Some of us were predicting Trumpism way back when ...

Some of us were predicting Trumpism way back when ...

by digby

Yes, It's that time of year again. I'm back, making my pitch for support to keep this old blog afloat for another year. Thank you to all of you who have supported me in the past and have stepped up already this year. It's a welcome affirmation and I could not be more grateful.

It's especially poignant for me this year since I originally started writing online twenty years ago during the Clinton impeachment. I wrote on forums those days. (Blogs were still in the future and are now mostly in the past.) I was sufficiently outraged by what was going on that I found myself writing late into the night, sometimes just to myself, documenting what was going on in our politics.

I could see that we had gone off the rails in some fundamental way and it scared me to death. It wasn't that I thought Clinton was all that great, although I had voted for him twice. It was that I could see that the modern conservative movement had finally radicalized the Republican Party to an extent that it was no longer committed to the democratic process. The dubious 2000 election proved that in my mind.

When I started this blog we were still reeling from 9/11 and in the midst of the debate over the Iraq war. Bush's approval rating was soaring above 80%. The political argument centered around stopping the war.

But throughout that period, I continued to be concerned about this radicalization of the Republicans and I wrote about it frequently.

I noted that for all their talk of "freedom" they were growing into an authoritarian faction. For instance,

It may be apocryphal, but the bin Laden family's good friend and everybody's favorite Leninist right wingnut, Grover Norquist, is reported to have said back in the 1980's:

"We must establish a Brezhnev Doctrine for conservative gains. The Brezhnev Doctrine states that once a country becomes communist it can never change. Conservatives must establish their own doctrine and declare their victories permanent…A revolution is not successful unless it succeeds in preserving itself…(W)e want to remove liberal personnel from the political process. Then we want to capture those positions of power and influence for conservatives. Stalin taught the importance of this principle."

As the Bush years unfolded I wrote about the GOPs strong-arm lobbying scam, the K-Street Project, tracing the roots of the corruption and radicalization over the course of a couple of decades. An excerpt from one piece:

Norquist more than anyone else has ensured through carefully constructed alliances that movement ideologues like himself peppered the Republican power structure to the extent that over time, they have come to define it. This is why people like John Bolton, who has no more business being a diplomat than the Rude Pundit does, have become mainstream Republicans, even though they are clearly radical. He has made sure that Republicans are interdependent on each other through money and influence and that the money and influence flow through him and his allies.

Norquist is the truest of true believers, but he understands the importance of certain other inducements to keep people in line. Tom DeLay and Norquist created the K Street project and it's been a rousing success. Abramoff and DeLay were the guys who offered those needed inducements when true belief and solidarity weren't enough. Delay wielded the hammer and Abramoff (among others) offered the goodies. This is how they hold the GOP majority together.

I think you can see why I'm bringing this up now. Trumpism did not spring up out of nowhere. Donald Trump is the product of the natural evolution of the conservative movement. This is what I've been worried about and fighting against and why I started writing like a maniac all those years ago.

I care about issues, of course. During the Obama years my co-bloggers and I pushed hard for progressive policies and held Democrats to account when we felt they faltered. I spent years trying to get progressives elected --- my colleague Tom Sullivan is hard at work doing that every day as we speak.

We do media criticism and talk a lot about the culture war as well. I am deeply concerned about foreign policy and the disintegration of the world order with nothing but chaos to replace it. But fundamentally, this blog's mission from the beginning has been to document the accelerating descent of the Republican Party into authoritarian, nationalist, kleptocracy.

And so here we are. Donald Trump's election represented a deep drop over that cliff, and it was the scariest day of this entire odyssey.

The Democrats are going to vote to impeach Trump this week. And he will be acquitted of the charges by the Republicans. And then comes the election campaign. It literally could not be more consequential. Having engineered the survival of this corrupt criminal in the White House, if Trump is re-elected, there will be no stopping them.

It's not really about Trump. It's about the Republican Party. The rot has been there for a very long time. The smart ones have departed but it's stunning how many stayed.

I'd like to keep doing this if possible. If you think it's a valuable contribution to the conversation, I could use your support to keep this thing running for another year. And again, thank you for reading and sticking with me all this time. It's not over yet...

Happy Hollandaise!

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