Archive for the ‘Republican’ Category

Former Republican messaging maven brings his analysis of the GOP’s Trumpian trend to Tallahassee’s Midtown Reader – WFSU

A one-time top campaign adviser to the Republican Party now finds himself part of a small "never-Trump" minority. Tim Miller has written a book on how the GOP literally shifted under their feet.Miller crafted messaging for lots of moderate Republicans like Mitt Romney. But in 2015, he says everything changed with the rise of Donald Trump who found an eager grass-roots audience for HIS messages. As well as other politicians and a willing media megaphone.

"And what happened was those peoples' grievances and anger were exacerbated by a conservative eco-system. That was the other part of the 'Triangle-of-doom' that was telling them they should be upset and giving them phony enemies within and without, whether it's the caravan, or Sharia Law in schools. We could go down the whole list."

Miller, now an MSNBC analyst and a writer for "The Bulwark," will be at Tallahassee's Midtown Reader this Thursday evening, Sept. 15 at 7:00 p.m. He'll talk about his new book, "Why We Did It," on the takeover of the Republican Party by supporters of the former president. Midtown Reader is a WFSU Public Media supporter.

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Former Republican messaging maven brings his analysis of the GOP's Trumpian trend to Tallahassee's Midtown Reader - WFSU

Token ‘View’ conservative Alyssa Farah Griffin loves reminding viewers of her party: ‘As a Republican…’ – Fox News

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Newly minted "The View" co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin is a Republican, and she's not shy about reminding viewers of that fact.

In her many stints as a guest co-host over the past year, an appearance on "Good Morning America" last week promoting the ABC gabfest's new season, and since taking the chair officially as the show's token conservative, Griffin has frequently noted her political affiliation, sometimes in a defensive posture or while taking shots at her party.

"I will say this as a Republican," she said during a discussion in May about the then-rumored pending overturning of Roe v. Wade. "My party needs to start If we are, in fact, going to undo 50 years of precedent by overturning Roe, we need to invest in maternal care, paid parental leave, funding for rural health care funding."

"I'm a Republican who believes the more voters the better," she said in May, suggesting that stance in the party made her an outlier. "Everybody should have fair access to the ballot."

Alyssa Farah Griffin was recently named a permanent co-host of "The View." (Screenshot/ABC/TheView)

ALYSSA FARAH GRIFFIN SAYS TRUMP RESONATED WITH WORKING CLASS AMERICANS, PUSHES BACK ON SUNNY HOSTIN

In her appearance on GMA last week, she called Chelsea Clinton "fabulous" while adding, "as a Republican," she was excited to question Hillary Clinton when the pair appeared on the program later in the week.

"As a Republican," she said in February, she had once held a top security clearance and was thus critical of both Clinton and Trump for mishandling classified material.

The former top Trump White House aide is now one of Donald Trump's staunchest critics and has repeatedly said he should not be president again, but she said last week she hopes to be a "voice" for his 74 million voters in 2020. She has often invoked her Republican identity while distancing herself from Trump's unfounded 2020 stolen election claims.

"Here's what's kind of scary about it. I'm a conservative, I'm a Republican," Griffin said once after bemoaning a conservative Republican who was defeated in a primary by a staunch Trump backer.

NEW THE VIEW CO-HOST ALYSSA FARAH GRIFFIN WANTS TO BE VOICE OF TRUMP VOTERS

"As a Republican who has spoken out I resigned before January 6, a month prior who has consistently said it was not stolen, we lost," she said on another episode.

"As a Republican, we don't have to do that whole Trump thing again," she said in May of politics becoming a binary choice between him and Joe Biden.

Hillary and Chelsea Clinton were guests on the new season of "The View" last week. ((Photo by Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images))

While questioning Chelsea and Hillary Clinton on the show last week, Griffin mentioned President Biden's controversial speech against MAGA Republicans, noting "as a Republican" herself she had been outspoken that threats to democracy constituted "one of the biggest issues facing our country."

