From Pine View Farm

History Lesson 0

The Booman summed it up so I don’t have to:

. . . It’s pretty plain that something pathological has dwelt within the Right for a very long time. The difficulty in diagnosing it has been that almost none of us were alive and conscious in the 1920’s, the last time before the Bush Era that the GOP controlled all three branches of government.

The 1930’s brought a deep and abiding minority status for the Republican Party, all of which they spent nursing one form of paranoid grievance or another. In the 1930’s it was red-baiting, foaming about the New Deal, and apologizing for fascism. In the 1940’s, after the war, it was an unhealthy obsession with the Red Menace of Russia and China. In the 1950’s it was all about communist infiltration of the government, Hollywood, and the armed services. From the 1960’s on, it has been about countering the counterculture and fighting the expansion of rights to all our citizens, regardless of race, gender, religion, or sexual preference. Their one decent president in all this time wasn’t even much of a Republican. The Democrats would have happily nominated the Supreme Allied Commander in 1952 if Ike had only agreed to run on their ticket. The rest of the GOP’s lineup has been thoroughly corrupt, if not corrupt and incompetent.

Really, not much has changed. The right is still the right that Richard Hofstadter diagnosed over half a century ago.

They are afraid.

They are afraid of history.

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