The chart above reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between August 21st and 24th of a nationwide sample of 1,536 adults (including 1,379 registered voters). The margin of error is 3.5 points for adults and 3.3 points for registered voters.
The following post is part of an article by Thom Hartmann at The Hartmann Report:
My father fancied himself a conservative back when I was a kid during the Eisenhower and Kennedy era, but in his mind that simply meant that one doesn’t radically or rapidly change society without first thinking through the consequences in detail and then, when you do decide to make changes to the rules of society, you move forward in measured increments. Conservatively.
At least that’s how Dad explained it to me, and how both Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his then-VP Richard Nixon explained it in their own ways.
Eisenhower, writing to his brother in 1954, warned that any party that tried to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, or other social programs would “disappear,” noting that only “a tiny splinter group” believed such a rollback was even possible. Nixon, two decades later, was just as blunt about the need for pragmatic, incremental governance, famously observing in a 1971 message to Congress that “we are all Keynesians now.”
In other words, the conservatism of that era wasn’t about blowing up the New Deal with its programs of Social Security, the minimum wage, labor protections, funding scientific research and education, etc.; it was about tending it carefully, changing it cautiously, and conserving what worked.
Today’s modern conservative movement, though, isn’t conservative at all, and hasn’t been since the Reagan Revolution: it’s reactionary and, through the two Trump presidencies and the Project 2025 embrace of Orbánism and Putinism, has now become fully fascistic.
It all began in a big way when, in 1954, the Supreme Court reversed their 1898 Plessy v Ferguson “separate but equal” decision with Brown v Board of Education, mandating that Black children must participate in racially integrated classrooms.
Petrobillionaire Fred Koch, who’d made his initial fortune in the Soviet Union, was offended and threw major funding into the virulently anticommunist John Birch Society, which was running billboards across America calling for the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren over the Brown decision.
While that impeachment never happened, the movement grew (my dad introduced me to the JBS when I was 13, saying, “You should hear what the crazies are saying”) and soon JBS’ morbidly rich funders decided that paying taxes to fund programs that would benefit “poor people” (aka Black people) was also an abomination just as bad as white kids having to sit with Black kids in public school classrooms.
In 1980, Reagan rode that racist message (along with sabotaging Jimmy Carter by cutting a deal with the Ayatollah to hold the American hostages until after the election) to the White House with millions in dark money support from those same petrobillionaires.
Reagan’s first official campaign stop had been to speak at an all-white county fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the brutal murder of three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, in 1964. The subject of his speech was “states’ rights,” which everybody knew was code for “let the Southern states continue their segregation programs.”
On the 1980 campaign trail, Reagan told the story of the “strapping young buck” in line at the supermarket upsetting all the hard-working white people when he whipped out his food stamps to pay for his “steak and beer”; it was the male complement to Reagan’s Black “welfare queen” myth. Cut off his food stamps, the logic went, and he’ll be forced to look for gainful employment…even if there were no jobs within miles and white employers wouldn’t then hire Black people.
But Reagan didn’t just talk about stopping affirmative action: he took steps to push America back to the white supremacist 1950s. As The Washington Post noted:
“In the 1980s, the Reagan administration began to roll back civil rights protections and legally designated targets for affirmative action hires, thus bringing the politics of reverse discrimination to the White House. Under the now familiar banner of ‘Let’s Make America Great Again,’ Reagan campaigned vigorously against affirmative action in 1980, promising voters he would overturn policies that mandated, in his view, ‘federal guidelines or quotas which require race, ethnicity, or sex . . . to be the principle factor in hiring or education.’”
Clarence Thomas, of course, worked for Reagan back then, doing everything he could to sabotage affirmative action programs. He began hanging out with billionaires in a classic example of, “I’ve got mine, screw you.”
Once the petrobillionaire’s agenda — gut social programs and regulations that protect working class people and children, all to pay for over $38 trillion in tax cuts for themselves — got rolling, other billionaires from other industries jumped on board, funding think tanks, publications, radio and TV stations and networks, universities, and a massive legal effort to pack the courts with Clarence Thomas-type judges and justices.
