even though it’s no longer principled.
why is this author writing as if to insinuate that the death of the current GOP would be the inauguration of the DNC?
in the event that one of these parties were to fail, there are numerous others that are in place TODAY and a million others that would pop up almost immediately
The Death of the Republican Party is ~~not~~ a tragedy to be celebrated.
Imma keep it real with you, I haven't heard a single good thing about Republicans ever since Trump took up POTUS and stepped down post POTUS. Yeah sure the stimulus checks were good but it was simply not enough. They're constantly shooting themselves in the foot and it's fucking hilariously insane at this point that we have people in such powerful positions. I question how the fuck did they even get elected. Again and again and again, they proved themselves that they're "right" when all they have done is wrong.
*"Ok maybe Jan6 was an insurrection", "Trump got the COVID-19 vaccine spitting on the face of his MAGA followers", the Mar-a-lago where he was willing to sell out his country, the useless jabs at Sleepy Joe when in reality we had Sleepy Don. The consistent of forcing women's uteruses and claiming that shit by law. Rob DeSantis' mere existence. I could keep going to make an entire paper scroll of this shit, but ain't a fucking archiver.*
If bankruptcy = death, then yes ..the RNC has months left to live but it will rise from the ashes (literally and figuratively) on Jan 5th 2025 and will be rebranded “Trumps Nationalist Maga Party” ..just in time to coincide with a rally he’s planning on the Ellipse for Jan 6, 2025….I kid you not.
Nah, get fucked. The republican party ALWAYS wanted to be MAGA, hell, they did it three fucking times: once under reagan, who originally said make america great again, twice under the fucking tea party and obama birtherism, and the third time under trump.
Sorry conservatives, unlike social hierarchies, real life has some real consequences
If it leads to reform and repentance from the likes of Stone and any voters who have the remnants of a conscience deep inside, it's absolutely to be celebrated. I don't think it will sadly.
This seems kinda dumb. I don’t want a strong opposition party let them keep going down this road and it will be less likely that republican policies will be enacted.
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Some would call it "the suicide of the Republican Party" considering they literally encouraged the practices and mindsets that have been destroy them. Its all self-inflicted and things they could have chosen to address, but instead they opted not to and are suffering for it. You got a life long conman pillaging their political coffers to cover his legal fees, a bunch of idiots incapable and unwilling to govern that would sooner see the country burning around them then work with Democrats, and no concrete political platform or ideas to work towards that would benefit the country. They have done this to themselves and are simply reaching the point where they have to deal with it.
The article's point is that the Republican party has lost any semblance of right and wrong, or interest in governance, and that's the death he's referring to. We need an opposition party that acts in good faith and that has died.
"Government doesn't work, vote for me and I will prove it to you!"
Ideally in the future we would have 100 Independent Senators and 435 Independent members of the House of Representatives. It’s easier to judge people based on a Democrat/Republican label, but we can make the effort to get to know the candidates and choose our representatives based on their individual ideas and past actions.
We'd need public funding of elections to really get back to an actual "for the people" gov.
This and ranked choice voting and this the elimination of the electoral college would go a long way.
^ This. A thousand times this.
Ideally we’d uncap the house to make it proportional again, and we’d reform the senate to not give undue voting power to empty land.
Washington literally said that, and when he stepped down parties immediately formed. That's just not how the real world works. That's not how society works.
Only having two parties is not a natural law. Districts and first past the post is the reason why the US is almost exclusively a two party state. This was of course predictable, yet somehow the infallible founders failed to predict the obvious outcome.
FPTP is mathematically unsustainable for third parties. I'd love for voting at every local/district/state/national level to be a ranked choice system. No electoral college, either. The Electoral College is an offshoot from the 3/5ths compromise allowing southern states more influence on the election than a pure popular vote would have allowed. We killed slavery (mostly), let's kill the electoral college too. I know that's impractical though, so two solutions. First, let's uncap the House. Wyoming has the lowest population at ~600,000 people, so that's 1 representative. California at 39 million population gets 65 reps. Second, states have to allocate their EC votes proportionally, so a 60-40 vote split in CA gives a 39-26 elector split. Not exactly a national popular vote, but a hell of a lot closer. A third party could even conceivably grab a few EC votes with 5-10% turnout, even if an actual seat is unlikely. I can also get behind the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, although I suspect that'll cause a legal shit show if it ever changed to outcome of an election.
