When I knew something was off with the GOP

 So, a certain liberal subreddit I sometimes address comments from on here recently asked a question about when people could tell something was off with the modern GOP. The answered varied widely, with some going back to the 80s and 90s with the rise of Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and the contract with America. But some really seemed in the dark until recently, believing well into the Trump era that we could compromise with the right. And of course the institutional democratic party is still kind of in their own lala land as I just got done discussing in my past article. 

For me, it came in 2012. The year I shifted left and became an atheist. Actually, 2011. I kind of could tell before that. The big turning point for me was the rise of the tea party. While the roots of the modern conservative movement actually do go all the way back into the 1970s and 1980s, with Richard Nixon's "law and order" campaign (terminology Trump used himself in 2016) and appeals to dog whistle politics (Trump took the mask off), the signs of worsening have, in retrospect, always been there. Rush Limbaugh and Fox News were another nail in the coffin, radicalizing a generation of boomers and gen Xers into extreme conservative politics. The contract with America marking the end of civility in congress. The Robert Bork hearings representing the politicization of the supreme court. 

But, I'm going to be honest, I was young, naive, and stupid. As you guys know, I'm in my 30s, and while when I made this blog I did have a post describing my political history, I never copied it over to this exact website. That said, i think it would be good to discuss my roots.

I started getting into politics after 9/11. My family has always been political, with my dad idolizing Rush Limbaugh in the 90s. He did HVAC and was the kind of guy who would drive to houses to fix stuff, but also spend a lot of his time in the car between calls listening to AM talk radio. I remember him being anti Clinton in 1996, and being pro Bush in 2000. But, I largely never paid attention to politics, being a kid. But that changed after 2001. The terrorist attacks pushed me, like most Americans at the time, into a form of hyper nationalism. I know some people, ironically centrist libs, lament that america isn't that united today, but trust me, given my current views, that unity wasn't okay. Basically you were forced to be fiercely patriotic or face intense criticism. The peer pressure was as such where you couldn't say no to "America" from 2001-2003. You would be unpatriotic and in league with the terrorists. THis caused us to do all kinds of questionable things like pass the patriot act and invade Iraq. 

In 2004, we got to the first election that I really paid attention to. While I was too young to vote, being a teenager in high school, I really came of age in this extremely pro conservative hyper nationalist environment. I also started going to a fundamentalist christian school in 2002, until I graduated until 2006, and they were very political too. So all of the forces in my life up to that point, were conservative. I listened to rush limbaugh and read his books too. I admired and idolized Reagan like most conservatives did, and I got particularly fired up over the issues of abortion, gay marriage, and immigration. Abortion and gay marriage because of my religious beliefs, and immigration because I believed that immigrants were responsible for most of the crime and were going on welfare. It was a boogeyman, but it worked at the time. 

Honestly? In 2004 or so, I had views that I would nowadays find terrifying. Views that are remarkably commonplace in the GOP these days, but that at the time I just accepted as doctrine. I thought that America was supposed to be a Christian nation, that we should be governed by godly principles, and that separation of church and state was a made up word by a liberal activist supreme court and that they just didn't want a state church like the church of england. I was more or less brainwashed with a lot of conservative propaganda at the time and believed God wanted me to major in political science so I could bring glory to him by basically making America Christian again.

Yeah, scary stuff. I know. But...I was a teenager, i didn't know any better, and that's the environment I grew up in. 

But...I'm going to be honest, these "christofascists" as they're now called (notice how the left has to call everything they dont like fascism?), did go a step too far where they did kind of shock me out of it. Like....a lot of people who were into that kind of christianity are also the kind of people who would go overseas and minister to people and trying to convert them to christianity. And we would watch videos about how if we had a gun to our head we should let terrorists kill us than to renounce Christ. It was some creepy Jesus camp level BS. And even at the time I really struggled with that. Sometimes these guys were just so over the top that I had glimpses of rationality of "wait, that can't be right, is it?", I mean, some of it just felt WRONG to me. 

Anyway, in 2006 I got the hell out of that educational environment and into college. I was apprehensive about college. I was taught to believe that it was all liberal brainwashing, and I remember in Christian school, they would always teach us that like half of christians end up losing their faith in college, and of course, at the time we were all horrified and like "wait that would NEVER happen to us"...uh...yes it did. 

