Which means that it didn't start with Trump. America's slide from a healthy democracy has been going on for a long time. So when did it start? I have heard various candidates. Once is the rise of Fox News, which distorted people's viewpoints. Others point to Rush Limbaugh and talk radio, or Newt Gingrich and the new class of Republicans he brought to Congress.
Others have gone back further, to the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The US has had at least two illiberal strains for a long time. Both can be considered right wing, but they did not used to be partisan. One was the the right wing illiberalism of Joe McCarthy and the John Birch Society, mostly a Republican phenomenon. The other were Southern segregationists, who were Democrats. Each party had an illiberal faction, but its chances on a national scale were best if each party held its illiberal wing in check. With Democrats embracing the Civil Rights movement in the 1960's, southern racists migrated over to the Republicans, allowing the illiberal forces to capture a party.
But if that is so, it didn't happen over night. When did the rot begin?
I do not claim to know, but I can say that the first hint I got of it was in the 1988 election.* Ronald Reagan had won two successive landslides, but he was term limited out and showing signs of mental decline. Democrats were feeling hopeful that it was their turn. And then Bush, Senior got nasty. There was an ugliness to the election that I (admittedly quite young at the time) had not seen before, as if the prospect of a Democrat winning were some sort of outrage against the natural order.
Well, Bush Senior won, by a landslide, though not so wide a landslide as either Reagan election. His government was quite reasonable and moderate. And then in 1992, Bill Clinton ran and won. The election had not of the nastiness of 1988. (Bush's campaign manager, Lee Atwater, author of the 1988 campaign, had died in the interim).
But no sooner did Clinton take office that Republicans began their freak out that has not ended since. Led by Gingrich, Republicans won control of Congress during the midterms and made clear that a Democrat in the White House was an outrage that could not be allowed to stand. The investigated everything from the use of White House personnel to answer letters to the White House cat to rumors of a Clinton body count. They shut down the government and threatened a default on the national debt. They appointed a special counsel to find grounds for impeach and ended up with nothing worse than an attempt to cover up an affair. They impeached anyhow. And paramilitary groups trained in the woods for violent revolution.
All of this during a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity, with steadily falling crime rate, and even a successful balanced budget.
My conclusion was that somewhere along the time Republicans had developed what all conservatives claim to hate most -- a sense of entitlement. In this case, entitlement to hold the Presidency. And maybe other offices as well. Republican reactions to an Obama or Biden presidency has been part and parcel of the same, except with serious problems on a national scale.
But looking back on it, even that may not be the whole story. Looking back on it, there were signs of something very wrong in the late Bush, Sr. presidency. Again, I first noticed in 1989 when a man in Stockton, California aimed an AK-47 semi-automatic, modified to by fully automatic, at a school yard full of children and started gunning them down. To me, it was obvious that something so lethal had no place on the street. I soon found that not everyone shared my view. In fact, it was then that I first started hearing the argument that the whole point of the Second Amendment was to make military firearms widely available so that the people could engage in violent revolution against their government, and that taking military-style firearms off the streets was "idiotic" and the work of "lunatics." The in 1992, Randy Weaver, a white supremecist in Idaho with a large arsenal, had an armed standoff with the FBI. An alarming number of people turned out to express their support for Weaver. The FBI and ATF badly mishandled the situation and ended up killing Weaver's unarmed wife and son. Dealing with fanatics with military style weaponry who considered armed resistance to government as their constitutional right was unfamiliar at the time. And the rise of Rush Limbaugh and all sorts of paranoia about the United Nations also got started at this time.
This was the reaction to having a moderate Republican in the White House. So, looking back with the clear light of hindsight, I can only conclude that sometime beneath the surface, not only did Republicans develop a sense of entitlement to the White House, but MAGA Republicans (not that the word existed yet) developed a sense of entitlement to control of their party.
The country has not recovered yet.
*Though not related, 1988 was also the first time Joe Biden sought the presidential nomination.
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