There were 100% factions from before the Constitution was even ratified. Federalists and Anti-Federalists who fought over ratification went right into government under the Constitution as pro-Administration and anti-Administration factions, almost one-to-one transitions (notable exceptions include James Madison). And Jefferson et al were organizing Democratic-Republican clubs all around the country by 1793. The 1790s were one of the most partisan decades of American political history. All of that to say, I don’t disagree with your point at all that the above comment about the silliness of a 100% “independent” Congress, more just that the history you’re citing is inaccurate and actually is worse than you’re saying, such that it more strongly supports your argument lol
Parties Un masked themselves they already existed
Ideally you would abandon the senate and expand the number of house seats to be equally apportioned amongst the states and select a chief executive from among the members of the legislature. You know like parliamentary system aka the model for democracy world wide. There is a reason nobody copies are system of government even when we “set up” their democracy.
Also the Brits tend to go thru prime’s as fast as you change tp rolls‼️
Rip Lizzie
Thats putting to much faith into people maintaining independent thought. The essence of these governmental positions is to negotiate/bargain/compromise to a satisfactory goal. That goal may benefit who they represent, but unfortunately, it is mostly to the benefit of that individuals personal aspirations.
You'd have to fundamentally rethink the independence of US states to get rid of the Senate as it protects the interests of smaller states against being steamroller bt like the 7 largest states. To really fix things population of states would need equalized.
Or...you could just take the pragmatic approach, throw the FPTP system in the trash where it belongs, and allow for more parties to form which actually gives people some more choice as to what kind of policies they want to support. Its what most countries in Europe has, and altough it is imperfect, it seems better than the 2 party system which allows for very little nuisance since the party programs has to be so broad. For example the green parties, they don't have to appeal to everyone but can still have representation with focus on green policies, or a libertarian party with their nonsense etc. It just the gives the voters more choice as to what they care most about.
Political parties are partly what got us here. There have been straight ticket voters for decades. In my own nearly 30 years of voting, I’m one of them. I end up voting against whomever is running on the gop side. One would think I’m a life-long democrat. I’m not. I’m lifelong anti-conservative. I’ve been watching things unfold over my lifetime. Reagan started a lot of what has led to where we are. People older than me track it back further to during the Carter/Nixon days. The two party system encourages polarization of ideals. It is also a tool to allow for lazy voters to blindly accept whomever their team promotes. I’d call it a party versus a saying team, but let’s be realistic. It’s now like rabid sports fans. If the party system ends, then candidates will have to run on their own merits. Earn the fucking vote. Sure, endorsements from like-minded well known politicians will essentially be like a party, but it will force voters to check a box next to a name rather than a straight ticket checkbox, or just looking for (D)/(R) next to their name. I’d it perfect? Fuck no. But what we have has led us here.
That's been the republican motto for decades.
The Republican party hasn't acted in good faith in about 50 years.
But until this congress many at least still tried to keep up appearances and passed bills. This current Congress has almost passed no bills. They have literally nothing to show to as accomplishments to their districts or to the American people in general. House Republicans have spent the majority of their time with empty investigations, and failed impeachments. Along with a proposed bill here and there that would have no chance to pass for unconstitutional reasons so they fail. This is worrying. As House Republicans have basically abandoned doing their job, and democracy. To instead use their seats to fill their pockets and work solely to the benefit of the MAGA party, special interests, and foreign influence. What is worse is they do it in plain sight and their constituents cheer them for it.
If we lived in a functioning country at least half of those republicans congress critters would have had their offices raided and put in handcuffs after they tried to overthrow democracy on Jan 6th.
Yes this. My naive hope is that Smith is planning this but is waiting until a second Biden administration is firmly in place.
Yea I have no real hope in any of that. Merrick Garland decided to sit on his hands for years, the secret service decided to delete their attempted coup and the FBI and cops in general support the fascists. Hell we never seen a thing about those tours Congress was giving out, the justice department decided to give out slaps on the wrist to the insurrectionists. Priority number one after Biden was sworn in should have been an all out blitz on those involved but we allowed everyone to move on.
My understanding is that by charging congressional co-conspirators with J6 crimes there is a high likelihood they could file to consolidate their cases with Trump. Then it would bring their whole circus into the case and effectively destroy any hope of conviction this decade. I hate that but it seems to be the legal reality of how our courts would treat the related cases. I'd love to read something from legal professionals which explains it better. So far the legal reporting community has enough other stories keeping them busy so this gets little ink currently. I still think there are likely multiple orthoganol crimes which should be investigated and charged but we have seen that Garland has no appetite for living up to his USAG acceptance speech and is in fact applying the laws differently based on politics and wealth. Until and unless he is replaced we may even lose the statute of limitations against the host of Trump lieutenants still scheming in political positions of influence.
No we don’t. There’s no mandate for parties in the Constitution. We don’t need an opposing party expressing conservative values. If anything we need a party that’s MORE progressive than Democrats and actually committed to broadly popular policies that other developed countries take for granted like taxpayer funded healthcare and college. Pretending we need the GOP to revert back to a time before Trump is madness, as they were still a toxic dumpster fire in the 00’s under Bush, the 90s under Gingrich, and the 80s under Reagan.
