They don't believe in anything. They just hate us.

[speak easy]

At least in the Civil War the South believed in something - slavery. Today, anything goes, as long as it 'owns the libs'. How did we get here?

[Skittles]

1. Reagan made greed and ignorance fashionable

the GOP has been appealing to the ugly side of human nature for decades....why do they keep doing it? Because it WORKS.

[speak easy]

2. even Reagan would not have been 'rootin' for Putin'.

[Skittles]

3. maybe not, but he did America a LOT of harm

America has never fully recovered from that asshole Reagan

[speak easy]

4. Goldwater - Nixon - Reagan

Ragan was the worst, but that's not saying much.

[CrackityJones75]

9. At least Goldwater knew about the fake christians

While I don’t agree with his policy he knew that the fake christians would destroy his party.

[Doc Sportello]

22. Agree, he was sort of a tipping point

Delegitimatizing the New Deal and legitimatizing the greed is good mantra through deregulation and worship of materialism. Throw in nationalist foreign policy an the expansion of the Southern Strategy and you have the beginnings of today's MAGAtism. Course had had a lot of help with Friedman and the military-industrial complex oligarchs, et al.

[William Seger]

11. ... and when Rush Limbaugh proved it was also profitable ...

... right-wing propaganda became a major industry.

[betsuni]

5. No morals or conscience, only winning. Power, using whatever gets them there. Started in the '70s.

[speak easy]

6. Turbo charged by Newt in 1994

[rpannier]

7. Earlier

I remember in the 80s Tip O' Neil blasting Gingrinch and the (at the time) fringe wing of the Republikkan party in the House for questioning the loyalty of Democrats

[Steven Maurer]

8. We made racism and hatred deplorable...

...something that only evil people engaged in. From their evil point of view, being called evil is the worst thing, so of course they'll turn their hate of minorities and women and anyone who is not part of their in-group of WASP bigots, onto liberals in general.

That's how we got here.

Had Democrats just kept FDR's silent deal with the Dixiecrat/Devils, we would still have substantial majorities. But we didn't.

Thank goodness.

[OneGrassRoot]

12. Thanks for that...

I updated my post below to add clarification to include your point. I agree that their hatred of The Other, and our lack of joining them in that hatred or our actual push-back against it, lies at the heart of their hatred of us. Now they have made us The Other, with all the dehumanization that goes along with it.

[OneGrassRoot]

10. I agree. It's pathological...

People point to different inflection points and a multitude of influences and no doubt they all have merit, but growing up in the 60s and 70s there was a visceral loathing of people viewed as liberal. Think of "All in the Family" - Mike and Gloria, and how Archie loathed everything Mike stood for. I mean a visceral loathing though Carroll O'Connor pulled it off with humor. My family thought that show was a how-to show, never realizing the sarcasm embedded.

The irony, which many of us have pointed out repeatedly, is that the qualities they seem to loathe truly are the qualities most people associate with Jesus, and most of the right-wingers consider themselves Christian.

But the whole "tree-huggin' liberal peace freak" hatred has been around since my childhood, and I do wonder if the extreme societal divide started then, with the anti-war movement associated with hippies and the now larger-than-life stories of soldiers being spat upon when they returned from war. Of course we know the political class has manipulated cultural issues forever and the anti-war, pro-environment, pro-choice side faced full-on combat from the creation of the official Moral Majority movement.

I grew up with that hatred of who I am and it exploded in the 90s with Limbaugh and then Fox News and now it is a hatred so strong I really think they have lost sight of why they hate. They just know they do. They are repulsed by anything and anyone they deem liberal (though, like Archie Bunker, can tolerate loved ones even if we've gotten to the point we can't tolerate their hatred any more). It's pathological and so much bigger than politics or quaint "culture wars" now.

It's irrational and has become a full-blown cult with Trumpism, with outright dehumanization of liberals/progressives. I don't see how the spell breaks without everything getting much, much worse which is hard for me to fathom.