The ABC show has never troubled to balance out its panel over the years, pitting a token conservative in the chair furthest to the right of the screen to face off with staunch progressives like Rosie O'Donnell, Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar, Sunny Hostin and others through the years.

How much the conservative is willing to "fight" has depended on the person. Meghan McCain, while a Trump critic, had fiery exchanges almost daily with her co-hosts on the issues of the day, while Griffin has been far more deferential and affectionate toward her colleagues. That hasn't always endeared her to right-wing media figures; the conservative watchdog NewsBusters has dismissed Griffin, who is also a CNN commentator, as a "faux conservative." There are also far-left voices who think she shouldn't be on the show by virtue of ever working for and praising Trump, such as MSNBC's Tiffany Cross.

'THE VIEW' TOUTS NEW CO-HOST ANA NAVARRO AS REPUBLICAN POWER PLAYER DESPITE LIBERAL VIEWS, BIDEN SUPPORT

For her part, Griffin has defended her conservative bona fides and says she deserves to have a voice despite working for a president she now despises.

In the same GMA interview last week, she said "as a Republican," the show clearly "skewed left" but added she wasn't going in trying to change anyone's minds, but simply present an alternative point of view.

While some conservatives may find her insufficiently feisty, Griffin looks downright right-wing compared to the other new co-host.

New "The View" co-hosts Alyssa Farah Griffin and Ana Navarro are strongly anti-Trump Republicans.

Sitting in the middle of the table on Monday was fellow "Republican" co-host Ana Navarro. Navarro is nominally a Republican but strongly supports Democrats, espouses liberal positions nearly across the board, worked for Joe Biden's 2020 campaign in Florida, and has referred to Vice President Kamala Harris affectionately as "Auntie Kamala."

Navarro was named a permanent co-host alongside Griffin last month. While Griffin worked for and praised Trump for years, Navarro has been anti-Trump from the start of his political rise in 2015.

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Navarro used some of her airtime on Monday to declare the Supreme Court was illegitimate in part because conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh have been hit with sexual harassment and assault accusations.

Nikolas Lanum is an associate editor for Fox News Digital.

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Token 'View' conservative Alyssa Farah Griffin loves reminding viewers of her party: 'As a Republican...' - Fox News

The ancestral home of the moderate Republican faces Trumpian swing – POLITICO

Trump declared Diehl the only conservative running for governor in deep-blue Massachusetts during a telephone rally Monday night. Chris Doughty, Diehls rival for the nomination, Trump said, is just a tool of outgoing Republican Gov. Charlie Baker, a Trump nemesis who has not endorsed in the primary.

Doughty will do nothing but surrender to the left-wing extremists, Trump said in his five-minute speech, painting the businessman who was virtually unknown a year ago as a puppet of the establishment. If you want to save Massachusetts from the radical left you must vote Republican up and down the ballot, and vote for Geoff Diehl.

A Trump endorsement also looms over a contest next week in New Hampshire, among the last primaries in the country. Its a race where insiders say the former presidents nod could propel either a far-right candidate who champions his election denials or the establishment-backed state Senate president against vulnerable Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan.

In Massachusetts, Diehl is looking to capitalize on the vocal pro-Trump faction of the states Republican base and those who believe Baker has shifted too far left during his eight years in office.

Trumps endorsement is certainly something thats going to help make sure that we have a victory, Diehl told reporters while campaigning in Boston last weekend.

But his opponents, a mix of conservative and moderate Republicans that include allies of Baker, say Trumps endorsement can only spell trouble in a general election in one of the most anti-Trump states in the country. And presumptive Democratic nominee Maura Healey, who election handicappers say is likely to flip the governors seat blue in November, burnished her profile by repeatedly suing the Trump administration as state attorney general.