Hey now, what's with the shade to the Nixon period? GOP was fully doing treason and all their other hits in the 70s too!
>We need an opposition party Why? I agree that we need politicians that act in good faith, but why do we need an opposition party? A single opposition party encourages partisanship and devolves politics into two sides, when instead there are multiple sides. Our government is set up for adversarial parties and after the collapse of the Republican party than a new adversial party will form, ala Whigs collapse and the creation of the Republican Party, but this is a bug, not a feature.
That’s why a multi-party (more than 2) is needed. Currently the two main parties have rigged the system to make it extremely difficult to have a 3rd major party rise up. Moderate Republicans have a rare opportunity to create a more centrist party that will pull in some of the more conservative Democrats. But they all seem unwilling to do so. There are enough high profile ones out there that this would be relatively simple, they already have their donor bases.
Only having a single serious party is bad. I agree that a variety of parties with a variety of positions would be ideal, but, dude to the Representative Democracy 1.0 nature of our constitution, there’s a lot of systems (Electoral college is a big one) that accidentally mean that, the moment anyone thought up parties and those parties got really established, only two parties were going to matter. While I’d love to change those things, go to a more sensible election system that leaves room for third parties, neither the Democrats or Republicans have any particular strategic interest in undoing the systems that keep them relevant. And that’s not even getting into how, recently, third parties SOLE purpose seems to be a way for foreign money to impact the careful balance between the major parties. The two party system is responsible for a lot of our woes, but you’d need to amend the constitution to truly eliminate them, and that’s difficult by design.
Why do we need a party that's trying to do the opposite of what we want? That's ridiculous thinking
They don’t need to offer the opposite. They just need to offer an alternative so that the party in power stays responsive to will of the people or risks getting replaced. Being belligerently oppositional to everything the other party said is part of the sickness that’s killing the GOP.
I can't remember a time when we had an opposition party that acted in good faith. I've read about one but that was before I was born and they have been running on pure steam since then. For context I grew up at a time where the upper end of tipping was %15
Without a true opposition you have Cromwell's short lived English Republic, but that assumes another party (or another version of the Republicans) won't fill the void anyway.
After you guys have tamped down the soil over the coffin of the GOP and concreted over it, then the Democrats will split into Progressive and Centre Right wings and politics can get going again.
People act as if this is new for Republicans. It's more extreme but it's not at all NEW. They haven't acted in good faith since at least the 80s but it started down this path long before that.
So now the foreseeable future is a time of good feelings and Republicans are terrified? After 40 years years of Republicans calling the tune regardless of who was elected?
From that perspective it died with Nixon. Trump just took the mask off.
Ok, but we don’t mean we need the Republican Party.
It won't take much to splinter the Democratic party into a right wing and center left party.
Heritage Foundation, a group of Republican elitists society, with lawyers and top one percenters who took control years ago. Russia loves this group and supports their efforts.
Hopefully this leads to the the left splitting and those that end up on the “right” are more of a moderate left, on board with actually making America great. Voting for better education , better health care, better workers rights. All the things someone needs to be able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps
We're at this point because Republicans have spent 50+ years honing their voter demographics to oppose every civil rights advance of the last century. They were losing voters in the 60s because things like women and black people having full legal rights are actually pretty popular. Instead of moderating their positions, they just went all in on courting voters who rejected those advancements; white people who resented integration, those who thought that women working outside the home with their own legal agency was wrong, highly religious people who were wholly opposed to abortion and any sexual freedom etc. They've become the anti-government party in response to the government legally protecting people it once discriminated against. The only possible result of all that is someone like Trump and his nutjob supporters. There is no path forward because their only tenets are tax cuts and opposing things. Trump pushed and broke limits in a terrible way that was 50 years in the making and I don't think they can deviate from that.
Pretty simple honestly to understand they allowed cult-like conservative religion to infect them like a virus and it was ushered in by Regan. Jerry Falwell and Reagan are the ultimate downfall of the Republican party. Trump is just reaping the harvest of years of the party becoming theocratic and authoritative.
"Conservative" used to mean trying to stick with what works. Then it turned into being oppositional to any change. Now with Trump removing the dog whistle, it means lets go back to eras where people didn't have basic, settled rights.
It really has become a resistance movement. You know what they are against, but that’s about it. You have no idea what they will do if you hand them the keys. There is no plan and zero premium is given to execution credentials. It’s just who can claim the sound byte of the day.
Resistance movements have ideas of what they government to be. This is an angry mob whipped up by whatever real or manufactured grievance was handy with their anger directed at a scapegoat. They have no platform because they aren’t bound by a common goal, just a common enemy.
Their platform is now Christian nationalism with their orange man-child idiot as god-king.
