People are acting like the ouster of Liz Cheney by the GOP is a puzzling development, but the truth is that this is who the Republican Party is and has always been.
What we're watching is the inevitable evolution of a dangerous political movement.
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jaredyatessexton.substack.com/p/a-train-comi…
Liz Cheney's refusal to trumpet the Big Lie of a stolen presidential election.
This should be lauded, but we can't pretend the GOP has not trafficked in these poisonous mythologies for decades now, and that this lie is that different from past propaganda.
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Pundits, journalists, politicians, and historians have long laundered the real and disturbing truth of the GOP through this sepia-toned lens of Ronald Reagan, a completely fabricated, alternate reality that hides the disturbing truth behind star-spangled mythologies.
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Despite espoused "principles" of fiscal and social conservatism, the animating issue of the modern Republican Party was and is white supremacy.
The modern origins of the GOP are found in opposition to desegregation and the reform of cruel racial hierarchies.
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As public schools were being desegregated, southerners began opening their own white private schools and the political backlash against the Democratic Party for championing Civil Rights provided an opening for the GOP to swoop in and establish a new base and direction.
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Richard Nixon was quick to recognize the opportunity to reconfigure American politics.
By incorporating a Southern Strategy to appeal to angry and racist whites, he manufactured a new base that would help enact the GOP's redistributive projects and hypercapitalism.
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Aiding Nixon in his racist messaging were media strategists like Roger Ailes, the future innovator of Fox News, who studied how to signal to racist whites that the GOP was on their side and that a burgeoning conspiracy against them was being undertaken.
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This Southern Strategy of white supremacist paranoia and messaging powered Nixon and the new Republican Party, creating a new alliance that would come to define the modern era and refashion "conservatism" in totality.
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Though the Evangelical Right has long been known as "pro-life," the abortion debate was only an updated version of the original platform: protection of segregation.
Men like Jerry Falwell, preaching Neo-Confederate, white supremacist Christianity, saw an opening for power.
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The Evangelical Right formed a partnership with Ronald Reagan that redefined faith, politics, and reality itself in America.
It shifted the conversation and ushered in an era of moral panics, theocratic power, and enabled our economy to be completely hijacked.
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While continuing to push racist religion and conspiracy theories, the Right used Ronald Reagan to pitch America on hypercapitalism and a redistributive project that moved wealth from the poorest Americans to the wealthiest and corporations.
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The plundering of American wealth and the cruel new economic system was hidden behind mythologies of "rugged individualism," the moral fairytales told by preachers like Falwell, and the espoused principles of the GOP, which meant absolutely nothing.
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The hypercapitalism project ushered in by Reagan, and Thatcher in England, was fronted by espoused principles of fiscal and social conservatism, all while the Right ran up deficits for military spending and their pet projects.
The only people doing without were the poor.
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Pundits and journalists still like to point to Reagan and his infamous friendship with Democrat Tip O'Neill as some wonderful time where politics worked, but it was simply an economic and political consensus that relied on the oppression of the poor and people of color.
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As demographics and realities shifted, and the lie of Reaganism and American Exceptionalism, all of it based on white supremacy, began to falter, it was inevitable that the GOP would turn to someone like Trump.
The principles were never real. They were weapons, slogans.
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Lindsay Graham's embrace of Trump and argument that the party must stick with him is based on the protection of the legacy of the GOP, not a disruption.
It is the next step in a long, antidemocratic, white supremacist, hypercapitalistic strategy.
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To maintain even a semblance of power, the GOP must rely on the same old white supremacist paranoia and conspiracy theories that animated the party since desegregation.
This isn't new. It's a continuation, an update, that legitimizes antidemocratic fervor and violence.
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The rejection of "The Big Lie" is impossible for the GOP because it is the next, inevitable step in their continued weaponization of reality.
It is the only way they can continue to hold onto power, redistribute wealth from the poor to the wealthy, and maintain influence.
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Liz Cheney and other Trump critics should be lauded, but let's not forget that they've been riding this train for a long time, and jumping off right before it arrives in the station isn't heroism.
This is the GOP. It has been for generations. Never forget that.
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People who shake their heads and wonder how the GOP got to this point are in denial, either willful or unwitting, and are trying to spin a fairytale that has absolutely nothing to do with reality or history.
It's only confusing if you're in denial.
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