Because the New Deal — which they were explicitly trying to repeal, root and branch — was so popular, they had to bullshit the American people with an intensity and ferocity that America hadn’t seen since the “Horse and Sparrow” days of the last Gilded Age:
— Tax cuts for billionaires would “trickle down” to workers.
— Unions hurt and rip off their members.
— Regulations stunt economic growth and thus kill jobs.
— Social Security is going broke.
— “Free Trade” will “lift all boats.”
— For-profit schools and prisons do a better job.
— America can’t afford a national healthcare system.
— Corporations are “persons” and should have rights under the Bill of Rights.
— Giving millions to a politician or president isn’t bribery; it’s “free speech.”
— When young people get free college, they don’t value it.
— More CO2 is good for plants and climate change is a hoax.
— Government isn’t the solution to our problems; it is the problem itself.
— Corporate monopolies “increase efficiency” and are thus a good thing.
Once the system got up and running it began to run on autopilot, fueled into hyperdrive by Clarence Thomas’ deciding vote in Citizens United (at the same time he was taking big bucks from the same billionaires the decision freed to bribe judges and politicians). It was spread across America by Limbaugh and an Australian billionaire who made his initial fortune complaining about Black American GIs “raping” white Australian women when US troops were stationed there during WWII.
And now we have a low-IQ nepo-baby psychopath sitting in the White House because he promised a roomful of petrobillionaires and Elon Musk that he’d cut their taxes, kill off green programs, and let Musk dismantle any agency that was investigating him or his businesses. Trump’s so certain of his royal prerogatives that yesterday he posted on his failing, Nazi-infested social media site a clip of Frank Sinatra singing My Way.
Like other conservative/fascist movements across history, from Mussolini to Stalin to Hitler to Putin to Orbán — all grounded in first defining an “other” who must be feared and stopped — today’s GOP has morphed into something that Eisenhower and even Nixon wouldn’t recognize.
And now he’s threatening to start World War III, all because neither he nor his nepo-baby son-in-law nor any of the 13 billionaires in his cabinet know the first thing about how to actually negotiate on the world stage.
Although Pope Leo XIV says his remarks weren’t specifically directed at Trump, his claim that the world is “being ravaged by a handful of tyrants” certainly hits the mark.
This is not conservativism, this new “one man above all” ideology that drives today’s GOP. It’s raw, naked evil. And it’s about damn time that Democrats and Americans of good will begin to call it out for what it is.
The chart above reflects the results of the Third Way / GBAO Poll -- done between November 19th and 26th of a nationwide sample of 2,000 registered voters. No MOE was given.
In the last part of the 19th Century and the early 20th Century, the Republican Party was controlled by the ultra-rich oligarchs - and the policies they pursued helped the rich to get much richer while making workers poorer. That policy led to the Great Depression with massive poverty and unemployment.
Today, the GOP has continued those same policies, and with the election of Ronald Reagan, gained the power to reinstitute those policies. Once again, they are bowing to oligarchs - making the rich richer and everyone else poorer.
When you look at the history of the modern Republican Party, it is obvious that they don't care about the workers in this country. For instance:
* They opposed the creation of Social Security. And even though Social Security has been very effective in insuring that working men and women won't have to live in abject poverty after retiring, Republicans still oppose the program. They continually try to cut benefits, and have expressed a desire to eliminate the program altogether.
* Republicans opposed Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act - programs that insured the poor, workers, and retirees have life-saving medical insurance. They still oppose them, and currently are trying to cut the programs - causing millions to lose that insurance.
* Republicans oppose the minimum wage, and have blocked raising the current wage (a poverty wage of only $7.25 an hour).
* Republicans oppose labor unions. They consistently try to make it harder to join a union, or create a new union - even though it was labor unions that created a large middle class in the United States.
* Republicans want to cut Pell Grants, which help working class students to better their futures through access to higher education.
