Devolution 0
In The Atlantic, George Packer tracks the devolution of the modern Republican Party. A snippet:
Republicans have chosen contraction and authoritarianism because, unlike the Democrats, their party isn’t a coalition of interests in search of a majority. Its character is ideological. The Republican Party we know is a product of the modern conservative movement, and that movement is a series of insurgencies against the established order. Several of its intellectual founders—Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham, among others—were shaped early on by Communist ideology and practice, and their Manichean thinking, their conviction that the salvation of Western civilization depended on the devoted work of a small group of illuminati, marked the movement at its birth.
Via Juanita Jean.
Afterthought:
I think the author failed to give adequate emphasis to Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy, in which appeal to racism and racists became an overt tactic of the Republican Party. The Southern Strategy was key to the Republican Party’s march from being personified by Nelson Rockefeller and Everett Dirksen to being personified by Steve King and Louie Gohmert.
