Trump is a culmination, not an aberration, for the GOP

In his screed trying to identify "exactly when the Republican Party assumed the mantle of the stupid party," former McCain, Romney and Rubio adviser Max Boot gives his party—and himself—too much credit. After all, Boot in May 2004 criticized Americans' growing concern over the course of the Iraq War with happy talk about the body count. "Recent low-casualty conflicts have spoiled the U.S." he lectured. "In fact, the Iraq loss rate is among our smallest ever." But in his New York Times op-ed, the Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow regretted that the GOP's proud tradition of anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism from Eisenhower and Nixon through Reagan and Dubya had somehow run off the rails:

In recent years, however, the Republicans' relationship to the realm of ideas has become more and more attenuated as talk-radio hosts and television personalities have taken over the role of defining the conservative movement that once belonged to thinkers like Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and George F. Will. The Tea Party represented a populist revolt against what its activists saw as out-of-touch Republican elites in Washington...

The trend has now culminated in the nomination of Donald J. Trump, a presidential candidate who truly is the know-nothing his Republican predecessors only pretended to be.

But despite his departures from party orthodoxy on trade and immigration, Donald Trump is largely using the same four-step formula Republican presidential candidates and GOP leaders in Congress have been turning to for years. With his largely policy-free campaign, Trump has merely refined the GOP's "post-truth politics" in which in which morality tales and stories of good and evil replaced facts and science as the basis for winning elections and setting public policy. Part two of the recipe is the veneration of the free market, the elevation of the private sector, and the canonization of the businessman as an economic leader and even a moral beacon for the nation, a tactic Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Mitt Romney embraced long before The Donald oozed his way out of Trump Tower. As we'll see below, with his casual race baiting, religious bigotry, and shameless xenophobia, Trump is writing just the latest episode in the GOP tale of white racial resentment now over five decades in the making. And to that incendiary rhetoric Trump adds that uniquely Republican accelerant, toughness for toughness’ sake. For the GOP base, promising to "take out" families of terrorists, "bombing the shit" out of ISIS-controlled towns, and engaging in torture techniques "a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding" are not means to an end, but ends in themselves

confuzzled dude wrote:

In his screed trying to identify "exactly when the Republican Party assumed the mantle of the stupid party," former McCain, Romney and Rubio adviser Max Boot gives his party—and himself—too much credit. After all, Boot in May 2004 criticized Americans' growing concern over the course of the Iraq War with happy talk about the body count. "Recent low-casualty conflicts have spoiled the U.S." he lectured. "In fact, the Iraq loss rate is among our smallest ever." But in his New York Times op-ed, the Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow regretted that the GOP's proud tradition of anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism from Eisenhower and Nixon through Reagan and Dubya had somehow run off the rails:

In recent years, however, the Republicans' relationship to the realm of ideas has become more and more attenuated as talk-radio hosts and television personalities have taken over the role of defining the conservative movement that once belonged to thinkers like Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and George F. Will. The Tea Party represented a populist revolt against what its activists saw as out-of-touch Republican elites in Washington...

The trend has now culminated in the nomination of Donald J. Trump, a presidential candidate who truly is the know-nothing his Republican predecessors only pretended to be.

But despite his departures from party orthodoxy on trade and immigration, Donald Trump is largely using the same four-step formula Republican presidential candidates and GOP leaders in Congress have been turning to for years. With his largely policy-free campaign, Trump has merely refined the GOP's "post-truth politics" in which in which morality tales and stories of good and evil replaced facts and science as the basis for winning elections and setting public policy. Part two of the recipe is the veneration of the free market, the elevation of the private sector, and the canonization of the businessman as an economic leader and even a moral beacon for the nation, a tactic Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Mitt Romney embraced long before The Donald oozed his way out of Trump Tower. As we'll see below, with his casual race baiting, religious bigotry, and shameless xenophobia, Trump is writing just the latest episode in the GOP tale of white racial resentment now over five decades in the making. And to that incendiary rhetoric Trump adds that uniquely Republican accelerant, toughness for toughness’ sake. For the GOP base, promising to "take out" families of terrorists, "bombing the shit" out of ISIS-controlled towns, and engaging in torture techniques "a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding" are not means to an end, but ends in themselves

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/8/7/1556666/-Three-lessons-from-the-rise-of-Donald-Trump