Anyway, college was a bit different than I anticipated. I mean, they really don't trash talk conservatives like you would think they did. If anything, they just taught us that it doesn't matter what we think, as long as we have good reasons to believe it. So, professors were always quite accepting of my religious and political beliefs. But that doesn't mean that my views werent challenged by course work. The first real shift happened in my first semester when I took an english class, and we read a lot of books about the mistreatment of blacks, gay people, etc. I never really was exposed to this dark side of history before, learning about the horrors of Jim Crow, and reading the Laramie Project, which talked about the role of groups like Westboro baptist church and the murder of matthew shepard. I was horrified. I mean, I was anti gay marriage, but I respected gay peoples' rights to exist, I just thought at the time their "lifestyle" was "sinful". Of course, Christians were, ultimately, expected to be "loving" and follow Christ's example, so wtf is up with this "god hates (slurs)" crap? Then I'd start finding gay people in college, and when religion came up to them, many of them were very anti christianity specifically because it was so hateful toward them. And I'm just thinking, wait, isn't Christianity supposed to be loving? What of hate the sin but not the sinner? Can you even actually do that in some cases? 

These thoughts weighed on me. Of course college also challenged a lot of my religious brainwashing in other ways. I quickly abandoned support for things like six day creationism, and found myself conflicted on ideas like climate change (which I had previously rejected on the basis of my religion), and even found some actions by the Bush administration, such as the war in Iraq distasteful. We never did find weapons of mass destruction, and invading seemed to be a huge mistake. Also, Bush literally DOUBLED the national debt between his tax cuts and all of this military spending. 

So, from 2006-2008, I moderated a lot. I did vote for a split ticket in 2006, but quickly turned back on the democrats in 2007 and 2008. I considered voting for Clinton, as I learned she was fairly moderate, but Obama was a "socialist" to me and a step too far. I hated John McCain. The dude was a third Bush term. A thing that happens a lot in politics is that parties seem entrenched in the status quo, often running on the last guy's platform, and it never works. After 8 years, people generally want something different, even people within your own party. Just as in 2016 the idea of Clinton seemed untenable to me, in 2008, another Bush term seemed awful too. 

In the primaries, I came across Ron Paul in 2007 watching debates on youtube, and I honestly thought he was just what we needed. Conservatism needed to go back to its original principles. It needed to throw out the neocons with their disastrous national security and fiscal policies. But, we didn't need a "socialist" like Obama. We needed a "real" conservative. Hence, Ron Paul, the libertarian.

I did become more libertarian in college. I feel like a lot of white millennial men ended up shifting from being standard conservatives to being libertarians in their late teens/early 20s. And I was one of them. Due to the quickly shifting atmosphere on issues like gay marriage and the war in Iraq and the national debt, I felt like Paul was what the country needed. Of course, much like Bernie among the dems, he was ignored, his message suppressed, and the party at large pushed the establishment brand of politics that was unpopular. This led to the historic 2008 election where the GOP got destroyed and the democrats did very well. Obama had all the energy, running on "hope and change" and "socialized healthcare", which I was brainwashed by fox news to be against for BS reasons, but he was popular among most millennial college students at the time, so he the lion's share of support. I honestly considered voting for Bob Barr, the libertarian candidate, but I sucked it up and voted for McCain, believing obama was an existential threat to American values. 

But...Obama turned out to be fine. Yes, he spent like a drunken sailor in his first 2 years, but he had to because of the recession. While I didnt approve of his spending habits, being a deficit hawk, I never went all in with the whole "the government should do nothing" thing, because it seemed obvious great depression 2.0 would've followed. I noticed many liberals were pretty disappointed with Obama in his first couple years, but I wasn't complaining, as a conservative, I didn't mind moderate libs at the time. I could actually cross the aisle and vote for some of them sometimes, although I generally stuck with the right and turned against them push comes to shove. 

Still, things kept changing for me. On religion, my religious worldview took a massive beating from college. Between taking some bible classes in freshman year to learn more about that, to just having my views challenged, I ended up shifting away from a biblical worldview. Here's the thing that christian school taught me. Everyone has a worldview, a set of assumptions guiding how you actually think about the world. We learned about four major worldviews at the time: biblical christianity, marxism leninism, secular humanism, and some sort of new age pantheism. The course was laughable, being clear propaganda in respect for teaching biblical christianity as the right one while strawmanning and "checkmate atheist"ing the others, but it worked AT THE TIME. But, here's the thing, a worldview is like a machine, it's like a set of moving parts and if some of the parts break and stop working, then the worldview becomes weaker until you find yourself rejecting it more and more. And much like evid3nc3 in his "why i am no longer a christian" series, that started happening to me in college with my religious views.

It also happened politically. I was forced to shift to the center on issues like gay marriage over time, and I quickly gave up on the theocracy crap in general. I did consider going into law, so I took a course on the supreme court, and later a senior seminar on separation of church and state and how to correctly apply the first amendment. And uh...all those 1960s liberal activists seemed to have it right. When i thought through the logical implications of actually going along with what my christian school taught me, it seemed like a clear attempt to use the force of law to favor one religion over another. And law was to be secular and applied to everyone ideally. So, the worldview weakened a lot.

