Barry Goldwater's Warning About Our Current Republican Party In One Graphic

[YoungDemCA]

19. Ironically, while Goldwater seems more sensible these days, compared to the modern GOP....

...he was considered something of a nutball in the 50s and 60s. Many feared that he would start nuclear war. He was aggressively anti-union and hostile to federal regulation of business. His presidential campaign in 1964 pioneered the use of appeals to "law and order" and "moral values" that were often coded with racist undertones to speak to the anxieties of white middle-class Americans. He was the first Republican to win the deep South. He was the first Republican presidential candidate to be nominated as a distinctly modern and aggressively active or "movement" conservative. And his nomination and campaign marked the first experience where the "New Right" provided much of the intellectual and organizational backing of the Republican candidate.

If you look at the Republican candidates from Goldwater on, ever since they've had to answer to a much more right-wing Republican Party. Nixon and Ford, though rather centrist by comparison, pandered to the New Right. Reagan was their lionized hero, and Bush Sr and Dole pandered to an even more aggressively right-wing GOP. And then came George W Bush, who by the time he was nominated, was running in a Republican Party that was dominated by the Religious Right.

Post-Bush, the Republicans have gone off the deep end for good this time, it seems. A lot of them are looking to inspiration in Ronald Reagan's example, but not Reagan the real President-no, they are looking at Ronald Reagan, The Conservative Idealized Hero. They just aren't dealing with the real world anymore.

There have always been fantastical, conspiratorial elements to the GOP (see the John Birch Society). The difference today, is that the Republicans are now almost ALL Birchers or sympathetic to those views. Crazy is the new normal.