On a recent podcast I heard conservative commentator Mona Charen state that she was shocked at how quickly the GOP became Trump’s GOP. The host, Charlie Sykes, repeated his long-presented view that the racist authoritarian streak in the GOP had been a ‘recessive gene’ that has now become dominate but this is a terrible analogy for what has happened, absolving all those ‘good’ conservatives for their action and inaction that created the current condition. A better analogy is found in chemistry class: Titration.
In titration one liquid is slowly, drop by drop, added to another. The base liquid is clear and colorless and at first e3ach drop appears to do nothing. The swirl the mixture but it remains clear, colorless. Then after a number of drop colors appears but fades quickly away in the swirling returning to the clear colorless form. But at some point, a single drop transforms the mixture and now the flask is filled with a colored fluid that had just moments before been colorless. It has changed and seeming from a single drop but of course it was a process that had been carried out over time.
This is what has happened to the GOP. Listen to ‘Never Trumpers’ and after a short time someone will remind you that in the old days, they threw out the crazy Birchers, that the party used to enforce rationality. But that was in the early 60s by the late 60s Nixon played his Southern Strategy, inviting in the racists whom the Democrats had enraged with the Civil Right legislation of the great society. The drops of racism began to be added to the GOP, but it wasn’t much, and it didn’t really change the nature of the party. Then there was Nixon’s War on Drugs and that was quite deliberately not enforced equally across racial lines. More Drops into the mixture. Welfare Queens, Crack babies, and more and more drops added to the mixture, flashes of racist color but with enough swirling you could make them go away. Crime Bills and torture for brown people were more drops added to the liquid, along with ballot initiatives against ‘illegal immigrants’ that really targeted more brown people. Throughout this process the left ceased to be political opponents and were the enemy of the nation.
Trump didn’t ‘change the GOP,’ he was the final drops the completed its titration into a neo-fascist, racist, caricature of the party that had thrown out the Bircher only to crawl back into bed with them.
