When was the modern day repuke party born ?

[bearfan454]

I say on Nov 22, 1963 when JFK was assassinated. JFK was going to get us out of VietNam. That meant a stop to the billions of dollars for the war profiteers such as Brown's company that was going to dredge the canal. You know Brown don't you from Kellogg Brown and Root tied in with modern day Halliburton ? Eisenhower warned us way back then to beware when the military industrial complex becomes more powerful than the Government itself. That is exactly what we have today. When do you think the modern day repuke party was born ?

[jimshoes]

1. That to me was

the day the paradigm shifted. This country has not been the same since.

[asjr]

2. I think it was the day Newt Gingrich came to town.

The real slide began then. He stirred up the pot that had been simmering for quite some time. He put a face to it and we have been going downhill ever since.

[Cuban_Liberal]

3. 1964.

The battle to shift the party rightward began with Goldwater's nomination.

[sasquatch]

4. When Reagan was elected

Before that Nixon had to be a domestic liberal in order to be elected. After Reagan, all the fascist came out of the woodwork and invaded the republican party.

[SHRED]

5. 1980

This seemed to be a turning point also.
When Reagan crawled in to power and started waging war on Latin America, Unions, the environment, regulations that helped maintain a more balanced business climate, a war on the citizens via the war on drugs, etc...

Generally WAR is what they love.
It feeds the Military/Corporate Complex which has it's mouthpiece known as the "mainstream" media.

[Itchinjim]

6. Civil Rights Act of 1964.

It started the southern exodus to the republican party. Welome to the big WHITE tent folks!

[The Magistrate]

10. Correct, Sir

That was certainly the dawn of the thing, sealed by Goldwater's campaign and defeat. This might be viewed as the conception of the beast, with 1988, and Robertson's primary campaign, along with the wholly noxious campaign of the first Bush in that year, viewed as its birth....

[msgadget]

12. Yes, Johnson said it would be the end of the Democratic Party

but pushed it through following Kennedy's death. It was an issue no one wanted to touch originally but social action and the awful pictures on America's tv sets forced their hand.

[leftofthedial]

7. That's a good symbolic date

I don't think JFK was going to get us out of Viet Nam.

But I do think he was perceived as being in the way of the opportunity to turn Vet Nam into a windfall for the MIC.

[RandomKoolzip]

8. Actually, it goes back further......

Check out what Nixon did to Helen Douglas in California in 1950.


Or you could even make a case that the modern-era Neocon philosphy is really a holdover from McKinley: pro-corporation, anti-prosperity for the lower classes, if you're unemployed and starving it's your own damn fault, pro-child labor, etc.

[Art_from_Ark]

9. Then a couple of years later, he gave his "Checkers" speech

and fooled people into believing he wasn't a crook

[Old and In the Way]

13. I'd say it started with Nixon, too.

He was the protege of Prescott Bush, the infamous traitor of WW2 fame and grandfather of modern day war profiteering.

[Art_from_Ark]

11. I'm going to say 1865

John Wilkes Booth was set up by the Radical Republicans to bump off Lincoln. Funny thing that his "body" was burned beyond recognition in that barn, and anyone who was around Booth on a regular basis was quickly rounded up, tried in a kangaroo court, and hanged, and no one questioned the official story. After that, the Radical Republicans made life difficult for Lincoln's successor Andrew Johnson, even going so far as to pass a law prohibiting Johnson from firing any of Lincoln's Cabinet members, and then impeaching Johnson when he dared to defy it by firing the worst of the worst, Edwin Stanton. Although they couldn't forcibly remove Johnson, they made sure he would never get another term. With Johnson safely out of the way, the Republicans took graft to a new depth under US Grant, and accelerated the genocide against the Indians.

Then in 1876, there was a very contested election in which the winner of the popular vote, Samuel Tilden, was denied the Presidency because of electoral vote fraud in places like... Florida. When the "winner" of the 1876 election, Rutherford Hayes (who was referred to as "His Fraudulency" by the Washington Post), showed he had some decent bones in his body, he was dumped in favor of James Garfield. When Garfield also showed signs of decency, he was assassinated to allow the more radical Chester A. Arthur to take over. But Arthur quickly fell out of favor with the ultra radicals, so he was replaced by James G. Blaine in 1884, who lost to Democrat Grover Cleveland. Cleveland was accused of "sexual impropriety", and Benjamin Harrison "beat" him in a very suspicious election in 1888. Harrison was a party stooge who was elected mainly because of his family name (his grandfather, W.H.Harrison, had been the 9th President). Harrison lasted one term, being replaced by Cleveland after the election of 1892. Cleveland retired after his second term, and was succeeded by Republican William McKinley.

The pressure was on McKinley to start an American empire, and lo and behold, the opportunity fell in his lap in 1898 when an American battleship, the Maine, mysteriously exploded in Havana Harbor, in Spanish-controlled Cuba. Spain also had control over the Philippines at the time, and funny thing, the US thought the Philippines would be a nice thing to own. So, without any proof of Spain's guilt, the US quickly declared war on that country and soon found itself the proud owner of most of what was left of the Spanish Empire. When the Filipinos complained because they thought they were going to be given independence, they were suppressed (after all, it was "for their own good").

So today's Republicans have basically been pulling the same crap that their forebears did in the 19th century.

[msgadget]

15. That's fascinating, thanks,

The repubs obviously wanted to consolidate power and control without the impediment of honesty or fairness but what were the dems doing around that time to fight them off?

[Art_from_Ark]

16. Before 1876, Dems had power at the local level in big cities in the North

but they were extremely weak at the national level and in the South. In fact, they didn't even have a viable candidate in the presidential election of 1872-- Grant's opponent was Horace Greeley, who ran as a "Liberal Republican". Then in the election of 1876, Democrat Samuel Tilden actually won, but the damn Repubs stole it through electoral vote manipulation. To prevent a political riot, the Repubs promised to end Reconstruction, essentially conceding the South to the Democrats for the next 90 years

[Ron Green]

14. I was at the Texas state Republican Convention in 1964....

Where Goldwater said, among other things, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice"... At one point during the convention a huge banner reading "Nixon's the One" was unfurled from the upper tier of the Dallas Convention Center, and was roundly booed and soon torn down. Nixon, you see, was too liberal!! This group felt so strongly that LBJ had sold out Texas and the south in the Civil Rights Act that they were willing to run as far to the right as they could to try to regain States' Rights, and keep the "colored" in their place. I knew at that moment that Texas, Democratic for as long as I could remember, was leading the Republican Party in a new direction.

[Artemis Bunyon]

17. They represent a force that has always been with us.

And by us, I mean humanity.

They are absolutists, the yin to the yang of progress.