In those days, being a Republican meant one respected knowledge, respected science and education, sought a fiscally conservative government and had no desire to police other peoples’ bedrooms. Then something began to happen: far right Christians who wanted to police everyone’s bedroom and force their religious beliefs, including biblical literalism, on all members of society — I call them Christofscists — began to be elected to the city committee. Next racist comments began to become more acceptable. Then white supremacy became acceptable. Slowly and steadily, the Republican Party ceased to be what it had once been.
There was a time when accomplished, educated grown-ups gravitated naturally toward the Republican Party; that began to change with Nixon’s so-called Southern Strategy, when the party decided to exploit southern hostility to the civil rights movement and invited-in the white trash. Now, here in what Gore Vidal once so aptly dubbed the United States of Amnesia, the retrograde, uneducated, backward-looking southern Democrats of decades ago — think George Wallace, who once campaigned for the presidency as a Democrat — have become the Republican base.
To paraphrase Churchill’s famous metaphor, the Republicans wanted to ride the tiger — and now it is eating them.