EDIT TO ADD: Steve Maurer's post above made me want to clarify that part of what they so obviously hate is the "love everyone" message -- no matter the skin color or religion or nationality. I agree with Steve that hatred of The Other, and us calling it out or rebelling against it, is at the root of their hatred of us. It's probably not so much an anti-war stance as the anti-war protesters not hating The Other as we're supposed to and thus seen as traitors.

[empedocles]

14. . . . and, as Carville has noted, a lot of voters don't like the Democratic Party 'brand'.

OGR you noted 'Archie'.

2 and 1/2 men has a longstanding popularity . . . still. Alan, the politically correct liberal, is the butt joke humor there.

[OneGrassRoot]

15. Yes!

Excellent point. He’s portrayed as the “weak” male. It continues.

[empedocles]

16. Yes. Most of the other characters, in their own peculiar way, have some 'strength'

[empedocles]

19. The weak lib, emerged as the mainstay [Sheen got fired], for more series years.

12 series years and still doing very well in reruns.

Easy to blast white supremacists, but 'the libs' thing, is a underlying November problem.

[Doc Sportello]

23. Solid analysis

I went through the same thing being an anti-war, anti-racism hippie in a conservative state. One thing you mentioned that people forget is how the "Vietnam soldiers returning were spat upon" myth was an early form of disinformation used to discredit the anti-war movement. Tom Hayden and others proved in later years that it was an urban myth. Of course that reponse was always met with "oh no it happened to my uncle" and when that wasn't true, it was "a friend of my uncle" and so on. The right has used false memes to its advantage ever since.

[OneGrassRoot]

25. I'd love to know who it was...

in Nixon's sphere who created that myth because, as you said, it laid the foundation for nonstop demonization with no basis in fact or reality. I just read this piece about that whole myth - http://www.vvaw.org/veteran/article/?id=350

The crazed evangelical/Qanon right-wing GOP has moved on from accusations of spitting on soldiers to liberals being pedo grifters and groomers.

Dangerous stuff.

[Doc Sportello]

26. Part of a whole strategy

That included use of agent provocateurs by the FBI. One such operation got a group of people I was involved with to do something stupid and illegal but not dangerous (crossing a few feet into an Air Force base without permission during a demonstration) and 10 went to federal prison. Nixon didn't care about niceties or legalities, and his acolytes were more than ready to put his wishes into action. That type of truly anti-American way of thinking continued through Reagan and to dump. And as you said it is even more dangerous today.

[OneGrassRoot]

27. I gotta say...

I never realized how truly vile and nefarious Nixon was until fairly recently and how much of an influence his administration and their criminality had on how things have unfolded since then.

[Doc Sportello]

28. Yeah he was kind of a quirky personality

And then Goldwater and the rest got rid of him, so I thought well he's a one off. But the demonization Haldeman and Liddy and the rest perpetrated and continued was in many ways one of the foundations for today's hate

[JHB]

13. How did we get here? 60 years of deliberate conservative investment in grievance

"Ticked off about certain somethings? We hear you, and you're right to feel that way. Anyone who tells you different is trying to shut you up so you won't realize how many people agree with you. You're in the majority, you're normal, not them."

Pick up on anything they can and get people axe-grinding over it.

And above all they invested in capacity: Buying up or building media chains and outlets and perhaps only having a fig leaf of "objectivity" or not even bothering with it. After all, anything was fair due to "liberal bias in the media."

They turned their messages into our national background radiation. It's "normal" because that's what people are talking about, but a big part of why "people are talking about it" is because it gets pumped into their radio shows, TV programs, social media feeds, etc.

[NewHendoLib]

17. They hate themselves. They have to despise us because they

Have no joy, no humor.

[Act_of_Reparation]

18. Thank Christ someone else gets it.

This, this, this, this, a thousand times this.

The Republican voter has no ethos, no ideology, apart from "libruls suck". They will pivot on literally any issue as long as it positions themselves opposite us.

[Kingofalldems]

20. They want us dead.

[kentuck]

21. All they need is hate.

Just like the Germans were trained to hate Jews, they have been trained to hate liberals. It could go off the rails very quickly. A bad economy could turn everything ugly very quickly.

[Doc Sportello]

24. The only good thing is that in the long run it's self-destructive

We can only hope they don't take the rest of us down with them.