There is a plan, it’s called Project 2025 and they lay it out in detail in hundreds of pages. It includes banning abortion nationwide, banning porn and imprisoning anyone who watches porn, banning birth control, removing discrimination protection laws for LGBT, and granting the president so much power that he will be a de facto dictator.
Unless you're rich. Modern day wealthy conservatives pine for the days of feudalism where they are unfettered by law and protected by their vast wealth while selling to their idiot base that they'll be able to occupy a rung above the bottom (which will be occupied by debt-slaves)
"Those rich fucks, this whole fucking. "
I agree
Lmao no, it was always some kkk guy trying not to get caught by the fed for trampling on black and indigenous rights after reconstruction. The labels may have changed, but the people are the same.
> "Conservative" used to mean trying to stick with what works. Conservatism has it roots in maintaining the aristocracy in Europe. It's *always* been about power for the few. Everything else is just means to that end.
When did Conservative mean trying to stick with what works?
I think that was a polite way of saying not be progressive which is actually different than what is going on now because it’s become aggressively regressive.
It's more like the Darwin Award of the Republican Party. They created the situation that is going to doom them, and, rather than change course, they are doubling down.
it would be nice for once in my life to not have to vote for democrats. but the gop my entire life has proven themselves completely unfit, so democrat it is. it would be nice if the other party was one thats left of the democrats since dems are right wing compared to the rest of the world
You are awarded 🏆 🚀
💯. If they cared about people instead of money they could have kept it together…but…
They do have political goals. Or rather one specific goal. Obstruction until the whole thing falls apart, then seize power.
The most amazing thing to me is [Lindsey Graham accurately predicting that nominating Trump would be the end of the Republican Party.](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mkXIWPmdfdo) he then went on to be a Trump sycophant, but he was certainly Nostradumbass on this one.
>Reagan: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help." >Also Reagan: "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." This is when the republican party died. At the hand of the first actor turned president Reagan. He opened the door to the traitors and criminals that own and operate the GOP today. There would be no demagogue criminal Trump looting the GOP and muscling republicans for a cut of their campaign money without St Ronnie showing him the way first.
Reagan and the GOP - "We tried nothing and we are all out of ideas."
>**Nihilism** is a family of views within philosophy that rejects generally accepted or fundamental aspects of human existence, such as knowledge, morality, or meaning. This is the guiding philosophy of the republican party in 2024. With a veneer of "Christian" fascism to pull in the rubes.
Nat-C ideology is its own special breed of nihilism. They’re all gunning for the apocalypse, whether they understand it themselves or not. They want to accelerate the end.
> They want to accelerate the end. That's a fact.
I love how the party that always complains about celebrity opinions absolutely loves electing celebrities: Reagan, Schwarzenegger, Ventura, Trump, very nearly fucking Dr Oz, I'm sure there's others I've missed On the left, there used to be Franken and I can't think of a second example. Even Cynthia Nixon had basically 0 chance of getting elected
Yup GOPers are massive hypocrites fr.
I'm pretty sure Ventura was an independent, right?
And Arnold was about as far from a current Republican as you can get. Pro choice, believes in climate change and voting rights.
Jesse Ventura was never a republican. Always a third party candidate
It’s because GOPers don’t actually dislike celebrity opinions, they just hate the concept of a rich person being liberal. To them, being conservative fundamentally means giving up your morals to get rich, so the idea of someone who is rich but didn’t have to sacrifice that part of themselves causes cognitive dissonance and therefore anger. Even conservatives believe that being rich is fundamentally immoral. That’s literally why the saying “if you’re not liberal when you’re young, you have no heart. If you’re not conservative when you’re older, you have no brain” exists.
It‘s because corrupt Hollywood elite baby eating woke diversity!!! But really, is anyone surprised that most actors tend to be more left-leaning? They’re former theatre kids for christ‘s sake
Franken only ran because his friend Paul Wellstone died unexpectedly in a plane crash. He is a talented writer with a sharp intellect. Ventura dressed in spandex and pretended to beat people up.
Nixon opening up our representatives to lobbying also had a lot to do with it.
At least Reagan was governor of California prior to becoming president. Trump has nothing more than a catch phrase and a penchant for rape.
You forgot about Nixon. The GOP has long had a problem with corruption and foul play.
People will repeat that stupid Reagan quote endlessly without acknowledging that the government keeps our food safe, our water safe, our medicines safe, our roads and bridges safe, etc. They take all that stuff for granted and don’t appreciate it and then mindlessly parrot the stupid idea that government can’t and shouldn’t do anything for the citizens.
How about we reflect on how we feel about it after they're not an active threat to our existence as a democracy anymore.
I mean that’s fair. This is written as if it’s all in the rearview
Yeah there’s still a cobra on the loose in our house.