The recession also had a major influence on me. It kind of taught me that yes, sometimes well deserving people get crap luck. Sometimes you can work hard all your life and get screwed. My dad would regularly get laid off from 2008 on, and obama's unemployment money was the only thing keeping us afloat for a while. Eventually, we ended up having to downsize, going from a more prestigious HVAC level income to maintenance guy level income. Our living standards all took a hit. It became clear the economy wasn't what it used to be and people were struggling. And a lot of areas, like my own, never really recovered. Our cities had become ghettos over the past few decades. The jobs went away, they weren't coming back, and service work was the future.

And of course obama got blamed for this, with his "shovel ready jobs", but lets face it, would the "free market" do any better?? No. Between a class I took on poverty, which also btw introduced me to the basics of critical theory, and watching the GOP completely and utterly fail to have policies that worked, I began to turn on them more and more during the recession. Trickle down economics doesn't work, sometimes the government needs to stop in and do things to make it work.

This was especially apparent after the tea party took over. I was originally supportive of the tea party, believing that it was what we needed, considering what drew me to Ron Paul. Basically, the conservative base came back in 2010 and ran out the establishment moderates. And "we" won. We won control of the party. Our guys were in charge, yay us. But then I got to see them in action, and this is where I turned on the GOP.

By 2011 I was in grad school. Kind of hoping to skill up while waiting for the recession to blow over. And then I got to see the GOP's handiwork. The republican party was HORRIFYING. Tom Corbett came in to my state and laid the teachers off in the middle of a recession. Yay, more unemployment. In the name of fiscal conservatism. The GOP was trying to target Obama's unemployment money, claiming we needed to be more fiscally conservative. But at the same time, they also wanted to reduce taxes on the rich which would increase the deficit. So much for fiscal conservatism. And while they claimed this would "create jobs", my dad's company just claimed "record profits" and laid him off. So clearly that's a bunch of nonsense.

And then obama tried to compromise, but the GOP kept shutting the country down with these government shutdowns over the budget. They would literally hold the government hostage to extract concessions from the democratic party. And it was clearly harming the country. 

On abortion, I watched the GOP pass a lot of batcrap insane laws similar to the field day they're having now, but mostly targetted at late term pregnancies. Still, they were doing weird stuff like not allowing women to abort stillborn fetuses and risk developing sepsis and crap, and oh god this is not good. 

All of this quickly turned me against the GOP. Once I saw their ideas in practice, I had to bail. I just couldn't any more. When looking at these ideas that they had, you have to ask, is the problem one of implementation, or is it a much deeper problem of the entire worldview. And here's the thing. The GOP was delivering on exactly what they were advocating for. What they were calling for for years. They were trying to ban abortion. Lower taxes, eliminate safety nets. And the outcomes were clearly terrifying.

After that, I just could not, be a member of the GOP any longer. Their entire worldview and vision was bad, and I had to start over from the drawing board. 

This existential crisis lasted into 2012, where due to parallel reasons, but also some quite different reasons as well, I was forced to question my christian worldview. Some of the reasons are readily apparent from the above. Learning about what the bible was really about weakened my worldview. I had some personal crises I was going through at the time that also made me question things, and I also couldn't find many answers. And I just couldn't reconcile my belief with god with reality on any level.

This deconversion from christianity further accelerated my political development, as it swept away that entire worldview and allowed me to see the world with fresh eyes for the first time. And from there, from 2012-2014 or so, I set to work rewriting my entire worldview from the ground up, until you get the brand of politics I've mostly advocated for on here. Even though I founded this blog in 2016, if you went back to 2014 my views wouldn't be fundamentally different. Maybe in 2012-2013 you'd see differences, as in 2012 I was more a moderate lib, and in 2013 I was quickly becoming more progressive but didn't really hit my stride until 2014, when I discovered UBI, the anti work community, etc. 

ANYWAY, while I did feel a need to retell my political journey here as it has come to my attention I've never told it before, the goal was really to tell you guys when I noticed something was off with the GOP. And it was 2011-2012. Sure, my views weakened and shifted between say, 2006-2010 quite a bit through my college years, but I really didn't wake up and realize just how far gone the GOP was until the tea party took over and sought to deliver exactly what they had promised. After that, I just could not in good faith be a republican any longer.

As for whether I saw any of the insanity coming? Yes. I did. I could tell, the second they started obstructing obama at every turn, getting us in costly government shut downs, and even going so far to steal a SCOTUS seat, it became apparent they were playing for keeps. It also became apparent that the voter base of the GOP had gone insane and was collectively delusional. Becoming an atheist really exposed just how bad this fundamentalist christian worldview was and how we had a case of collective brain rot. And I sought, in my years post deconversion to bring people out of that cult. A lot of ex religious people are like that. They feel such disdain and hatred for their former religions they wish to get people out of those religions. I believed that if we were no longer religious or had that worldview, that people would be more reasonable.

