More Questions, More Answers
Our Enemies List Podcast Q&A Episode was a big ratings and audience hit last week, and so my team asked me to do another on for The Lincoln Project Podcast. Keep sending your questions and we’ll do our best to get to them all!
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America isn’t a center right country, but the “washed out of their own party” GOP sure wants it to be. The truth is the GOP was dying, going out of style, and in order to save themselves they turned into an unhinged, racist, conspiratorial bunch of clowns with a cult leader plucked from TV. Reagan 2.0 only somehow more stupid. Now some of us knew that’s what the Republican Party ALWAYS was. The largest (and most medium-sized) cities in America, where the actual PEOPLE ARE, are progressive and blue. The cow fuckers in the MAGA party manage to make the country look more “right” with their chickenshit gerrymandering, voter suppression, voter intimidation and every other filthy fucking trick they can think of. Trying to use disillusioned democrats to help create a new GOP is transparent af. This is what shifting the Overton window looks like, folks. Don’t fall for it from Rick or Conway.
A crosspost from the last thread because it was dead when I wrote it:
I just listened to Rick's LP Q&A and I'd like to question one of his central assumptions he loves to repeat, that America is a center-right country. Is it, Rick? If America was truly a center-right country, then how did Trump have such an easy time hijacking the GOP? I contend, rather, that America is a center-left country with a deep reactionary strain that has been with us forever.
Ike was a reluctant New Dealer. Nixon was practically a Communist (LOL). Mainstream Republicans two generations ago would seem like liberal Democrats today. The postwar right was always restive about this, which spawned harbingers like Tailgunner Joe and the Birchers. Look to your foundational texts, Rick, the National Review of the early 60s when the GOP was on the proverbial balls of its ass. WF Buckley, Jr. might have been the urbane, civil libertarian face of the emerging conservative movement, cheekily sailing his yacht into international waters so he could smoke pot legally, but Russell Kirk and Brent Bozell were drooling over Catholic Integralism and military authoritarians. Much of their standing athwart History yelling Stop! sounds like Project 2025. This is the deep reactionary strain in our nation's DNA that the conservative movement had to spruce up and civilize to avoid election catastrophes like Barry Goldwater.
And they found the perfect messenger in Ronald Reagan, and thus the myth of America as a center-right country was born. But Reagan's deeply corrupt administration only kept the lid on what was seething underneath thanks to the cold war. After the Wall fell, talk radio and Newt Gingrich began to let the demons out. The Clinton-era Republicans weren't winning the argument on the merits, nor did they lack a partner willing to compromise with them, so they shifted to pure opposition mode. Tax cuts for the rich and a deregulation frenzy were never popular with voters. So the GOP shifted attempts to appeal to the center to their base.
If America was truly a center-right country, the GOP wouldn't need pure demagogy to get elected.