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Comment by Scubabear68 | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, the current Republican Party bears almost no resemblance to the "classic" Republican Party of....10 years ago.

The Newt and the Tea Party started the slide, normalizing hatred and bombast and FU-politics, and MAGA perfected it.

Whether you love it, hate it, or are indifferent, what you are dealing with now are not really Republicans. They are MAGA-folks. They should really rename themselves the Solipism Party. Nothing matters but the current state of your own head.

And yes, I know parties change and evolve with the times, but I would argue this time is very different.

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> To be fair, the current Republican Party bears almost no resemblance to the "classic" Republican Party of....10 years ago.

In other aspects, perhaps. But the "small government" or "pro-economy" branding of the Republican Party has been an absurdity for more like 75 years. Democratic administrations have performed better on virtually any conceivable economic metric with very few minor exceptions.

The "old" GOP also loved 3 letter agencies, unitary executive theory, and mass surveillance. They did the Patriot Act. And Scalia hated the 5th Amendment, was weird on the 4th, and dramatically increased police powers.

It's not like those Tea Party folk appeared out of the blue. They grew, but the core constituency has been pandered to by mainstream Republican leadership since at least Nixon.

The current Republican Party is the exact same as 10 years ago, just further along.

10 years ago was basically Trump 1. And 10 years before that was GWB starting the endless wars with an admin outright denying reality. Which Reagan also did. And of course Nixon literally broke into the opposition party’s.

.. 10 years ago. Yes it fucking does, it's just become more brazen. Those are the motherfuckers that passed the patriot act and then reupped it over and over.

Obama and the Democrats were surprisingly heavy on surveillance and curtailing rights during Obama’s Presidency.

So you can include them in the “reupped it over and over”.

That's why all of these efforts to corrode civil liberties needs to be fought and contested by both sides. Otherwise the ratcheting effect makes if impossible to reclaim these liberties.

Every US administration at least as far back as Woodrow has done nothing but expand the surveillance state. Like you can make the argument that occasional weirdos like Ike, Clinton and Hoover didn't really do anything to expand on that front and just kept the status quo and let them run themselves but there has never been any substantial rollback in at least 100yr. And as bad as the executive is the legislature is no better.

Yes votes were 144 D and 213 R in the house with unanimous yes (only one no) in the Senate. Right after 9/11 people were fine giving up with their rights pretty much across the spectrum. Granted Republicans more than Democrats. I think since then it has just been the status quo for every president since Bush. I hate it but it has been engrained at this point IMO.

This all reminds me of Makeshift Patriot by Sage Francis.

The Tea Party, MAGA (and the on the other side of the isle the Bernie bros and whatever their replacement will be) represent pent up demand from the masses to get the current status quo to F-off. So far the status quo has co-opted all these movements.

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