I think 1994 was a pivotal moment, but like you allude to in your footnote, the broad sweep of Republican postwar electoral history shows many troubling signs of decay. To recap, the Republican presidents since we beat Hitler are:
- Eisenhower, a decent enough man and a competent bureaucrat who nearly escalated us into an apocalypse by caving into public pressure to "close the missile gap", which in reality was far and away a gap to America's advantage. His parting note about the Military-Industrial Complex was an exquisite exercise in gaslighting that did nothing to halt the very thing he railed against.
- Nixon, an objectively a terrible human being *and* a terrible president who reneged on the promise to stop killing all those Indochinese for no real reason, but he didn't obstruct the formation of the EPA so he wasn't completely shitty in every respect. Also escalated the War on Drugs, one of the stickiest and most evidence-averse policies in the history of the country.
- Ford, an incompetent bootlicking placeholder who never actually won a nationwide election but didn't fuck things up *too* horribly in the grand scheme of the jagoffs on this list.
- Reagan, an Alzheimer's sufferer who never saw a bunch of Central Americans he wouldn't like to put in a mass grave in between watching his own movies and giving avuncular anecdotes whenever his handlers wheeled him in front of a camera while they double-dealt with the Iranians and reenacted D-Day in Grenada.
- Bush the Elder, another placeholder, though a competent-enough one, whose primary ambitions seemed to be getting elected and betraying a bunch of Saddam Hussein's enemies in a failed gambit to get elected a second time.
- Bush the Lesser, still the low-water mark of American geopolitics in world-historical terms, who oversaw 9/11 and let Cheney use that event and the office of the presidency itself to embark on an endless occupation of the Middle East. While he wasn't the first president's son to go on to assume the office, he ain't Jon Quincey Adams, and his watercolours got nothing on the Amistad.
- Donald Trump, a literal reality TV star with the worst traits of New York and Florida combined, like some kind of alligator-skin Bodega hotdog that plays a Luis Fonsi remix of Florida Georgia Line every time you swallow a bite. The best we can say about him is that he was too lazy to enact the worst of Rachel Maddow's fever dreams.
I think we infer 1994 as the inflection point simply because it was when Republicans in Congress stopped pretending to play nice. That's definitely not nothing, but at least from Eisenhower, we see growing problems of misinformation, outright lies, cynical opportunism, and tribalism that threaten the very social fabric of the United States.
I don't mean to imply that these men *caused* these issues. I mean, Joe McCarthy was violating the spirit of the Constitution in 1950, and the race relations of the Flower Power/Vietnam era make today's look like a mild disagreement over work duty in a Kibbutz. And the Democratic presidents during this same period certainly aren't all angels.
But still, it's worth noting the longstanding problems symbolised by these Republican presidents, as well as the general decline, which seems to be accelerating. I'm quite morbidly curious about what the Republican Party will vomit out next.
1) The video to the insane "I am not a witch" video linked through ABC Is gone, need to use https://youtu.be/uxJyPsmEask for now, and if that goes someday, whoever is reading this years from now make sure you google/torrent that video as it is priceless (in a pinch the Kristen Wiig SNL parody video can suffice as it is essentially 1:1)
I think 1994 was a pivotal moment, but like you allude to in your footnote, the broad sweep of Republican postwar electoral history shows many troubling signs of decay. To recap, the Republican presidents since we beat Hitler are:
- Eisenhower, a decent enough man and a competent bureaucrat who nearly escalated us into an apocalypse by caving into public pressure to "close the missile gap", which in reality was far and away a gap to America's advantage. His parting note about the Military-Industrial Complex was an exquisite exercise in gaslighting that did nothing to halt the very thing he railed against.
- Nixon, an objectively a terrible human being *and* a terrible president who reneged on the promise to stop killing all those Indochinese for no real reason, but he didn't obstruct the formation of the EPA so he wasn't completely shitty in every respect. Also escalated the War on Drugs, one of the stickiest and most evidence-averse policies in the history of the country.
- Ford, an incompetent bootlicking placeholder who never actually won a nationwide election but didn't fuck things up *too* horribly in the grand scheme of the jagoffs on this list.
- Reagan, an Alzheimer's sufferer who never saw a bunch of Central Americans he wouldn't like to put in a mass grave in between watching his own movies and giving avuncular anecdotes whenever his handlers wheeled him in front of a camera while they double-dealt with the Iranians and reenacted D-Day in Grenada.
- Bush the Elder, another placeholder, though a competent-enough one, whose primary ambitions seemed to be getting elected and betraying a bunch of Saddam Hussein's enemies in a failed gambit to get elected a second time.
- Bush the Lesser, still the low-water mark of American geopolitics in world-historical terms, who oversaw 9/11 and let Cheney use that event and the office of the presidency itself to embark on an endless occupation of the Middle East. While he wasn't the first president's son to go on to assume the office, he ain't Jon Quincey Adams, and his watercolours got nothing on the Amistad.
- Donald Trump, a literal reality TV star with the worst traits of New York and Florida combined, like some kind of alligator-skin Bodega hotdog that plays a Luis Fonsi remix of Florida Georgia Line every time you swallow a bite. The best we can say about him is that he was too lazy to enact the worst of Rachel Maddow's fever dreams.
I think we infer 1994 as the inflection point simply because it was when Republicans in Congress stopped pretending to play nice. That's definitely not nothing, but at least from Eisenhower, we see growing problems of misinformation, outright lies, cynical opportunism, and tribalism that threaten the very social fabric of the United States.
I don't mean to imply that these men *caused* these issues. I mean, Joe McCarthy was violating the spirit of the Constitution in 1950, and the race relations of the Flower Power/Vietnam era make today's look like a mild disagreement over work duty in a Kibbutz. And the Democratic presidents during this same period certainly aren't all angels.
But still, it's worth noting the longstanding problems symbolised by these Republican presidents, as well as the general decline, which seems to be accelerating. I'm quite morbidly curious about what the Republican Party will vomit out next.
Couple of notes:
1) The video to the insane "I am not a witch" video linked through ABC Is gone, need to use https://youtu.be/uxJyPsmEask for now, and if that goes someday, whoever is reading this years from now make sure you google/torrent that video as it is priceless (in a pinch the Kristen Wiig SNL parody video can suffice as it is essentially 1:1)
2) Surprised you didn't work in Meet Wally Sparks