* Republicans support a GOP president who has imposed tariffs on almost every country importing goods into the United States. This increases inflation. The higher prices affect workers far more than the rich.
* Republicans oppose the government helping working parents to pay for child care.
* Republicans passed a tax cut bill in Trump's first term, with 82% of the cuts going to benefit the rich. Now they want to extend those cuts.
* Republicans want to cut SNAP (food stamps) which help low-wage workers feed their families.
I am amazed that Hawley has the temerity to call his party the party of workers. Their policies always help the rich, but I can't think of a single one that helps workers.
I miss the Republican Party. It no longer exists. It has been replaced by a cult that does not believe in compromise - only achieving and retaining power.
I remember when the Republican Party had bedrock values. Regardless of the leader or the election, they believed in three basic things - spreading and defending democracy around the world, supporting law and order in this country, and a free enterprise system (both internally and globally).
While I disagreed with the GOP on many things (helping the poor and disadvantaged, assuring all citizens could get medical care, Social Security, labor unions, raising the minimum wage, etc.), I understood their bedrock values. While we might disagree on how to achieve them, it's hard to argue with a strong business community, the rule of law, and the preservation of democracy.
Sadly, the Republican Party has abandoned all three of those principles. They no longer beige in free trade, but are now a tariff party. They no longer defend the rule of law, but have allowed the DOJ to become a vehicle for retribution. They no longer want to defend other democracies, but have turned against Ukraine and our friends in Europe.
Why have they abandoned these principles that served them well of decades? Fear! They are afraid of their own party's leader - Donald Trump. Instead of standing up for their principles, they have bowed to Trump so they can keep their cushy government jobs.
That is sad. Whether on the right or the left, politicians should stand up for their beliefs - even when it could cost them their jobs. Voters deserve no less.
I hope the Republican Party comes to its senses after Trump. A loyal opposition is needed.
Jamelle Bouie explains the GOP way in this part of his New York Times article:
Republicans have made “democracy” a dirty word. And they seem to have given up on persuasion in favor of trying to win power through the brute-force exploitation of the political system. Why win over voters when you can gerrymander your party into a permanent legislative majority? Why try to persuade voters to reject a referendum you disagree with when you can try instead to change the rules and kill the referendum before it can get on the ballot? Why aim to win a broad national majority when you can win — or try to snatch — a narrow victory in the swing states?
The defining attribute of the modern Republican Party, beyond its devotion to Donald Trump, is a profound lack of confidence in its ability to compete for a majority of the country at large married to an inability to see outside its ideological cocoon. Republicans both reject the idea that voters could have a legitimate dispute with their views and do not seem to believe that they could persuade anyone who disagrees. And so they decide that the public in question has been indoctrinated or brainwashed or led astray, in one way or another, from the supposedly pure light of the Republican Party.
But the truth is so much simpler. Republicans have tied themselves to the far extremes of the conservative movement — and most voters just don’t like it.
The following is part of an op-ed by Peter Wehner (who served in the administrations of Reagan and both Bush's) in The New York Times:
Populism has its place. It can be an understandable response to enormous and rapid economic and social changes. It can alert elites to problems they may be out of touch with, including vast inequality, an indifference to beleaguered lives and shattered communities, and widespread institutional failure. . . .
The Republican Party, rather than embracing the best aspects of populism, has taken on its vices: anti-intellectualism, anti-institutionalism and anti-elitism; feeding off negative emotions like anger, grievances and vengeance; and a propensity to believe and to spread conspiracy theories. Populism often looks for scapegoats, frequently blaming immigrants and those who are ethnically and culturally different. Populists are also historically attracted to demagogues and authoritarian personalities.
But the most worrisome feature that has defined the Republican Party during the Trump era is a relentless assault on reality, fused with lawlessness and the embrace of illiberalism.