But, as Ive gotten older, Ive realized that political tribalism doesnt really go away, it just changes. Secular political ideology can replace religion for some. We've been seeing a massive retreat of religion from the public sphere over the past decade, with the exception of the SCOTUS crap, and it's just made the right grow more extreme and have a mask off moment. The "alt right" rose to replace the formerly fundamentalist christian right in 2016, and that was just basically fascism. Even with a lot of the trumpers secularizing and not having christian worldviews any more, they still maintained their collective delusions and hysterias. 2016 kind of made me realize, in retrospect, that the problem isnt always religion. That while religion was a factor, secular political ideology can also have negative effects on people. The same thing applies to the democrats. With the fall of "new atheism's" influence and the rise of identity politics, democratic politics hasn't gotten better, but worse. 

At the same time, while the moderates of the democratic party have held onto power, repeating the tea party strategy on the left doesnt look like the best of ideas either. I'd say from 2016-2020 I believed we needed a tea party like revolution on the left, but watching how some of the bernie people are radicalizing into marxists, or jimmy dore stans, that aint it either. The left isn't immune from its own delusions, and some of its own transformations are terrifying. I always just wanted social democracy, or, as we know it now, with the advent of andrew yang, "human centered capitalism". But if the marxists get a hold of the democrats, they would likely screw up just like the tea party and alt right are doing so on the right. Extremist ideology isn't the answer, and seems to be the source of much collective delusion.

We need a change in direction from the moderate democrats, but it is possible to overdo it. We shouldnt embrace radical identity politics or literal marxism for example. But, we need to fight the GOP as it exists, and the dems need to stop playing paddycake with them. Watching the dems in 2016 push this weird cult of incrementalism and compromise seemed weird. I mean did they not learn from the obama administration? The democrats made a lot of the same mistakes the republicans did in 2008, relying way too much on attacking their opposition as a radical threat to the country while being out of line with the america people. The difference is though, the democrats were right, more so than they thought.

You see, for the dems, it was all political theater. Sure, they wanted to fire up their base to vote against the GOP, but they secretly believed they could work with the GOP and that politics was politics and at the end of the day we can all just come together and compromise around a neoliberal consensus. 

But...the GOP actually IS radical and uncompromising. Given my own experiences, it seemed obvious that they would be. But given the dems seemed unwilling to actually counter this, I was perfectly willing to let them lose and figure it out for themselves.

I'm not sure that worked as well as I expected. While the GOP has shown itself to be an existential threat to democracy, especially AFTER losing the 2020 election, they still remain remarkably popular with a lot of the people. The brainwashing goes deeper than I thought it would. I literally thought if people had to sit through 4 years of trump, they would leave so horrified it would mark the end of the GOP as we knew it. But Trump almost won in 2020, and actually incited his lunatic base to storm the capitol. And now the dems are hell bent on remaining as useless as possible at doing anything.

America is not in a good place. We face an existential threat from a radical, anti democracy republican party, and the democrats are stuck in their own little world of running to the center and refusing to fight at all.

THROW A PUNCH ALREADY. Again, not saying they have to go full Jimmy Dore or Karl Marx, heck, I'd rather they didn't, but I dont understand why they can't see that the answer is the same as it was in the 1930s, a strong democratic party that didn't take crap off of GOP and special interests and ran on actually fixing the country. Really, this is why I'm such a Bernie stan despite my ideological disagreements with the dude. The guy had a vision that could fix most of the problems we face, and while I dont agree on every single policy, I respect his vision enough to support it and vote for the dude.

If we want to defeat the GOP, and get out of this harmful cycle of strong republicans and weak democrats, we need strong democrats who have a vision that can win over a majority of americans. We need someone who can deliver a stern rebuke of the GOP so hard that they're forced to change or lose the country for a generation. But Hillary isnt going to give us that. Biden isn't either. And neither will Harris, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and other establishment darlings. The establishment is the problem. They need to step aside and let the next generation take over. As I said, most young people want biden gone by super majority margins. They want someone else. Someone younger, someone with a different vision. 

I fear, if the democrats cant get their crap together in the next 5-10 years, we might be screwed as a country. We literally are potentially looking at a fascist takeover here. This GOP is insane, they're radical, they must be stopped, but the democrats...just aren't going to deliver that. The answer isn't just to make unhappy people vote harder, or shame them when they don't. The answer is to deliver a once in a life time political campaign that realigns politics in ways favorable to left wing ideology. I'm not saying that will solve all problems. If the Bernie stans get in charge, for example, I could see these people in 30 years time talking about literally abolishing capitalism and nationalizing the economy. Lefties are stupid like that sometimes. BUT, we need to get out of this rut we're in between fascist republicans and worthless democrats. This is make or break people. Figure this crap out in the next decade or fall to the far right. That's what we're looking at.