The Massachusetts gubernatorial primary is as much a proxy war between the Trump wing of the GOP and more moderate New England Republicans as it is a battle for control of the state Republican Party. The Massachusetts GOP has in recent years been defined by the power struggle between conservative, pro-Trump Chair Jim Lyons and the moderate Baker. But Bakers decision not to seek a third term left his wing of the party with a power vacuum, and Doughty is now the one standing in the way of a Trump takeover.

Our party is headed off a cliff in Massachusetts by supporting candidates that are frankly unelectable, Amy Carnevale, a GOP state committeewoman who voted for Trump but is backing Doughty in the gubernatorial primary, said in an interview. This primary has essentially become a referendum on the future of the Republican Party in Massachusetts.

Voters in solidly blue Massachusetts have elected fiscally minded yet socially moderate Republican governors like Baker and Bill Weld for the better part of 30 years.

But Diehl rejects that mold. The conservative former state representative describes himself as pro-life in a state where more than three-quarters of residents believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases. He opposes the coronavirus vaccine mandate for state workers implemented by the ever-popular Baker.

Obviously, things like having the presidents endorsement help with Republicans in the primary, but my messaging has always been targeted towards that independent voice out there.

Geoff Diehl

And, after initially veering away from Trump, Diehl tied his fate to the former president and his rhetoric. He brought in Trumps former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, as a senior adviser and has falsely claimed the 2020 election was rigged.

Diehls hard-right Trump turn played well at the state GOP convention in May, where he walked away with the partys endorsement for governor after winning a resounding 71 percent support from roughly 1,200 party activists. He followed it up by campaigning with South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a Trump ally, in August.

But Trump who jumped into the GOP primary back when it seemed like Baker would seek a third term and who again made clear hes not a fan of the governor during his telephone rally for Diehl could walk away from Tuesdays primary a loser.

Republicans make up less than 10 percent of registered voters in Massachusetts. The majority, 57 percent, of voters are unenrolled and can pull a Republican ballot in the states open primary.

That larger electorate has little love for the former president. Voters here resoundingly rejected Trump in both of his presidential bids and sent likeminded down-ballot candidates packing in 2020. Diehl, who co-chaired Trumps 2016 campaign in Massachusetts, also lost his 2018 campaign against Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren by 24 points.

Diehl argues that his experience running a statewide campaign will help him this time around and that his platform of restoring peoples freedoms will appeal across party lines to parents who want more say in their childrens education and people tired of living under pandemic rules.

Obviously, things like having the presidents endorsement help with Republicans in the primary, but my messaging has always been targeted towards that independent voice out there, Diehl told reporters while campaigning in Boston over the weekend. I understand that theres going to be Democrats who are going to have a tough time thinking of voting for me. But I think there are event light Democrats who are looking at me and saying hes talking about the things that are important to us.

Still, Doughtys supporters say their candidate is more electable. They argue the wealthy businessman whos poured more than $2 million of his own money into his first campaign is better positioned to take on Healey a fundraising juggernaut who had more than $4.7 million in her campaign coffers at the end of August than Diehl, who ended last month with less than $17,000 in his bank account.

And they point to the fact that, in a bizarre turn of events, influential conservative talk radio host and Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr a Trump ally who backed Diehl in his bid against Warren started urging his listeners last week to vote for Doughty.

Doughtys political leanings are murky at best. He initially labeled himself a moderate, then eschewed the term. He opposes vaccine mandates, describes himself as pro-life though hes vowed not to try and change state law protecting abortion access and has left the door open to voting for Trump in a future presidential run.

Im pragmatic and common-sense. Im not extreme, Doughty said in an interview. I speak to everybody thats just sort of sick of the extreme on both sides of the parties.

And hes won the support of more moderate Republicans including New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu through what they describe as his willingness to embrace bipartisanship in a state where Democrats control the Legislature with supermajorities in both chambers.

Hes not a moderate, Carnevale, the state commiteewoman, said. But I think he understands what it takes to govern in Massachusetts and thats the winning formula that weve seen time and time again on the Republican side for governor.

