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Sunday, December 13th, 2020

Hatred of liberals is all that’s left of conservatism

Author:     Paul Waldman
Source:     The Washington Post
Publication Date:     Dec. 11, 2020 at 9:45 a.m. PST
 Link: Hatred of liberals is all that’s left of conservatism
Stephan:   Right now, I think the biggest most important trend in the United States, other than the failure to deal with climate change, is that we no longer have a functioning two-party system, the form of governance we have had since the 1790s. It was not what the Founders had intended, but political controversies caused the system to develop and it has prevailed until it began to unravel during the Nixon years, and became a crisis over the past five years. Now as this essay describes this is what is left of the Republican Party.
2020. Grand Rapids, Michigan. USA. President Donald Trump’s last rally before the 2020 Election on November 3, 2020. Grand Rapids was also the site of his final rally in the 2016 election.

If you were dropped in from another country without knowing anything about the United States and surveyed our current political moment, what would you conclude about the Republican Party and the broader conservative movement it represents? As 2020 comes to an end, what is conservatism about?

After nearly four years of Donald Trump’s presidency in which no misdeed was too vulgar or corrupt for conservatives to defend, now culminating in an outright war against democracy itself, you might be tempted to answer, “Nothing.” Though that’s not quite true, the real answer is not much more encouraging.

Some years ago, I wrote a book arguing that Democrats should learn from the things Republicans did well. One of these was that the GOP had a simple foundation of shared beliefs that could be easily communicated to voters. Ask a Republican running for any office from dogcatcher all the way up to […]

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