Turning Points

This was also a long time ago but needs to get its due:

en.wikipedia.org

Southern strategy - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

A lot of the current state of the white evangelical movement - now largely synonymous with MAGA - can be traced back to this moment. The process accelerated in the last 15 years, but this is the foundation of the present-day white evangelical movement that now prizes political power, and the imposition of its goals via force or fiat, over faith or any religious mission of the church.

Edit: to give a little more detail, the southern strategy led directly to this:

en.wikipedia.org

Moral Majority - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

Falwell's movement is really the direct ancestor of the current white evangelical political power bloc. It was the first movemebt to really fully understand the power being able to direct, from the top down, a huge bloc of white evangelical voters through the imperatives of their religious leaders.
 
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altmin said:
Remembering Never Forget GIF

And how it led to an ends justifies the means erosion of norms and liberties. My father woke up September 12, 2001 suddenly a hard core Republican.
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The full cultural significance of this event cannot be overstated. Everything from a surge in isolationism and more rapidly growing distrust of experts following the second gulf war to the rise of militant Christianity in mainstream churches and worshipping the AR15 as the primary expression of patriotism.
 
lawtig02 said:
No, this thread is not about Charlie Kirk, even if he sadly co-opted the term. I just thought it might be interesting to have a thread dedicated to the moments in the last 45 years or so that marked real turning points in the evolution of the GOP from the party of "individual rights" to the party of unfettered executive power, and the evolution of our nation from a flawed liberal democracy to a thriving kleptocratic autocracy. Obama and Covid are the two easiest answers, but there are so many other transitional moments, and I'm curious which ones stand out to you.

I'll start with this one --

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I was young at the time but growing up in a Rush-listening household and I still remember the conservative fury over the "borking" of this man. I think it changed Republicans' views on the Supreme Court permanently, especially when Kennedy proved to be such a disappointment to movement conservatives. It's also interesting to remember that one of the main criticisms of Bork was his support for what we now call the unified executive theory. The NYT memorably called him an "advocate of disproportionate powers for the executive branch of Government, almost executive supremacy." Thirty-eight years later, we find ourselves in a nation in which the Supreme Court has abdicated its power in deference to "executive supremacy," and the obsolete structure of the court, combined with McConnell's mendacity, essentially guarantees minority conservative domination of the court for decades to come.

Bork was also one of the first conservative prophets of the anti-intellectualism that has now dumbed down our politics to the point it's indistinguishable from Idiocracy. In his book Slouching Towards Gomorrah, which dittoheads viewed as something akin to II Jeremiah, he wrote: “Surely a number of such people want to do the right thing, are well-intentioned, but just as surely some do not act from creditable intentions. Some of our elites . . . professors, journalists, makers of motion pictures and television entertainment, et al. . . . delight in nihilism and destruction as much as do the random killers in our cities. Their weapons are just different.” And thus the early days of the culture wars were distilled into three concise sentences.

What other turning points do you recall? The more obscure the better.
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I 100% agree that the Bork nomination was a turning point but for completely different reasons.

Prior to Bork Supreme Court nominations and confirmation hearings were, for the most part, non partisan, collegial and essentially non events. Ted Kennedy and the Dems' treatment of Bork was the game changer. It's never been the same since. Bork, followed by the Thomas confirmation, issued in the new era of hyper partisan nomination battles lead by special interest groups. It's now so bad (particularly on the Dems side) that I recall remarking to a colleague when Kavanaugh was nominated that he better be prepared to defend his 5th grade lunch room behavior because the Dem special interest groups are going to stop at nothing to defeat him.

I wasn't far off.

Republicans are tough on Dem SC nominees but there's never been a last minute special interest lead torpedo firing against a Dem nominee similar to Bork, Thomas and Kavanaugh.
 
"in 1958 Robert Welch of Chowan County North Carolina founded the John Birch Society."

donbosco

Politics Post in thread 'What Happened to American conservatism?'

IMG_8870.jpeg


A, THE, Bircher / N.C. Connection: “…
in 1958 Robert Welch of Chowan County North Carolina founded the John Birch Society. The organization was named for a ‘missionary’ killed by Chinese Communists - the circumstances of which are cloudy as they occurred during the days of the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II in China as greatly complicating the narrative, Birch was also an undercover US Army Air Forces Intelligence Officer and OSS operative.



Raised up in Hertford, N. C., Robert Welch eventually came to believe that ‘Reds’ were everywhere-For example, he...
  • Like
 
In my previous life as a marketing guru, one of the things we studied at were events that shape national identity. There are some events that only affect a nation or a region, while there are some developments that can have international consequence (9/11 and COVID are two clear examples of the latter). If I were to make a Top 10 list for the US (from a somewhat outsider perspective) of the last 30 years I would probably have the following:

-Gore/Bush too close to call
-9/11 & Iraq invasion
-founding of Facebook
-Katrina disaster response
-rise of smartphones (iPhone launch 2007)
-2008 financial crisis
-Obama election
-Trump election
-COVID
-Jan 6
 
CRHeel94 said:
In my previous life as a marketing guru, one of the things we studied at were events that shape national identity. There are some events that only affect a nation or a region, while there are some developments that can have international consequence (9/11 and COVID are two clear examples of the latter). If I were to make a Top 10 list for the US (from a somewhat outsider perspective) of the last 30 years I would probably have the following:

-Gore/Bush too close to call
-9/11 & Iraq invasion
-founding of Facebook
-Katrina disaster response
-rise of smartphones (iPhone launch 2007)
-2008 financial crisis
-Obama election
-Trump election
-COVID
-Jan 6
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Facebook and smartphones are definitely good ones.
 
