Republicans have been living the big lie for too long
Opinion by Fareed Zakaria
We are all wondering how the Republican Party — the party of Lincoln — got to the point that it has an elected member of Congress, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who has called for the execution of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), cast doubt on the events of 9/11 and suggested that a Jewish cabal used lasers to start the California wildfires. The answer is in plain sight: the accommodation of extremism by the party’s leaders. This week, the Republican congressional caucus declined to censure Greene in any way. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) pretended not to even know what QAnon was.
In the Senate, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has finally drawn the line, describing Greene’s views as “loony.” But it is too little, too late. The party has been encouraging loony views for years. Today we rightly laud Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) for his political courage — but it’s worth recalling that when he was running for president in 2012, he craved Donald Trump’s endorsement. When Romney got it, he gushed, “There are some things that you just can’t imagine happening in your life.” Later that year, he tacitly endorsed Trump’s most noxious lie — birtherism — joking that “no one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate.”
The real big lie at the heart of the modern Republican Party is about public policy, not conspiracy theories. Starting in the 1930s, Republicans promised their voters the repeal of FDR’s New Deal. When the next Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, did nothing of the sort, the modern conservative movement emerged, furiously branding Ike a traitor. When LBJ enacted the Great Society, conservatives pledged that once elected, they would tear it all down — and never did. Ronald Reagan launched his political career by denouncing Medicare as a direct path to socialism. If it passed, he warned, “[We] are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” Of course, as president, Reagan left Medicare largely intact.
In the early 1990s, House leader Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) doubled down on a rhetoric of radicalism and extremism. He promised revolution and described political opponents as the embodiment of evil, who won only because they lied and cheated. E.J. Dionne Jr. has described the toxic results of this strategy as “the politics of disappointment and betrayal.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/republicans-have-been-living-the-big-lie-for-too-long/2021/02/04/223e06fe-6728-11eb-886d-5264d4ceb46d_story.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