The Republican Party once preached about the importance of standing for moral truths and standing against moral relativism; today it is, in important respects, nihilistic. The Republican Party once described itself as the party of “law and order”; it now worships a man who is a felon, who was found liable for sexual assault and defamation, and who portrays the violent mob that attacked the Capitol as a band of patriotic “J6 martyrs.” Republicans once proudly proclaimed their reverence for the Constitution; in Milwaukee, they crowned as their leader a man who attempted to subvert it.
It’s hard and haunting to know that the political party to which I devoted a significant part of my life has become the greatest political threat to the country I love.
“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” — Lord Acton.
The remarkable thing about this last, grotesque chapter of Donald Trump’s presidency is how much he has proved Acton both wrong and right.
Few axioms are more popular among earnest pundits and politicians than Lord Acton’s line about power, even though the point of the letter in which the quote appeared focused on the institutions and people who protect the wielders of power. He decried those who exempted the powerful from the rules that bind the rest of us. “There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it,” Acton wrote.
In one sense Trump proved Acton wrong. Power didn’t corrupt Trump. It merely gave his corruption room to run, like handing an inveterate drunk driver a bottle of Jack Daniels and a monster truck to play with.
The phone call to the president of Ukraine that got him impeached was simply Trump being Trump only on a global scale instead of in the more fetid backwaters of real estate, entertainment and general hucksterism where he made his name. And the sore loser — already the greatest sore loser in American history — who called Georgia election officials on Saturday is the same man we saw descend the escalator five years ago.
“I do whine,” Trump said on CNN in August 2015, “because I want to win and I’m not happy about not winning and I am a whiner and I keep whining and whining until I win.” His postelection whining spree is a testament to his consistency.
So while power didn’t corrupt Trump, Trump has vindicated Acton’s larger point about how power invites corruption in others. Corruption means more than bribery and self-aggrandizement; it means rot, decay, the erosion of standards and principles and their replacement with baser motives.
And in this sense, Trump’s corruption has been infectious. Conservatives who once prided themselves on old-fashioned notions of good character now think whining and deceit are manly while graciousness and honesty are for “cucks.”
Worse, conservatives, who not long ago all but defined conservatism as fidelity to the Constitution, now think constitutionalism is whatever allows a losing president to steal an election.
I’ve no doubt some fraction of the politicians supporting Trump actually believe the lies and conspiracy theories he has peddled. Some probably even think their constitutional schemes are legitimate: Of course, the Founding Fathers intended for the vice president to be able to unilaterally void the election results and install the loser!
But sincere belief in transparent lies is even more a symptom of the Trumpian rot. Five years ago, no one who knew, say, Sens. Ron Johnson, Josh Hawley or even Ted Cruz would believe they’d go along with such assaults on the Constitution, democracy or common sense. Such is the extent of the corruption, it is somehow more reassuring to think they’re simply lying. Lies are a concession that the truth matters.
But truth is no longer defined by the factual. Trump has set the truth free to mean whatever delivers a win.
This rot extends far outside of Washington. How could it not, for the politicians are merely responding to market incentives, the way weather vanes respond to the wind (even if they helped manufacture the very gales they are responding too)? The consumers — i.e. the voters, viewers, donors and subscribers — want the lies.
A whole industry has grown up around the idea that what is good for Trump — or simply what Trump thinks is good for him — is the premise and conclusion of every argument. From pastors and “constitutional scholars” to journalists and conservative activists, all the conservative yardsticks — of good character, decency, statesmanship, constitutionalism — have been shaved down and bent to fit the crooked timber of the man.
These are the people Trump surrounds himself with. Some were already corrupt, which is why they fluttered, moth-like to his flame in the first place. But others were not always this way. The American right is now littered with Actonian cautionary tales, people trading their reputations for one last bit of relevance.
No wonder Trump’s consternation with the uncorrupted Georgia officials who would not ratify his lies. He pleaded for investigators who “want to find” the evidence he needs, because for Trump and his apologists the truth is defined by his wants and needs.
He won’t stop whining until he gets what he wants, which means he’ll be whining for the rest of his life, and some will call it leadership.