While the Republican Southern Strategy bent on turning the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s-60s into a White Supremacist voting block for them replicated rather well the old Democratic Party's own racist campaigning throughout the South in the 1890s -- turning the schools into contentious public spaces fraught with tension by fostering segregationist protest and violence took things to another level...a reckless one that turned children into pawns and was as anti-education as it was anti-democracy.
 
HeelInTheOzarks said:
1994 midterms really stand out for me and the change of Congress from doing any lawmaking to pretty much solely a group of people to attack the president.
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Yeah, Gingrich was really the proto-McConnell in terms of an obstructionist congress. And as I have said many times, the filibuster and the way it has evolved into modern practice is a huge reason of why that approach can be successful.
 
CRHeel94 said:
In my previous life as a marketing guru, one of the things we studied at were events that shape national identity. There are some events that only affect a nation or a region, while there are some developments that can have international consequence (9/11 and COVID are two clear examples of the latter). If I were to make a Top 10 list for the US (from a somewhat outsider perspective) of the last 30 years I would probably have the following:

-Gore/Bush too close to call
-9/11 & Iraq invasion
-founding of Facebook
-Katrina disaster response
-rise of smartphones (iPhone launch 2007)
-2008 financial crisis
-Obama election
-Trump election
-COVID
-Jan 6
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To add a footnote, the voter purge conducted by Kathleen Harris in Florida probably had more to do with the outcome of Bush-Gore than any other one factor. It has terribly done and with a high degree of partisanship, bad information and misinformation.
 
Ramrouser said:
I 100% agree that the Bork nomination was a turning point but for completely different reasons.

Prior to Bork Supreme Court nominations and confirmation hearings were, for the most part, non partisan, collegial and essentially non events. Ted Kennedy and the Dems' treatment of Bork was the game changer. It's never been the same since. Bork, followed by the Thomas confirmation, issued in the new era of hyper partisan nomination battles lead by special interest groups. It's now so bad (particularly on the Dems side) that I recall remarking to a colleague when Kavanaugh was nominated that he better be prepared to defend his 5th grade lunch room behavior because the Dem special interest groups are going to stop at nothing to defeat him.

I wasn't far off.

Republicans are tough on Dem SC nominees but there's never been a last minute special interest lead torpedo firing against a Dem nominee similar to Bork, Thomas and Kavanaugh.
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Yeah, Pubs are so tough on Dems they don’t even allow them to be nominated by a Dem president.
 
As has already mentioned numerous times, the switch of racists white people from D to R is the most significant change in politics I have seen in my lifetime. Racist Southern white people voted pretty much "en bloc" as Democrats until 1968. That was the year the Republicans let the camel's nose into the tent. And ever since that 1968 election, Republicans have ran on a platform of "fear the other" to fuel their rise. Whatever contempt the GOP had for those who were conned by their "fear the other" mantra is complete and absolute BS now. The "fear the other" is no longer a rallying cry to fool gullible white people into electing those who are handmaidens to the wealthy. It is the animating feature of what the GOP is. And it is the wrecking ball the GOP uses to destroy America.

And it all happened on my watch. I cannot even imagine how disappointed my father and grandfather must be in what I have allowed to happen with no more opposition than the mere casting of my single vote.
 
donbosco said:
While the Republican Southern Strategy bent on turning the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s-60s into a White Supremacist voting block for them replicated rather well the old Democratic Party's own racist campaigning throughout the South in the 1890s -- turning the schools into contentious public spaces fraught with tension by fostering segregationist protest and violence took things to another level...a reckless one that turned children into pawns and was as anti-education as it was anti-democracy.
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In 2020-21, at the height of the "social justice era" sparked by the George Floyd protests, the North Carolina Bar Association did a detailed report on the role that many founding members of the Bar played in the 1898 election in North Carolina, which featured a campaign of overt white supremacy and opposition to integration (and specifically the Wilmington white supremacist coup). The Bar was founded basically right after that, by a number of folks who had prominent roles in that campaign (including governor Charles B. Aycock, who in hindsight was so obviously a virulent racist that no one has complained much about taking his name off of all kinds of things it was previously on).
 
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lawtig02 said:
I'll add another one that I've mentioned here before -- Katrina. I firmly believe Republicans viewed that disaster as the result of social dysfunction and political corruption in a blue city full of black Americans, and they could not understand why most people blamed Bush and his administration. The takeaway was that if Pubs will be blamed and called racists for a problem of the Dems' own making, there's no point trying to cooperate with the Dems on anything. This scorched earth mindset came to full bloom with the emergence of the Tea Party two years later.
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Good one.

I couldn't believe that the Dems/media/celebrities, etc. were successful in placing 100% of the blame on FEMA and Bush. Nagin and Blanco were straight up incompetent (delayed evacuation, refusal to allow national guard to be federalized, waited 4 days before requesting the assistance of the military, the empty school buses, etc.) yet they initially escaped almost any blame or criticism.

The Katrina effect did cause Republicans to back up in a corner and to decide to go scorched earth on their political opponents in the future.
 
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