The thing is, I was alive and an adult then, and I knew otherwise OK people who were single issue voters who therefore voted republican. I may have disagreed with them on a thing or three, but we could get along OK. It either wasn’t as pervasive, or somehow didn’t hit my sphere. (And I was living in the south at the time)
Now - everyone who I know is a republican is just a raging confrontational asshole.
I made the comment because Gingrich took confrontational politics and brought it to the National level. The era of Fox News and the 24hr news cycle was starting and he was the architect of the sensational hyper partisan angry Republicanism that we see today on right wing media. I don’t think Gingrich actually believed what he is pushing. He pushed it because it got the results he wanted.
Fast forward 30 years and now we have social media and the internet all vying for attention. Only the most extreme views that are controversial enough get noticed and commented on.
Some of the people I know who were Republicans have moderate enough views that they don’t feel the party is in step with them anymore. But I know Republicans who are true MAGA supporters and just parrot the grievances of their party. They all seem to emulate that anger
It’s the natural conclusion of the strategy republicans set into motion to manipulate their base.
It started just after Watergate. Nixon was facing massive calls for justice from both sides. Republican think tanks realized that their base of conservatives consumed news from all sources that informed their mostly unbiased decision to hold their guy accountable. So those republican think tanks devised a plan to create a conservative news outlet that explicitly demonized other news so that the conservative base would never turn on one of their own again. That strategy was realized in the 90’s with the creation of Fox News.
Since then, conservative media has been slowly transforming politics from the perspective of the average conservative into a team sport, where the main motivation isn’t “who runs the country better” but rather “my team is better than yours”.
It wasn’t so pervasive 20 years ago, but conservative media has found themselves with a base that now only responds to the outrage they’ve been conditioning them with, and that has created the raging confrontational assholes you see today.
Being a conservative doesn’t mean what it used to. And that’s because the Republican leadership robbed conservatives of that in order to maintain control of their base.
The thing is, I was alive and an adult then, and I knew otherwise OK people who were single issue voters who therefore voted republican. I may have disagreed with them on a thing or three, but we could get along OK. It either wasn’t as pervasive, or somehow didn’t hit my sphere. (And I was living in the south at the time)
Now - everyone who I know is a republican is just a raging confrontational asshole.
I made the comment because Gingrich took confrontational politics and brought it to the National level. The era of Fox News and the 24hr news cycle was starting and he was the architect of the sensational hyper partisan angry Republicanism that we see today on right wing media. I don’t think Gingrich actually believed what he is pushing. He pushed it because it got the results he wanted.
Fast forward 30 years and now we have social media and the internet all vying for attention. Only the most extreme views that are controversial enough get noticed and commented on.
Some of the people I know who were Republicans have moderate enough views that they don’t feel the party is in step with them anymore. But I know Republicans who are true MAGA supporters and just parrot the grievances of their party. They all seem to emulate that anger
It’s the natural conclusion of the strategy republicans set into motion to manipulate their base.
It started just after Watergate. Nixon was facing massive calls for justice from both sides. Republican think tanks realized that their base of conservatives consumed news from all sources that informed their mostly unbiased decision to hold their guy accountable. So those republican think tanks devised a plan to create a conservative news outlet that explicitly demonized other news so that the conservative base would never turn on one of their own again. That strategy was realized in the 90’s with the creation of Fox News.
Since then, conservative media has been slowly transforming politics from the perspective of the average conservative into a team sport, where the main motivation isn’t “who runs the country better” but rather “my team is better than yours”.
It wasn’t so pervasive 20 years ago, but conservative media has found themselves with a base that now only responds to the outrage they’ve been conditioning them with, and that has created the raging confrontational assholes you see today.
Being a conservative doesn’t mean what it used to. And that’s because the Republican leadership robbed conservatives of that in order to maintain control of their base.