Past is Prologue

The other day, I received a User Comment from a reader who went by the moniker Nikon1.  It was in response to my article here about Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva who upset by a series of article about a brutality cover-up by the him and saying he was opening an investigation against the candidate running against him, against the department official investigating the charges, and against L.A. Times reporter writing the articles.

What Nikon1 wrote was --

​This brings forth the age old question: “What came first, the chicken or the egg” relating to this thuggish behaviour.It definitely seems like trump and the gop, as they all lie and say, “I never said that,” despite there being audio / video of the fact. How many times did trump deny saying things that were captured on audio / video? Now McCarthy is trying to deny what he said post January 6, 2021 despite very clear audio recordings. And how many other gop goons are guilty of these same thing, trying to claim “fake news” (as in the FAUX News network)?So, was this behaviour around and common pre-trump or did he just “legitimize” all the lying and denying?Either way — it’s killing our democracy!

​I thought that the question deserved a more a more detailed response than what I first started to reply in the User Comments section.  So, I deleted that and said I’m write more here.

There are aspects of what we're seeing today with the Republican Party that existed before Trump, that was part of their DNA.  I recall writing an article for the Huffington Post at least 10 years pre-Trump about a GOP tactic I was observing of slamming Democrats for what were actually only GOP transgressions -- which would then make it difficult for Democrats to criticize Republicans after they did what they were accusing others of.  This is a Republican tactic out of their Playbook 101 we still see today.

And another of my articles, this one written 12 years ago in December, 2010, was titled “Demagogues Gone Wild,” which I described at the time as how “Republican discourse from many has turned inflammatory,”

Also, Republicans have been calling Democrats "socialist" and "commies" since the mid-50s.  This despite periods when Democrats have controlled the White House, Senate and House, and yet the country has not yet turned communist.  Because if it had, Republicans wouldn’t still be warning us about what Democrats supposedly want to do.

And the support of white supremacy we see in the Republican Party today stems from when GOP went after racists in its "Southern Strategy" after Democrats passed the Voting Rights Act. 

And while we now see Republicans crying out to ban books in school and taking off against LGBTQ ruining the country, decrying how even Disney cartoons will have (as Ted Cruz put it) “Micky and Goofy going at each other,” the Moral Majority was a GOP doctrine from the Nixon years. 

So, too, during the Nixon years was the Republican hatred of the press -- not just from Nixon and his long-festering "You won't have Richard Nixon to kick around anymore," but from his VP Spiro Agnew who went after the "Nattering Nabobs of Negativism" in the press.  And putting members of the press on Nixon's Enemy's List.

I also wrote an article long on September 16, 2010, before Trump called “The Republican Miracle:  Turning Water into Whine” about how the GOP has declared itself a religion.  And a month later, I wrote “An Incredibly Fair and Somewhat Balanced Look at the Right” which was about how I sensed that the conservative bent to fully believe their leaders implicitly came from the party's religious base which was indoctrinated to believe in ministers whose word came from God and an infallible Pope.  And today, we see so many of the Republican base saying they believe Trump came to us from God.

So, a lot of this has long-existed in Republican make-up.  Maybe even most of it.  What seems new is Trump opening the door wide to let out the worst instincts of Republicans and giving them the freedom to be so unabashedly public about it all.  Being so highly racist openly, as well as bluntly going after the press as "the Enemy of the People," and making religion the foundation of the GOP, rather than dancing around all these things that they'd kept buried in private.

The only thing that strikes me as particularly new to the Republican Party is the open denial of facts and reality  and accepted science.  Not that even this is "new" to the GOP, since it was percolating slightly under the surface in the GOP's past.  That's why we have Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's famous admonition, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”  (The quote takes on even more substance when you realize that in 2017 -- during Trump Years -- Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana wrote an op-ed against Obamacare and attributed the quote about not making up their own facts...to Ronald Reagan!  Of course.  Though to give full credit, since the point here is facts and reality, the foundation of this quote probably goes back to 1950, when Bernard Baruch said, "Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.")  And further, and more pointedly, we had the Republican White House official (believed to be Karl Rove) during the George W. Bush Administration who chided Democrats for living in the "reality-based community," and told author Ron Suskind, writing for the New Yorker, that "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."

So, even there, we had at least a hint of what Republicans could do.  Though the widespread denial of facts, reality and science that exists in today's Republican Party -- if not new -- does seem something its own variant, something more foundational than just a disagreement of details.  From "creating our own reality" to Kellyanne Conway's world of "alternative facts" to a complete denials of reality, what the world is based on. All of which leads to the Big Lie of the Republican Party that Trump really won the election.

So, in the end, much of what we see in today's Republican Party, if not all of it, did have its foundation in the GOP before Trump.  But Trump just gave Republicans the right to use their outdoor voice and act on what was pretty much always there.

And this includes Republican Supreme Court nominees saying under oath at their confirmation hearing that Roe v. Wade is "settled law" -- and then (apparently, as the news Monday suggests) ignoring what they swore to and voting to repeal it.

It should not come as a shock.