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The ancestral home of the moderate Republican faces Trumpian swing - POLITICO

The Long Unraveling of the Republican Party – The Atlantic

In 1992, Pat Buchanan made a campaign stop at the San DiegoTijuana border. As a few white-power activists who had tagged along milled in the background, he called for the United States to build a walla 200-mile-long physical boundary between the U.S. and Mexico. At the time, Buchanan was seeking the Republican nomination for the presidency, the first of two consecutive efforts that were rebuffed by party voters and leaders alike. Buchanan and his politics seemed to be on the verge of being drummed out of the GOP altogether. (When he made one last try for the White House, in 2000, he ran on the Reform Party ticket.) From the start of the 1990s, his hostility toward free trade and NATO, his extremist proposals on immigration, and his jeremiads against cultural decline marked him as an outlier. Communism was over, the stock market was rising, Silicon Valley was just taking off, and few were interested in Buchanans grim vision of a looming illegal invasion.

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Three decades later, Buchanans ideas may still seem fringe, but they are no longer marginal. His call for a barrier at the border has become a staple of Republican platforms, as have his denunciations of cultural decadence, his skepticism about free trade, and his warnings about the dangers of the global elite and of immigrant incursions. As the midterms approach, Donald Trumps conspiracy-laced version of those views shows no sign of flaming out, which forces the question: Is this ethno-nationalism and pugnacious stance toward cultural elites going to be the signature of the Republican Party from now on? And if so, what happened? Not all that long ago, the GOP was the party of Big Business, free markets, traditional family values, and anti-communism. Now it has become the party of election denial and the Wall.

When Trump first surfaced as a 2016 presidential candidate, his dizzying ascendance, seemingly out of nowhere, fueled the sense that he was hijacking a GOP theretofore rooted in the confident optimism that had come out of the Reagan era. Historians have considered Ronald Reagans presidency, and the adoption by the Democratic Party (especially under Bill Clinton) of Reagans end-of-big-government-and-big-labor-and-high-taxes ideology, as the formative development of the last quarter of the 20th centurythe vision that laid out the parameters for American politics in the new millennium.

Yet the recent trajectory of the Republican Party, and its turn against many of the key precepts of Reaganism, calls for a reassessment of this perspective. That is precisely what the historian Nicole Hemmer offers in Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s. She is joined in rethinking the evolution of conservatism by two journalists who approach the subject from different places on the political spectrum. Dana Milbank, the author of The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party, is a liberal Washington Post columnist. Matthew Continetti, the author of The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, arrived at The Weekly Standard as a 22-year-old in 2003 and is now a Never Trumper at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to National Review. All three books portray a conservatism that was fraught with tensions long before Trumps emergence. Their goal is to explain why the current incarnation of the GOP shouldnt come as a surprise. In showing the deep roots of our present crisis, their analyses also suggest the limits of any politics focused on a dream of salvaging the Republican Party.

The consensus among political historians of the postWorld War II years is that the conservative movement of the period was driven by two connected concerns: the desire to constrain the welfare state and the labor unions that had been created during the New Deal, and the imperative to fight international communism. In pursuit of both goals, conservatives embraced the ideology of the free marketas articulated, most notably, by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedmanand rejected the isolationism and America First mentality that had prevailed among many on the right prior to the war. This was, as Continetti argues, a major political shift: In the 1920s, the American right had been split between open elitists in the intellectual world, such as the journalist H. L. Mencken, who warned in a 1919 essay that all government is a conspiracy against the superior man, and the grassroots mobilization of the Second Ku Klux Klan, which strove through mass rallies and political campaigns to maintain the purity of the old pioneer stock.