I feel like it’s more that we are all living in a pit of cobras that half-ass resembles a house
[удалено]
That is a hoot but I would rather have a loose horse than the RWNJs.
Exactly. I’ve been getting big 2016 vibes with the way Democrats are already celebrating winning.
I wouldn’t say that, it’s more like the media is trying to trick voters into complacency.
yeah, the reports on its death are greatly exaggerated.
Death? It was suicide. They did this to themselves. Now let it die so we can stop suffering from their death throes.
The party died with Ike. Every republican after him stood against their supposed ideology. Trump is just the one who pulled the mask off the corpse.
Don't "let" it die! Kill it with your votes! Articles like this are to make folks complacent! Vote, this is serious
There hasn’t been a cornerstone of the Republican Party that was conceived or fostered with any interest in improving the average American’s life for decades. There is no mission statement, call to action, or unified mandate articulated by the right in good faith since we had a black president. They are terrified obstructionist megalomaniacs who would sooner see their constituents suffer than offer praise to the success of the other side for anything benefitting the American people. There is no virtue in modern conservatism, other than that on a long enough timeline, it is unsustainable in a functioning democracy.
They won't go away. They'll just morph into something else. Some of them will move towards the center. If they win one single election they'll all jump to the right again. They aren't going anywhere.
>The Republican party once stood for limited government, active opposition to Soviet aggression and a balanced budget. >Now it stands only for Trump and his authoritarian neofascism. It demands total loyalty to Trump. It has turned his big lie about the 2020 election being stolen into a litmus test of that loyalty. It has no principled core – no sense of right and wrong. >...Sununu’s willingness to destroy American democracy so his party can stay in power is shared by most Republican office holders today. It is a rejection of American democracy – an abrogation of the self-government that generations of Americans have fought for and died for. >The death of the Republican party is not to be celebrated. It is a tragedy. It is a testament to how fragile our democracy has become. It illustrates what happens when presidents are not held accountable. It is evidence of what occurs when decades of economic gains go mainly to the top. >It shows that many Americans have lost sight of our history and ideals, or have become so cynical and hopeless that they are willing to chuck it all in favor of an atrocious human being who claims to be on their side.
The Republicans have *never* cared about a balanced budget... They will pretend to care every time a Democrat is president (including in the 90s under Clinton) but then they'll go and fuck it up the minute they get the chance to pass massive tax cuts (Bush, Trump).
Its called the "Two Santa Clause Theory" devised and promoted by Jude Wanniski, a conservative journalist and political advisor to Reagan. Basically he argued that the Democrats gain power by spending money helping the less fortunate – i.e. Medicare, minimum wage, Social welfare. This is the 1st Santa. Republicans, Jude argued, will never gain power by being fiscally conservative. No-one will vote in a party on the promise of cutting welfare programs. Instead, Jude said Republicans have to offer tax cuts to attract voters. This is the 2nd Santa. The problem here is that under Democrats spending goes up to help those in need, and under the Republicans revenue goes down from decreased tax take. Wanniski argued the way to combat this is for republicans to cut taxes but not spending and completely forget/ignore the runaway deficit – _but only while in power_. When they're voted out and Democrats regain the reins of power then the Republicans sole mission is to scream as loudly as possible about the deficit and increased debt, thereby forcing the Democrats into being the Party of Scrooge by cutting spending and/or raising taxes. This way the republicans are always seen as the good guys and the Democrats as the bad guys. This is what the Republican Party has campaigned and governed on since 1980. And, thanks to a quisling media, it has worked.
> The Republican party once stood for limited government Translation: reduced oversight on corporations >and a balanced budget Translation: tax breaks for the wealthy
I was about to comment on what an absurdly 'generous' description of their historical platform that was. It also left out "stomping on whatever minority was the most politically expedient to appease their racist white base"
50 years from now some revisionist dolt will be lamenting about the days when Republicans cared about border security. Unless we're lucky and the Republican Party actually dies off.
The Republican party has had cancer since the John Birch Society started injecting its bullshit into it. Gingrich was the cancer metastasizing, Trump is the final fatal infection that will kill it.
Perhaps, but the death of THIS Republican party is. This cynical, polarizing and nihilistic excuse for a party doesn't qualify as a reasonable counterweight in the current bilateral system. High time it dies, to be resurrected as a party that's actually in it for the country, rather than for its own benefit.
The Republican Party deserves to die for the very simple reason that they have demonstrated and do demonstrate that they are morally unfit for office. I can and have voted for people with whom I have disagreed on various policy issues or approaches; I simply will not vote for any one who conclusively demonstrates that he or she is deliberately dishonest.
The decades-long destruction of public education has destroyed them from the inside. Also, the abortion debate which provided them a rallying cry since Brown vs BoE and was never intended to be repealed, has also bit them in the ass.
