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Thom Hartmann asked a question: Why is the GOP ruining America? Here's my reply FWIW. [1]
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Date: 2025-07-21
Thom Hartmann has a post detailing at length many of the ways Trump and the Republican Party are actively destroying America. He concluded by asking why are they doing this? This is my reply. I’ve written about these resources repeatedly, but it never hurts to keep bringing them up.
Mr. Hartmann:
If you are serious about asking why Trump and the GOP are working so hard to ruin the country, I can point you to some resources. What we need to recognize is that the Republican Party has become a right wing authoritarian movement, and understanding what that means makes it easier to understand why they are doing so many destructive things.
If you want a quick primer on how it works, you need to understand there are two personality types involved: authoritarian leaders and authoritarian followers. The way they interact is what drives what they are doing to the country. It all makes perfect sense — within their world.
Sara Robinson wrote a series of articles back in 2006 detailing how it manifests. Part 1 defines their personalities. Part 2 looks at why people get caught up in this, and what sometimes causes them to escape. Part 3 looks at mechanisms to break free of the mindsets that these movements run on.
Robinson’s articles draw heavily on John Dean’s Conservatives Without Conscience, and Dean’s book makes use of extensive research into right-wing authoritarian movements by Bob Altemeyer.
Altemeyer’s work is available as “The Authoritarians” which can be downloaded for free, and can also be found in several formats at Amazon.
Journalist David Corn has extensive documentation on how the Republican Party got to this point, going back decades while tracing the events, choices, and people who made it happen in his book American Psychosis — A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy. The list of citations and other sources is extensive; Corn has put all the pieces together.
Something that should not be neglected is following the money. A 2012 article by Rick Perlstein at The Baffler lays out how the right wing movement has always been full of grifters and other con men looking to score. The Long Con starts by looking at Mitt Romney, who built his career on mendacity that now looks quaint by comparison. The article traces the threads of greed that run all through conservatism. Trump has just taken it to the next level and is operating right out in the open these days.
Writing back in 2018, the late Kevin Drum writing at Mother Jones summarized what the Republican Party is these days in GOPus delendus est. The key excerpt:
..So this is where we are. The Republican Party can’t win using ordinary methods. On the process side, they can win only by inflating the white vote via gerrymandering, cracked-and-packed districts, and ruthless black voter suppression. On the policy side, they can win only with heavy dollops of strident and outright bigotry against Mexicans, Muslims, blacks, Hispanics, Chinese, and anyone else who comes along. Even Canadians will do in a pinch. Today, the Republican Party exists for one and only one purpose: to pass tax cuts for the rich and regulatory rollbacks for corporations. They accomplish this using one and only method: unapologetically racist and bigoted appeals to win the votes of the heartland riff-raff they otherwise treat as mere money machines for their endless mail-order cons...
The mainstream media and too much of the Democratic establishment is still in denial about Drum’s conclusion — and especially about his suggested remedy:
Like it or not, this is the modern Republican Party. It no longer serves any legitimate purpose. It needs to be crushed and the earth salted behind it, while a new conservative party rises to take its place. This new party should be conservative; brash; ruthless when it needs to be; as simpleminded as any major party usually is; and absolutely dedicated to making Democrats look like idiots. There should be no holds barred except for one: no appeals to racism. None. Not loud ones, not subtle ones. Whatever else it is, it should be a conservative party genuinely open to any person of any color.
It would also help if they were absolutely committed to the rule of law, the constitution, accountability, and democracy, but increasingly those ideals seem to be incompatible with conservatism.
And here we are.
I hope this will answer your question Mr. Hartmann.
Bonus Reading: The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett thoroughly documents how corrosive inequality is in a developed society. The greater the difference between the bottom and the top, the worse everyone does across the board by a whole range of measures.
They back it up with extensive research from around the world. Inequality is at record levels in the United States — The Spirit Level explains how dangerous this is, and why there is so much discontent across the country — and how Republicans are making it far worse.
Something’s got to give.
I realize that’s a lot of links to follow. If you do nothing else, please click on the first link for Sara Robinson. It really does an incredible job of describing exactly what we are facing.
It was written long before Trump came down the golden escalator, but it describes him and the MAGA movement with almost scary precision. If more people had known about this research, we might not be where we are today.
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