During the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, the fight against the New Deal and the Soviet Union gave the right a new energy. Under the broad umbrella of opposing socialism and communism and defending freedom, all kinds of policies that might otherwise have appeared narrowly self-interestedfree-market economics, anti-tax measures, opposition to unions, an aggressive interventionism in Vietnam and elsewhereacquired an idealistic gloss. Even the ugliest aspects of postwar conservatism, such as its opposition to the civil-rights movement, could be portrayed as a principled defense of localism, or even as part of the anti-communist project: Some conservatives suspected that key advisers of Martin Luther King Jr. were secretly in league with Moscow, and that the entire civil-rights movement was riddled with communist sympathizers.

But this brand of conservative politicswhile garnering substantial support, especially from midsize-business owners and prosperous suburbanites, as well as southernersfailed to gain enough traction to win national elections in the 50s and 60s. Victories came only in the 70s, as postwar economic growth faltered and the conservative coalition expanded. Now it included working-class white voters in the North and South animated by resentment, fear, and racism in the aftermath of civil-rights successes. The movement also tapped into a new wave of organizing among evangelical churches, which were able to make common cause with anti-government conservatives in opposing such policies as the IRS denial of tax-exempt status for Christian schools found to be racially discriminatory. For their part, conservatives signed on to much of the evangelicals cultural crusade against abortion access and gay rights.

Read: How the GOP surrendered to extremism

Yet these new recruits and the business-oriented conservative establishment, all three authors argue, never fully merged. The New Right, which gathered momentum in the 70s, remained at arms length from the elite intellectual organizations of conservatism, such as the American Enterprise Institute and the libertarian Cato Institute. Its key activists lacked the establishments intense focus on economic issues, and were angry that their own zealous focus on cultural issues (strictly limiting abortion, banning gay teachers from public schools) wasnt shared. The schism and the fractious extremism at the core of the party, in tone as well as policies, were masked, however, by Reagans cheerful personathat of an avuncular, old-school movie-star gentleman whose politics embraced, Hemmer writes, flexibility and optimism, making movement conservatism genuinely popular for the first time in the Cold War era.

Not that Reagan, despite the unifying power of his presidency, was a moderate. He had a long history of warning against the encroaching control of the liberal state, and his administrations harsh attacks on welfare policies, unions, and busing were extreme; so was his support for his Star Wars defense initiative and for violent anti-communists in Central America. But anti-communist internationalism on the right also helps explain Reagans comparatively genial stance on immigration. As he put it during his 1980 campaign, You dont build a nine-foot fence along the border between two friendly nations. An early draft of the speech went further still: We cannot erect a Berlin Wall across the southern border.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and decline of communism in the early 90s shook the political world of the right. Suddenly, the lack of common ground between religious and cultural conservatives on the one hand and the libertarian-leaning establishment on the other was exposed. Already, anti-communist hard-liners had denounced Reagan for meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, and evangelicals had been chafing at his failure to do more to outlaw abortion. In the 1988 presidential race, Hemmer reminds us, the television host Pat Robertson had challenged George H. W. Bush in a campaign that tapped into conservative dissatisfaction with Reagan.

Despite the apparent triumph of capitalism in the Cold War, many conservatives in the 1980s and early 90s were gripped by what Continetti calls a deep-seated pessimism. They had managed to take control of the White House for eight years, yet were unable to shrink the state, had trouble holding Congress, and felt unwelcome in Hollywood and academia. A gloomy, bitter conservatism began to spread, from above and from below. Its rhetoric was tinged with loss and preoccupied with themes of masculinity, race, and immigration, a far cry from Reagans upbeat invocations of freedom and morning in America. The journalist Peter Brimelows 1995 best seller, Alien Nation, for example, opened with the suggestion that the country had been defined by a specific ethnic core that has always been whiteand was now in danger of being replaced.

