Until Trump, I never imagined how fragile

[JHB]

58. This isn't just Trump. This is the endgame of a 50-year effort to force a fundamental change on the nation.

The ball for this got rolling in the 70s. Trump wasn't part of it then. Neither was Putin. This was the "see commies under every rock" Movement Conservatives/RWers deciding the were going to wrest control of the country away from the Democrats and restore what was in their eyes the pinnacle of American civilization, the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. Before income taxes, before popular election of senators, and certainly before all those rights for the riff-raff. When the right sort of people had a firm grip on things.

They used focus groups to identify hot-button issues that could get people single-issue voting and made the Republicans the champions of those issues. They funded "think" tanks, college campus groups to direct like-minded young people their way, and their own media to catapult their propaganda. They worked the resentment and bile beat and ratcheted it up every year to polarize and radicalize Republican voters. As the Democrats moved away from the entrenched racism of segregationist days, the Republicans set up recruiting tables to scoop up those "former" Klan members and supporters.

By the 80s they had Reagan and launched the "greed is good" society. They began a campaign of putting only justists they saw as "conservatively correct" on the courts. They politically exterminated the Rockefeller Republicans, paving the way to begin attacking the Democrats in earnest. Bill Clinton was their worst nightmare: a centrist Democrat who was pro-business, ok with the death penalty, accepted the basic structure of Reganomics (tweaking it, yes, reversing it, no) and declaring that the days of Big Government were over. To the RWers, this was a threat because there were still moderate Republicans around, and if they decided "eh, we can work with this guy," the dream of destroying the last remnants of the New Deal would be out of their reach. He HAD to be treated as an enemy, and since he didn't fit the sterotypes of previous Democratic politicians, they just made shit up and had Rush Limbaugh and the rest of hate radio blast it on the airwaves for hours on end, every single day, all over the country.

It's been a steady process of taking over the GOP, trashing restrictions on funding, turning media into a one-sided megaphone, and turning the Party of Abe into the Party of Ahab. All with the goal of forcing through a wish-list that was eventually written down as Project 2025. The Russians weren't commies anymore, and their view of the way things ought to be overlapped a lot with Putin's. And with Trump, they had a vehicle they could use to ram though what they wanted.