This was a pretty wild ride, which I think is best exemplified by the author better than I could do:
- "Even when Mitt Romney stepped forward and called out Trump for what he clearly was- "a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University"-no other Republicans of note rallied behind him to speak publicly what most were saying privately. How do you abandon deeply held beliefs about character, personal responsibility, foreign policy, and the national debt in a matter of months? You don't. The obvious answer is those beliefs weren't deeply held. In the end, the Republican Party rallied behind Donald Trump because if that was the deal needed to regain power, what was the problem? Because it had always been about power."
- "So I launched my career in the party that prided itself on being the "family values" party. When pundits marvel that the Republican Party could accept a man like Donald Trump, who has five kids from three wives and talks in the public about having sex with his daughter, they're missing the point. Trump doesn't signal a lowering of standards of the morality by Republican voters. Instead, he gives them a chance to prove how little they have always cared about those issues. Trump just removes the necessity of pretending. "Family values" was never a set of morals or values that the Republican Party really desired to live by; instead, "family values" was useful in attacking and defining Democrats. It was just another weapon to help portray those on the other side as being out of the mythical American mainstream. I was an "otherness" tool . . . The entire modern Republican definition of the conservative movement is about efforts to define itself as "normal" and everything else as "not normal"."
- "The long list of high-profile evangelical figures who scammed the public and lived their lives exactly opposite of what they preached reveals the essential truth of the Moral Majority and the like efforts it spawned. in The Immoral Majority, Ben Howe, an evangelical who grew up in the movement, describes the long list of disgraced preachers as "figures who were cartoonish, dramatic, deceitful, wealthy, white, smarmy, judgmental, callous, and above all hypocritical Charlatans." This is about as perfect a description of Donald Trump as on can find.
- "To understand how white evangelicals could embrace Donald Trump, consider him the ultimate white megachurch preacher. The congregation has been conditions to accept leaders who are lying, philandering frauds who live extravagant lifestyles far above their own means. But even the larger-than-life flaws and sins of these men - and they are all men - serve to convince the flock that they are unworthy to judge such men. Their followers proudly claim they favor "authenticity" as a virtue but are drawn to the most elaborately artificial of men who cosmetically, chemically, and surgically alter their physical presence as if to affirm they were of a different, more godlike persona . . . The very strangeness of the figures makes them harder to judge by the standards of normal human behavior. Their entire artifice is to appear abnormal and thus escape judgement. These men are "different" and should be judged differently."
- "Decency, kindness, humility, compassion - all touchstones of a Christian faith - have no value in today's Republican Party. All his life, Donald Trump has believed these to be weaknesses, and now that is the view of the party he heads."
- "So what sort of signal does it send when a man as intelligent and thoughtful as Bill Bennett decides to contradict his entire body of work to support a man like Donald Trump? What value si left in the intelligent reasoning? Donald Trump didn't crash the guardrails of political and civil standards; rather, the highway officials eagerly removed the guardrails and stood by cheering as the lunatic behind the wheel drove the party straight off the cliff of reason. When a Williams Collage and Harvard Law grad like Bill Bennett considers a man who found the nuclear triad a puzzling mystery in a primary debate qualified to be president, the idiotocracy is in full ascendant."
- Justin Amash (congressman): "Because you have to look at what you are doing first. You have to care about what you're doing. If you have a society where all we care about is that the other side is bad, and therefore we don't have to do the right thing, that society will break down, and you will have no liberty."
- In How Democracies Die, the authors described a set of four behavioral warning signs that can help us know an authoritarian when we see one. We should worry when a politician 1) rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game, 2) denies the legitimacy of opponents, 3) tolerates or encourages violence, or 4) indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media. ....(sound familiar?)
- The most distinguishing characteristic of the current national Republican Party is cowardice. The base price of admission is a willingness to accept that an unstable, pathological liar leads it and pretend otherwise. This means the party demands dishonesty as a trait of membership . . The vast majority of the Republican elected officials know Donald Trump is unfit to be president and pretend otherwise.
- What does a center-right party in America stand for? Once this was easy to answer: fiscal sanity, free trade, being strong on Russia, personal responsibility, the Constitution. Now? Can anyone honestly define what the Republican Party stands for beyond "owning the libs"? Whatever that means. Can any governing party exist as a credible force with no defined principles?
- Special interest groups are like terrorists: they test for weakness and exploit fear. What happened to the Republican Party is that slowly over half a century the kooks and weirdos and social misfits of a conservative ideology started discovering that they could force reasonable people to support unreasonable positions through fear. The transition of the National Rifle Association is a perfect parable: over a couple of decades, it evolved from a gun-safety education organization to a thuggish gang that rewards those at the top with millions of dollars based on proven ability to muscle elected officials into doing what they mostly know is wrong. Today the leaders of the Republican Party follow Donald Trump's lead and routinely attack the foundations of law enforcement, from the FBI to the Justice Department to the judiciary. At first glance it seems stunning to witness a party that once defined itself as a "law-and-order party" take the same position as every drug dealer ...
- The evidence points to a major partisan asymmetry in the polarizations. Despite the widespread belief that both parties have moved to the extremes, the movement of the Republican Party to the right accounts for most of the divergence between the two parties. Since the 1970s, each new cohort of Republican legislators has taken more conservative positions on legislation than the cohorts before them. That is not true of the Democratic legislators.
- But few if any Republican politicians will even broach the possibility of a tax increase. The result of this weakness will be generations forced to pay off the debt and interest resulting from the simpleminded conspiracy of the silence that is a central tenet of Republican politics.