From the March 2018 issue: Boycott the Republican Party

The transformation on the right was stylistic as well as substantive. Its hard to imagine Reagan leading cheers of Lock her up! or inventing Trump-style nicknames for his enemies. But this jeering patois would have been familiar to followers of Rush Limbaugh, whose nationally syndicated conservative talk-radio program started broadcasting on AM stations in 1988. Limbaugh was a college dropout who had read Pat Buchanans newspaper columns when he was growing up in Missouri and then found his way to radio, getting his break when Morton Downey Jr. was fired for using openly racist language on the air. Limbaugh immediately began to develop his own style, one that anticipated the bullying sarcasm of Twitter: Rather than harangue his audience or engage in high-minded exegeses of Friedrich Hayek or other conservative thinkers, he set out to ridicule the left, as Hemmer puts it. Limbaugh routinely insulted Democratic politiciansTed Kennedy was The Swimmer; Robert Byrd was Sheets (referring to his Ku Klux Klan past)and when critics phoned in to his show, he would cut them off with what he referred to as a caller abortion (a loud vacuum-cleaner noise followed by a scream before the line went dead).

A similar shift took place on Capitol Hill, where a program of tax cuts and deregulation was supplemented by constant hyperbolic invective. Newt Gingrichs crusade to rally congressional Republicans to build their base by explicitly embracing political language that demeaned their political opponents is well known. Even so, the intensity of some of this rhetoricand the ways in which it foreshadowed the style on the right todayremains surprising. Milbank describes the 1990 memo that Gingrichs political-action committee circulated to Republican candidates. Titled Language: A Key Mechanism of Control, it instructed them in how to speak like Newt, using words such as sick, corrupt, bizarre, pathetic, destroy, and decay when characterizing Democrats. Gingrich himself deployed this strategy incessantly, describing Democratic politicians as the enemy of normal Americans and calling for a war against the left to be fought with a scale and a duration and a savagery that is only true of civil wars.

Meanwhile, conspiracy theories acquired new salience in the movement, having long proliferated in less public ways on the right. (The John Birch Society, for example, specialized in anti-communist paranoia and continued to attract members well after it was repudiated by William F. Buckley and National Review in the 1960s.) Stoking doubts about whether Vince Foster, who had been deputy White House counsel to President Clinton, had really died by suicide in 1993 proved popular. Helen Chenoweth, the three-term Idaho representative in the 90s, catered to militia supporters and the far right with claims that the United Nations was secretly plotting to institute a one world government, a mission enabled by federal agents in black helicopters flying over Idaho.

Hemmer and Continetti make the case that the Republican establishment still held sway as late as the George W. Bush years. Hemmer calls Bush the last Reaganite, intent on pursuing free-trade agreements and tax cuts, while Continetti describes Bush as adopting a principled freedom agenda in the War on Terror and notes his efforts at immigration reform. Milbank, by contrast, sees the entire Republican establishment lurching to the right over those same Bush years. In his account, gerrymandering, campaign-finance scandals, and the Brooks Brothers Riot in Florida after the 2000 election (in which Republican operatives in suits mobbed the office where a recount was taking place, shouting Stop the count! Stop the fraud!) all anticipate the naked power grabs of the contemporary right. Milbank himself became the target of Karl Roves rage after writing a 2002 article headlined For Bush, Facts Are Malleable, about the administrations efforts to stoke support for the Iraq War; after it appeared, Rove telephoned Milbanks boss and requested that he be removed from the White House beat.

As the authors get closer to the present and to Trump-era chaos, the reading experience becomes disorienting. One source of overwrought, outlandish outrage is rapidly overtaken by the next; any given departure from evidence-based rational assessment is topped by another, as denial of Barack Obamas American citizenship is joined by climate-change denial, COVID denial, and 2020 election denial, while the base declares faith in QAnon and ivermectin. Each dispiriting set of characters gives way to a yet more demoralizing array. Glenn Beck is followed by Tucker Carlson; Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin by Elise Stefanik; the Tea Party by the Oath Keepers. One moment Lou Dobbs is insisting that hes just asking questions about Obamas birth certificate; the next, hes been thrown aside for being insufficiently anti-immigrant. Revolutions devour their own children, goes the truism (credited to a skeptic of the French Revolution)but among conservatives today, the journey from hero to apostate seems to happen at warp speed. So, among almost all the Republicans in the legislative branch, did the journey from momentarily denouncing Trump, on January 6, to swearing fealty once again.

