A question for older DUers and those who study history: Were repubicans always this nuts?

[hifiguy]

24. No way. When I was young there were plenty of

reasonable, moderately conservative Republicans both nationally and in my state. They used to be called "Rockefeller Republicans" after NY Gov Nelson Rockefeller. Generally they were moderate to conservative on fiscal issues and moderate to liberal on social issues. I don't remember anything like the religulous kooks being in the Repub parth of the 1960s and most of the 1970s, much less controlling the party.

Back in the 1960s William F. Buckley basically read the John Birch Society out of the Repub party. Not that Buckley was any particular apostle of enlightened liberalism, but he knew kooks when he saw them. While they were booted from the Republican party, the kooks never went away, they just went underground. Which left the national Republican party in the hands of center-right adults. One could disagree civilly with them, and there were even many liberals in the national party. Ed Brooke, Charles Percy, Charles Mathias, Bob Packwood - the Rockefeller wing of the party remained a force to be reckoned with if not necessarily the dominant players.

Nixon's Southern Strategy opened the door for the racist elements, and constituted an invitation to the mossback Dixiecrats to make common cause with Repukes. The Bircher wing of the party began to slowly re-emerge in the mid-to-late 1970s after the religulous shitheels like Falwell and Robertson slimed their way into public life on a national scale. These two groups of reactionary crazies made common cause with each other, and it was a group Raygun assiduously courted in his first two runs for the presidency. At the same general time the most reactionary and crazy elements of the plutocracy of the time, like the Scaife and Coors families, dumped millions into "think" tanks to promote reactionary policy ideas. Richard Viguerie developed the direct mail strategy to extract enormous sums of cash from the low-IQ people mobilized by Falwell and Robertson.

Raygun tapped all these diverse but ideologically united reactionary elements to underpin his 1980 run against the luckless Jimmy Carter and the Republican party began its descent into the open air lunatic asylum that it is today.

The purges of the sane and responsible Repigs did not really start until the 1990s, though. Gingrich was a central player in this drama. Here in Minnesota the buybull thumpers began expelling (or driving away) all of the moderate elements of the party in the name of talibangelical ideology. Tolerate gays? Gone. Believe government has a constructive role to play in American life? You're out of here. Unwilling to swear eternal and unquestioning fealty to Repukelikon Jeebus? Hit the road. Women's rights? Fuhgeddabout it. Expecting the rich to pay their fair share? Begone, heretic! The remaining moderates fled in disgust. The elements which remained - the plutocrats and their useful religious idiots - took over the party completely and began charting their course for neo-feudalism (one could also call it neo-fascism) and their dream of a state that is, at its essence, theocratic totalitarianism combined with the Divine Right of the 1%.

At least that's how I remember it and I've been following politics for 40 years.