Goodbye to all that -- once again, and for the last time

Goodbye to all that — once again, and for the last time
Farewell reflections from an American who has now lost his country: I quit the GOP 13 years ago. That wasn't enough

By Mike Lofgren
Contributing Writer
Published November 17, 2024 6:00AM (EST)


(Salon) It was in 2011, amid the eruption of the Tea Party juvenile delinquents in the House of Representatives and the then-novel asininity of birtherism, that I called it quits after 28 years on Capitol Hill — 28 years working for Republicans, no less.

As for the party I had grown up with in the Midwest — the party of Ike and Gerry Ford, respectable cloth-coated women, Jell-O salad, mainstream Presbyterians in brick churches (and please, no time-wasting and embarrassing hallelujahs or speaking in tongues during services; we all want to make the first tee by noon), late-model Buicks and neat lawns — three decades on, when I left the Hill, that party was as extinct as the passenger pigeon, and I felt I was without a political home.

It had evolved — or rather degenerated — into a billionaire-funded mob of primitives reminiscent of Jonathan Swift’s Yahoos. (Yes, that's the origin of that term.) Within a month of retirement, I wrote my first essay, "Goodbye to All That," which, for a fumbling first effort, garnered an amazing couple of million views and started a minor paradigm shift.

....(snip)....

Of course, that time, little more than a decade ago, seems almost innocent now, with the Tea Party’s imbecilities merely college hijinks during homecoming week. These days the GOP practically wallows in its own evil, at once surprised that they dare openly commit their atrocities in what was once a civilized country, and pleased that everyone supinely lets them get away with it.

....(snip)....

Sometime in the last 40 years, between Ronald Reagan's proclamation that greed is good, the rise of hate radio and garbage social media, the vicarious victimhood of 9/11 and the kill-fest of Iraq, the dominoes falling from Wall Street all the way to some empty and forlorn McMansion slum in 2008 and finally Trump shrieking in our ears nonstop, at least half the American people lost whatever shred of rationality they possessed. These people now think Joe Rogan or Alex Jones are philosophers on par with Henry David Thoreau or William James, except that they've never heard of the latter two. .............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2024/11/17/goodbye-to-all-that--once-again-and-for-the-last-time/