A new term was raised to most aptly describe Trump's erratic, lawless gov't: patrimonial. It's very disturbing - moreso than any "a" word. Look it up. If I find the link to the article I read yesterday I'll post it here. It's even worse than we thought.
There are at least three wrong turns that the Republican Party took in the last 75 years that have all led to a deep cancerous corruption in the Republican Party. Two of them I have posted about individually in earlier replies
1) Platforming Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, who in turn was deeply corrupted by his main assistant Roy Cohn, a brutal sadist who cloaked his actions under the guise of patriotism. It is to the credit of Dwight Eisenhower that he worked behind the scenes to undermine him.
2) The Southern Strategy of 1964 luring away all the segregationist "Dixiecrats" from the South into the Republican Party to make up for the fact that the Democrats in the Northern states were starting to draw in a lot of progressives. The KKK lost its hold on the Democrat Party in 1952, but their 12 year limbo ended when they had a new friend in the Republican Party in 1964.
===>After this, the Republican Party lost ALL right to call itself "the Party of Lincoln"<===
3) The turn in the late 1990s (really starting in the 1980s) from classical Edmund Burke conservatism (which has shortcomings of its own) to out and out fascism. The underlying philosophy of the books of Ann Coulter, is really fascism(!!), NOT classical Burkean conservatism, although she calls herself "conservative".
Conservatism
Cultural(!) conservatism has always had a toxic element, partly because it has had racism built into it for a long time. Like Sauron in Lord of the Rings, after being put down it will rise assuming another form. It is also good at hiding behind superficially rational ideas, using slogans that mean something different than what they outwardly say.
White supremacy has been built into the fabric of American culture for all of its life, as has anti-Semitism in much European culture.
I kind of like Edmund Burke, ostensibly one of the founders of conservatism as a political(!) philosophy, but there is a radical incompleteness to his philosophy evidenced in the way that worse men than he have been able to easily abuse it.
Christianity
The earliest (at least) wrong turn in Christianity goes back to the 2nd century Christian Tertullian, a mysogynist horror if ever there was one. Better Christians like to trace the harm back to later figures like the Emporer Constantine and St. Augustine, but they enabled(!) a toxic thread that predates those fellows. There have always been good guys in Christendom like Leo Tolstoy and Bonhoeffer who have held up a much more humane standard, but they are typically in the minority. There are also entire groups on the good side (the largest in America is Sojourners), but they still represent a minority. Of course, getting influence is more important than numbers.
A new term was raised to most aptly describe Trump's erratic, lawless gov't: patrimonial. It's very disturbing - moreso than any "a" word. Look it up. If I find the link to the article I read yesterday I'll post it here. It's even worse than we thought.
Random thoughts
Republican Party
There are at least three wrong turns that the Republican Party took in the last 75 years that have all led to a deep cancerous corruption in the Republican Party. Two of them I have posted about individually in earlier replies
1) Platforming Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, who in turn was deeply corrupted by his main assistant Roy Cohn, a brutal sadist who cloaked his actions under the guise of patriotism. It is to the credit of Dwight Eisenhower that he worked behind the scenes to undermine him.
2) The Southern Strategy of 1964 luring away all the segregationist "Dixiecrats" from the South into the Republican Party to make up for the fact that the Democrats in the Northern states were starting to draw in a lot of progressives. The KKK lost its hold on the Democrat Party in 1952, but their 12 year limbo ended when they had a new friend in the Republican Party in 1964.
===>After this, the Republican Party lost ALL right to call itself "the Party of Lincoln"<===
3) The turn in the late 1990s (really starting in the 1980s) from classical Edmund Burke conservatism (which has shortcomings of its own) to out and out fascism. The underlying philosophy of the books of Ann Coulter, is really fascism(!!), NOT classical Burkean conservatism, although she calls herself "conservative".
Conservatism
Cultural(!) conservatism has always had a toxic element, partly because it has had racism built into it for a long time. Like Sauron in Lord of the Rings, after being put down it will rise assuming another form. It is also good at hiding behind superficially rational ideas, using slogans that mean something different than what they outwardly say.
White supremacy has been built into the fabric of American culture for all of its life, as has anti-Semitism in much European culture.
I kind of like Edmund Burke, ostensibly one of the founders of conservatism as a political(!) philosophy, but there is a radical incompleteness to his philosophy evidenced in the way that worse men than he have been able to easily abuse it.
Christianity
The earliest (at least) wrong turn in Christianity goes back to the 2nd century Christian Tertullian, a mysogynist horror if ever there was one. Better Christians like to trace the harm back to later figures like the Emporer Constantine and St. Augustine, but they enabled(!) a toxic thread that predates those fellows. There have always been good guys in Christendom like Leo Tolstoy and Bonhoeffer who have held up a much more humane standard, but they are typically in the minority. There are also entire groups on the good side (the largest in America is Sojourners), but they still represent a minority. Of course, getting influence is more important than numbers.