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Comment by crankylinuxuser | Hacker News Reader

So, what exactly happened? The EPA was founded by a republican (Nixon). Yet environmental efforts are now attributed to democrats. And combined with that, is that republicans was to destroy the very org they made?

What am I missing out of this? Why did the parties completely change their face?

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The political parties did largely switch sides on many issues. As Republicans love to remind people, Lincoln was a Republican and he freed the slaves. Additionally the politicians who opposed civil rights legislation were largely Democrats. http://factmyth.com/factoids/democrats-and-republicans-switc...

Had there been an actual switch, you would have seen numerous politicians changing party. Virtually none of them did.

The one senator: Strom Thurmond

The one representative: Albert Watson

The whole "party switch" idea is slander and an excuse. It's a rewrite of history intended to evade the ugly truth of an unbroken continuity to behavior that is now considered unacceptable.

and that behavior would be?

The Reagan administration sold the GOP that all government agencies are incompetent.

Not exactly. Reagan was a surprisingly nuanced political thinker, whether or not you agree with him. He believed - and in fact observed - that government has an inherent motivation to constantly increase legislation. This, according to Reagan, is partly because legislators who vote for more regulations on a given industry will then benefit from that industry’s lobbying and campaigning efforts. It’s akin to a somewhat benevolent protection racket - play ball, or you might find it even more expensive to do business.

Of course, Reagan flipped that script and made wanton deregulation a “selling point” of the GOP. And now Trump has taken that to the extreme.

In a very shorthand version of things - it's related to fundamentalist Christians switching from segregation to anti abortion as a rallying cry in the 70's, which somewhat meant a switch from southern Democrats to the GOP as time went on, the tie in used during the Reagan adminstration by his EPA head James Watt was that the Bible says that the world is for humans to use, and that since the Bible predicts that Jesus is coming back, saving the environment from development is a pointless goal cause the second coming of God would render the state of the environment moot (of course one could probably find contradictory statements/interpretations for either side of an argument in the Bible).

You’re missing the fact that introducing bureaucracy is the GOP’s best tool in dismantling big bad government.

In Nixon’s time, introducing an agency that directly answered to/was controlled by Congress was the name of the game.

Pretty hard to call Nixon a small-government conservative. He was the last of the Rockefeller Republicans (counting Ford as part of his administration). Some Nixon Admin policies:

-Nominating Warren Burger and Harry Blackmun to the Supreme Court, who concurred in Roe v Wade.[0]

-Creating subsidies to turn corn into a commodity crop, effectively paying farmers to grow a lot of it[1]

-De-coupling the US Dollar from the value of gold and instituting price and wage controls[2]

No Republican in any district in 2018 America could get the nomination supporting these policies.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade#Supreme_Court_deci...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Butz#Secretary_of_Agricul...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Nixon#Domestic_policy

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