Will the Republican Party continue to move ever further to the right? And if so, what does this portend for American politics? Taking the longest view, Continetti sees the current struggles on the right as the latest manifestation of a 100-year battle between the forces of extremism and those who have sought mainstream acceptance for conservative ideasthe establishment wing to which he has devoted his life. One imagines that he is looking for models when he approvingly refers to Senator Margaret Chase Smiths 1950 castigation of Joseph McCarthy, and her warning that certain elements of the Republican Party had chosen to manipulate their way to victory through the selfish political exploitation of fear, bigotry, ignorance, and intolerance.

But reading these books together does not inspire confidence. For one thing, as Continetti is honest enough to admit, the distinctions between the extremists and the respectable right have never been all that clear-cut. The postwar conservative movement was entwined with opposition to the civil-rights movement from the outset. Such luminaries as Buckley used National Review in its early days to argue against federal troops going to Little Rock, Arkansas, to protect Black schoolchildren; he did so on the grounds not only that the Southern dilemma was a matter for local control but that white people remained the advanced race and thus should be able to discriminate. Given this history, which predates the 1990s by decades, resurrecting an American conservatism free of the taint of racismand deeply committed to democratic political engagementis a formidable challenge.

Nor is it so easy to absolve classical liberalism and Reagans free-market policies of responsibility for our current travails. What you wont find in these accounts, focusing as they do on the ideas and programs of conservatives in positions of power in politics and the media, is much sense of the social history of the United States over the past three decades, as the legacies of the Reagan years became clear. The radical tax cuts, hostility toward labor, and deregulation that marked the 1980s facilitated the rapid deindustrialization of American cities and the rise of finance and services as the motors of economic life in the United States. The unionized jobs that had provided meaningful upward mobility for many in the postwar years all but disappeared.

Reagan promoted these shifts, even if they did not originate with him. And as Clintons presidency went on to demonstrate, the laissez-faire economic agenda of the 1980s and 90s became a largely bipartisan one: It promised a vision of a newly dynamic, globally plugged-in America rescued from boom-and-bust economics by low tax rates and the light hand of regulation. Pursued with a blithe insistence that all would be better in this best of all possible worlds, that agenda helped seed the social chaos and despair that have been such fertile ground for the right.

It has also helped create an economic elite with little connection to the rest of American society. Having benefited from low taxes and tax evasion, this elite has also been well served by the weakening of the public sector and the labor movement, and has every interest in the continued erosion of both. Tracing the history that illuminates Trumps success in commanding popular attention and support is important, even if evidence of a wholesale shift of working-class voters to the Republican Party is far from conclusive. Yet more surprising, in certain ways, is watching those factions of the political and economic elite that have thrown in their lot with Trump and the broader agenda he represents. They have been willing to do more than back candidates who are openly skeptical of democracy, and to continue funding election deniers after promising to cut off support. Abandoning traditional corporate imperatives, especially the desire for stability, some in these circles have relied on the least democratic features of our system (the Supreme Court, the filibuster, the Electoral College) to advance their ends, and made this reactionary politics far more dangerous in so doing.

How best to counter the politics of a Republican Party in thrall to Trump is not obvious. Milbank pleads with the republic to vote (presumably for Democrats), suggesting that the Republican project is an antidemocratic one that speaks for a declining rural white minority and will inevitably be defeated. Continetti rallies conservatives not to flee the scene but to stay and fight for the principles of classical liberalism. Only Hemmer proposes that the Democratic Party might also bear some culpability for the transformation of the partisan landscapewhich implies that an overhaul of moral and political vision is crucial.