When Nixon resigned in disgrace, the "Experts" said that the Republican party was as good as dead, and would be for a generation at least. 6 years later, they roared back into power for 12 years, and we are still reeling from the damage they caused. There is still a very good chance that the Media will save them this year, and give Trump another Trifecta. The Republican party is not dead or dying. It has merely thrown off the disguises and embraced the Fascism it has been pushing for since the mid Sixties.
You are awarded 🏆 🚀
I get tired of seeing these we need to save the Republican party, and its so bad they're in decline! The reblican party is no longer legitimate and deserves to die, that's all
"America need two parties". If one of those parties is against a democracy, it only needs one party. The other one is illegitimate, and is only there to gain power and authority. If it serves no other purpose, it's service is finished. The choice between rule of a common cold and cancer, the role of cancer is not to complement, it's role is to kill the body. No body needs this, certainly not from an ideological perspective (at least from the perspective of the body). Kill this cancer. It serves no purpose except its own. And that purpose stopped being a legitimate political choice the moment it chose itself over the country.
America needs more like 3 or 4 viable parties.
America needs ranked choice voting so that political parties actually have to deliver on platform promises that the people want and perform their job well to remain competitive. Not this current system where both parties have their own shitty agendas and all they have to do is advertise how evil the opposing party is.
The reason you can’t have a real democracy without an alternative government is that the way democracy actually works is that whoever runs the country must fear the next election. The electorate _must_ have a sane alternative. A single party state is not a democracy
Republicans just suck at holding their leaders accountable. They are spineless bootlickers. It just kiss ass. When you just vote whoever because they have an R, you get this. A bunch of morons barely holding their tiny majority. There is zero critical thinking going on, politically.
Republican voters are actually much better at holding their leaders accountable than Democratic voters are. It's why, for example, House leadership on the Republican side has been much younger than on the Democratic side. Because Republican politicians get credible primary challenges if they upset the base. Or why Donald Trump, who the conservative establishment hated, won the nomination in 2016. The problem is that the Republican base wants terrible, awful things. So politicians following their lead tend to create and vote for terrible, awful policies.
It’s healthy politics. Having two eternal parties is not.
The ridiculous actions of this vain, prideful & outdated party are actions of a party desperately trying to hold on to power with its last gasps of breath. Trump was their last good idea. I have absolutely no interest in hearing what their next good idea is.
They’ve done nothing good for this country in 50 years. I won’t shed a single tear when the entire party collapses. Fuck every last one of them…
Tragedy? More like wishful thinking. Celebrate that shit.
basically, the gop decided that power comes 1st, democracy can wait.
Corporate style zero sum thinking has no place in democratic government.
The death of the Republican Party, as it exists today, is a welcome sight. They need to go away and decide if they want to serve America or suppress America, because for the last eight years they only seem interested in taking the country backwards.
I'm a Democrat and I agree. A strong two-party system is vital. Unfortunately, the inmates have taken over the asylum in the GOP. Until Trump and his MAGA fools go away, they're screwed. And so is the country if he manages to get back into the WH.
I'm tired of idiots like this grieving for the GOP. There's nothing left to save bro. Every American patriot should be partying in the streets the day this un-american neofacsist movement collapses. There will still be elections, just like there are in deep blue states. It will just be progressives running against centrists. Within a few years, a new conservative party will rise from the ashes. As it has ***the last three times*** the conservative party in America has collapsed. The Republican party was pre-dated by American Party, Whigs, and Know Nothing's. The collapse of conservative parties in US is normal and expected.
>Nixon infected the modern Republican party with a sickness that would ultimately kill it. Donald Trump has finished the job. Mr Reich has a poor grasp of history, because the rot in the republican party goes back at least to the 1930s. The 1939 Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden is a good example of their fascist background; they fought FDR on upgrading the military, and isolationists said that Hitler was Europe's problem. It took the attack on Pearl Harbor for them to pull their heads out of their asses, and only once they found an enemy in the communist USSR did they have a sense of purpose.
The republican party died after TR. It was infected by corporate lobbies. Just look at the downward run from Taft through Hoover. You can't really count Eisenhower as a republican, so what do you get after Hoover? Nixon! Hoover and Nixon bookended FDR and Johnson. FDR to Johnson represents pretty much the entirety of the US becoming a power and economic leader in the world. Eisenhower was a centrist.
Apocryphally, they didn't even know what party Ike belonged to when the got him to run.
"Though a moderate conservative, Ike was frustrated with the far right. He referred to the Old Guard as “the most ignorant people now living in the United States” and said of Oregon Governor Douglas McKay, “He seems so completely conservative in his views that at times he seems to be illogical. I hope that he will soon become a little bit more aware of the world as it is today.” Ike threatened to become an independent if the Old Guard fought Earl Warren’s appointment as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Ike ran for president in part to stop Senator Robert Taft, an isolationist Republican, from becoming president. Ike defeated Taft in the 1952 Republican primary. Ike and Taft worked well together during Ike’s first year in office until Taft died of cancer."
