It's not that simple. Democrats are responsible for plenty of stupid ideas, and Republicans have pushed through some good ideas.
Being overly reductionist makes one easier to reject as partisan.
What is new is the MAGA/2025 hijacking of the Republican party to enact its goals. To the extent that the current Republican leadership is essentially a different party than it was 6 years ago.
I attended GOP caucuses circa 2010-2014. I would like to believe there was once a healthy sensible conservative party, but I'm sorry to say that to my eyes nothing has been hijacked: MAGA is what the Republican party has been for my entire adult life. It's just loud about it in public now instead of behind the doors of political machinery.
There is a through line from Goldwater to Nixon to Reagan to Gingrich to Trump. Connective tissue has been provided by the likes of Roger Stone. This has been a 60-plus year project to overturn the New Deal.
Facts. All Trump did was take the top talking points of AM radio & fox (birtherism/racism, illegal immigration, and no factory jobs) and parroted them to power.
That's a fundamental shift in historical Republicanism though.
For most of its history, the Republican party was fairly anti-populist (defined by whatever populism was at the time).
The Republican southern strategy from 1980+ was predicated on attracting southern white votes by attacking civil rights (explicitly or implicitly), but ultimately focusing on business priorities (with some headline-catching red meat).
However, in the decades since, the explosion of hardline conservative talk radio then dragged the party to answer to its more egregious populist demands.
I would argue that their opposition to civil rights was populist. It was amoral and intended only to get votes from racists, as an “ends justify the means” way to pursue deregulation and corporatism.
That bait-and-switch reveals the core, though. The R base wanted what Trump is doing all along but was tricked by the establishment business class. The reason they are so loyal to Trump is because he ripped away the fasaud and acts out their longstanding wishes.
The national debt is too abstract and wonk-ish to be an actual tenet of a populist movement. I remember people talked about it a lot, but only in trite ways and I really think it was just a fig leaf.
I actually believe that the hardline tea partiers did believe this until they actually saw where the money was going. Then, lots of people in the tea party started saying "get the government's hands off my social security" (the irony would be funny if it didn't hurt so much).
The national debt is concrete, but no president likes having their ability to spend constrained.
It should be handled in the way all >4 year payback US problems are: by empowering a commission to do the neccessary unpopular things and give members longer-than-4-year terms.
The entire platform of the GOP is that the government is the problem.
The ACA would have been much better had the GOP not tried to stop it any way possible. Suing to remove critical aspects of it, voting at every turn against it, arguing that there would be death panels for grandparents.
Even once it was law, no attempt to improve, or replace.
A good faith effort would include an alternative health care plan. Where is it?
Two options: either incapable of producing a plan or are at best indifferent to the suffering and death of hundreds of thousands of people, if not more.
The GOP has only tirelessly worked to ensure that the ACA would be less effective than it could have been.
Note: not repeal it. It’s entirely too popular and effective for that.
PEPFAR started in 2003 under Bush and has saved millions of lives. Of course Trump is dismantling it now but I think it's inarguably the best thing Bush did as president.
I totally agree with you, but as someone who has seen the impact on the ground in parts of Africa, and how HIV/AIDS is no longer the death sentence it once was, PEPFAR is an amazing program that came too late, but let's not discount the actual good that it has done.
Many Republicans don't realize this. The party you've voted for all your life is not the same party running America today. Today's Republican party has been co-opted by an Anarcho-capitalist wing. And step 1, which they're well on track to do is to dismantle the Federal government. Step 2, which will be coming within the next year or two is to sell off previous government services to private entities.
When the Soviet Union collapsed the US sent over "economic consultants" to steer what happened next towards "free markets."
What happened next is that various chancers marched into state institutions, usually with private security details made of low-grade armed thugs promoted from street crime, and said "This is ours now."
The US aristocracy saw this and apparently thought "Perfect - let's make that happen here too."
The fact there's been no significant state or media push back against Musk's takeovers is all anyone needs to know. The aim is a kleptocratic imperium drowning in gold, drugs, delusion, and corruption - which is exactly what Russia turned into.
The best part is where the plant is still state property on paper, but operates at loss because it exports everything to a shell company in Austria who resells it at profit paid to the actual benefociary controller.
And if report on this, the president orders you to be behaded
There were two paths, the examples I would give are Cheney and Graham. Both thought Trump was terrible, one stuck to her convictions and is now out of government, the other rolled over and is now licking Trump's boots.
David Brooks, at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, had a session called "How the Elite rigged Society (and why it’s falling apart)"
I included a link just below to at the exact timestamp he talks about this:
How Brooks sees Trumpism: not conservative, they don't have a conservative or positive vision for society, they just want to destroy the institutions "dominated" by left. In his words, this means, they are astoundingly incompetent. "Elite Narcissicm" leads to the destruction of every thought system it encounters.
Being overly reductionist makes one easier to reject as partisan.
What is new is the MAGA/2025 hijacking of the Republican party to enact its goals. To the extent that the current Republican leadership is essentially a different party than it was 6 years ago.