One of the challenges of our moment is that so many forces seem poised to drive people out of what remains of public life. At some point, arguing with opponents galvanized by a completely different political calculus becomes enervating. It feels like shadowboxing, at a time when the issues our society confrontsthe pandemic, climate change, the international role of the United States, stark economic inequalityhave never been more pressing. The way forward is daunting because it calls for a new kind of politics that can generate the courage and strength to push back against a politics of fear and demonization. With all due respect to Margaret Chase Smith, the path doesnt lie in trying to reconstruct the old order that helped open the door to our current crisis.

*Lead image: Illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: Charles O. Cecil / Alamy; Independent Picture Service / Alamy; Grant Peterson / Fairfax Media / Getty; Everett Collection Historical / Alamy; Mark Reinstein / Corbis / Getty; Catechetical Guild; Wally McNamee / Corbis / Getty; Fotosearch / Getty; Interim Archives / Getty; Universal History Archive / Getty; Scott Olson / Getty; Jose More / VWPics / Alamy; Ron Galella / Getty.

This article appears in the October 2022 print edition with the headline The Roots of Republican Extremism.

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The Long Unraveling of the Republican Party - The Atlantic

Harris tells Democrats ‘stakes could not be higher’ as the midterms near – ABC News

With the midterm elections less than two months away, Vice President Kamala Harris on Saturday said the "stakes could not be higher" as both parties wrestle for control of Congress.

Speaking at the Democratic National Committee's summer meeting in Maryland, Harris echoed President Joe Biden's recent attacks on "MAGA" Republican leaders who he says are a threat to the nation.

"We need to speak truth about that," Harris said. "Today, we all by coming together reaffirm that we refuse to let extremist, so-called leaders dismantle our democracy."

The vice president criticized the fallout from the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade as one example of such leaders attempting to "take away freedoms." At least 15 states have ceased nearly abortion services since the court's ruling in late June.

Harris warned Republicans could decide to ban abortion nationwide or go after other rights such as contraception or marriage equality if they become the majority in the House and Senate.

"Without a Democratic majority and conference, who knows what other rights they will come after?" she asked.

She condemned Republicans who say issues like abortion rights should be left up to individual states while also "intentionally make it more difficult for people in those states to vote" and called out three states -- Florida, Texas and Georgia -- for restrictive laws targeting abortion rights and the LGBTQ community.

Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, Sept. 9, 2022.

Adam Davis/POOL/EPA via Shutterstock, FILE

Like Biden, she also framed the midterm elections as a stark choice between the Democrats' agenda and that of some of their Republican colleagues.

"If there was any question about whether there's a difference between the parties, well, over the last 18 months, it has become crystal clear," she said. "There is a big difference. We all know that American families have been struggling but while Republican Party leaders have gone on TV to opine about the situation, Democrats actually did something about it."

The vice president went on to tout administrative accomplishments on COVID-19 relief, infrastructure, gun safety and the announcement of student debt cancelation.

Other parts of the Biden-Harris agenda, including child care and voting rights, have stalled in Congress but Harris said if Democrats can pick up two more seats in the Senate more can be done -- specifically highlighting her role as the Senate's tie-breaking vote.

"In our first year in office, some historians here may know, I actually broke John Adams's record of casting the most tie breaking votes in a single term," she said, before adding: "I cannot wait to cast the deciding vote to break the filibuster on voting rights and reproductive rights."

Biden has called on the Senate to change the filibuster rules to pass voting reforms and to codify Roe but was met with opposition from Republicans and a few members of the Democratic Party.

Republicans, in their midterm messaging, have criticized the Biden administration over inflation, gas prices and crime.

The GOP has been generally favored to win back control of the House and Senate this cycle but recent legislative and electoral wins are signs Democrats' odds may be improving.

Harris celebrated Democrat Mary Peltola's victory over Republican Sarah Palin in Alaska's special election for the state's vacant U.S. House seat, as well as Kansas voters rejecting an anti-abortion ballot measure.

"We've got momentum on our side," she said.

ABC News' Justin Gomez contributed to this report.

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Harris tells Democrats 'stakes could not be higher' as the midterms near - ABC News