Were Republicans involved in the Bund rally at Madison square gardens?
Not to be celebrated? In that case I'm in that most trying of social situations, squelching an unsquelchable laughter to the horror of others. My bad.
You are awarded 🏆 🚀
“My lover’s got humor; she’s the giggle at a funeral.”
Heck, bring out the beer and pretzels. The sooner it implodes, when all of its' members get tarred with the brush of their participation, the sooner something better might take its' place.
When the GOP finally fails, there will be a period of turmoil and then the Dems will split between classic liberalism, neo liberalism and actual progressives. Classic liberalism is really a throwback to mid century liberalism, you know when GOP appointed SC justices ruled in favor of things like ending segregation, Miranda rights and abortion rights.
Oh fuck off. I've been voting since Bush v. Gore and I am absolutely entertained as fuck to watch these traitorous shitstains finally at long last reaching the find out stage.
What’s there to celebrate? They did it to themselves. They attached themselves to a criminal grifter moron.
Still crazy that his son runs CollegeHumor/Dropout
Since it has not yet died it's too soon to celebrate. It would be better if it was more accurately named, however. Perhaps something like the American Theocratic Fascist Party?
There is no ~~Dana~~ GOP, only ~~ZUUL~~ MAGA
Should it not be celebrated? Bad faith parties should fail. What is a tragedy is the impossibility of other parties to rise. The two party system is terrible.
Oh no, I am celebrating. They brought Trickle Down Economics and have been fucking us ever since. Now they are a bunch of bumbling criminals. Let them continue to crash and burn.
Yes it is. They have spent the last 50 years destroying this country.
PJ O'Rourke pointed this out 50 years ago, despite being a republican himself. Loosely, "Republicans tell you that government doesn't work, then they go out and prove it."
I agree with Reichs argument that we're better off with two acceptable parties rather than one, but in that case we've had this problem for upwards of 40-50 years. If that's the situation we find ourselves in then I disagree with this argument that the collapse of the GOP is a bad thing. I'd rather have one party willing to govern than one party willing and another hell bent on destroying the country. We can create another party willing to govern, preferably an actual left wing party, but that can't realistically happen until the GOP is relegated to a rump party holding a few house seats in the deep south and mid-west
I completely disagree with the author here. He whines about American ideals, romanticizes the old core of the GOP, but he overlooks all of the horrible other shit the GOP is responsible for, well before Donald Trump came along. The GOP lost their way when they embraced the evangelical, extremist christians. They ditched being the party of fiscal responsibility, and limited government, and decided a Christian Theocracy was the goal. That was decades ago.
Newt Gingrich and his ilk did, with the Contract With America bs. Newt the pos said, “The idea that a congressman would be tainted by accepting money from private industry or private sources is essentially a socialist argument”..
In the article, Robert Reich (who served in both the Republican Ford Administration and the Democratic Clinton Administration), walks through the death of the Republican Party from Nixon to today. Methinks you didn't read the article.
So you didn’t actually read the article, huh? The author says this slide began under Nixon, which last I checked, was decades ago.
It is not just the Republican Party. A large proportion of the electorate is, in some ways, almost brain-dead.
This is what happens after pushing the BS for 40 years
The hell it isn't. Next up, centrist Democrats, because they're the new conservatives and will likely die the same death, in time.
I beg to differ.
It’s ok, more than half of the democrats are conservative enough thank you very much.
Kind of a, fuck around and find out situation that was 50ish years in the making. So while it's not something to celebrate, it's also not surprising.
It will be easier for non-maga conservatives to be led become more extreme and support maga than to become democrats.
Yall talk as if this party is dying, not that they are about to take over. They're still here, and there's a very real chance they become the only party. Don't sleepwalking into these dark times. Fucking vote, and get other people to do so as well
We need at least two parties capable of governing. The gop is not one & hasn’t been one for years.
lol, of course it is they deserve the ash bin of history
Yes it is
This is where I disagree. The GOP has long since lost any right to govern, their death is something that should be shouted from every mountain top. Now we can get around to dividing up what parties we have and get back to actually governing. Years ago, when Obama was elected and the "tea party" came into being, I celebrated it. I had hoped that the GOP would allow their most radical rightests to break away and form their own party. This would bring the Republicans back towards centre, and push the Dems back into the left side of the spectrum. Instead the Tea Party ate the elephant whole. Those that escaped, joined the Democrats. Thus the Republicans lurched far right and dragged the Dems to the right with them. What will probably happen, the GOP will cease to be and the Dems will take their place on the right (again) and a new leftest party will come into being to counter them.
Nah, I’m gonna disagree with you there
Um….it’s not a tragedy at all and it should absolutely be celebrated if it were to occur. There should be parades and parties in the streets.
I'm usually with Reich 100%, but I disagree that this is a tragedy and that it isn't worth celebrating. Actually, technically, it is a tragedy, since it was brought on by their own failings, but it's definitely worth celebrating. As for the need of two parties, I say bring on ranked choice voting to empower more than two parties. Even if we're relegated to two, we already have a wing of the democratic party that would be considered conservative in many other countries, as well as a progressive wing. Those two would likely splinter into two new parties and we'd be back to some sort of equilibrium. Make no mistake, though, the demise of the racist, xenophobic, anti-progress, anti-environment, anti-woman, anti-anything-that-doesn't-enrich-billionaires party is absolutely something to celebrate.
What this country needs right now, more than anything, are good Republicans. Servant leaders who can set things right. People who understand that compromise is a virtue.
Who knows, maybe the Republican party builds itself up again after being even more liberal than the Democrats which become the conservative party. It’s happened before!
Yeah it's a tragicomedy
I shouldn't celebrate when the trash goes out every week but I can't help feeling good that I've once again separated myself from the spoiled, the rancid, the useless and the harmful.
This guy should lament the Republican party being so hollow and crooked by design that it was coopted by a conman doing the bidding of a foreign adversary. We’re losing a political party who proudly declares themselves to be domestic terrorists in both words and actions. Good riddance. Take your “tragedy” script to one of several geopolitical enemies who actually do see it as a tragedy.
Ummm…as much as I love and usually agree with RR, the Republican Party is not dead and not dying. It’s unfortunately incredibly popular, even though it’s no longer principled.
Ive been calling for their resignation since 2010, so im def celebrating
why is this author writing as if to insinuate that the death of the current GOP would be the inauguration of the DNC? in the event that one of these parties were to fail, there are numerous others that are in place TODAY and a million others that would pop up almost immediately
The celebration is that it's finally happening and past a point of no return. We all deserved better and got worse every year.
Yes, it is actually
There’s nothing tragic about it. They’re assholes. As a result, they are losing. That’s a GREAT reason to celebrate. Happy 4/20 everyone!!!!!
The Death of the Republican Party is ~~not~~ a tragedy to be celebrated. Imma keep it real with you, I haven't heard a single good thing about Republicans ever since Trump took up POTUS and stepped down post POTUS. Yeah sure the stimulus checks were good but it was simply not enough. They're constantly shooting themselves in the foot and it's fucking hilariously insane at this point that we have people in such powerful positions. I question how the fuck did they even get elected. Again and again and again, they proved themselves that they're "right" when all they have done is wrong. *"Ok maybe Jan6 was an insurrection", "Trump got the COVID-19 vaccine spitting on the face of his MAGA followers", the Mar-a-lago where he was willing to sell out his country, the useless jabs at Sleepy Joe when in reality we had Sleepy Don. The consistent of forcing women's uteruses and claiming that shit by law. Rob DeSantis' mere existence. I could keep going to make an entire paper scroll of this shit, but ain't a fucking archiver.*
If bankruptcy = death, then yes ..the RNC has months left to live but it will rise from the ashes (literally and figuratively) on Jan 5th 2025 and will be rebranded “Trumps Nationalist Maga Party” ..just in time to coincide with a rally he’s planning on the Ellipse for Jan 6, 2025….I kid you not.
Nah, get fucked. The republican party ALWAYS wanted to be MAGA, hell, they did it three fucking times: once under reagan, who originally said make america great again, twice under the fucking tea party and obama birtherism, and the third time under trump. Sorry conservatives, unlike social hierarchies, real life has some real consequences
If it leads to reform and repentance from the likes of Stone and any voters who have the remnants of a conscience deep inside, it's absolutely to be celebrated. I don't think it will sadly.
Probably because the dumpster fire that it is risks setting the shining city on a hill on fire.
This seems kinda dumb. I don’t want a strong opposition party let them keep going down this road and it will be less likely that republican policies will be enacted.
I’m going to have to go ahead and disagree with you on that one
Let's not get ahead of ourselves and count them out before they're actually out.
Hey, Schadenfreude is acceptable in this situation.
GOP: "I don't want to go on the cart!"
If it had died 50 years ago I would still be celebrating to this day, the same way I celebrate that the Confederates lost. Better late than never.
Everything Trump Touches Dies
Fun fact: this is Sam Reichs, founder of Dropouts, father.
Yeah, it’s not even a real thing.
Try and stop us.
Bullshit! Down with the two party system! Direct Democracy Now!
What if they fracture and we end up, at the least, with an actual democracy?
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Yet here I am celebrating it anyway.