Republicans Win

For the past decade or so, I've been formulating, and trying to put into coherent form, a theory/explanation for how the rise of <I don't know what to call it> was (a) adopted by the Republican Party, and (b) has resulted in the decline of America as a country in pretty much every way you can measure—except of course the important metric of how good life is for rich people. That's the one thing, and I would argue the only thing, in which America leads the world.

In a series of tweets on 11 December 2020, Paul Krugman made the following comments which touch on various of the points my "uber theory" includes. I repeat it here verbatim.

——————————

The GOP spent most of 2020 rejecting science in the face of a deadly pandemic; now it's rejecting democracy in the face of a clear election loss. How did we get to this point? One step at a time, of course. But I'd argue that the wrong turn began under Reagan. 1/

Republicans have, of course, done their best to beatify Reagan — mainly on the basis of an economic recovery that he didn't cause and the collapse of Communism, which he also didn't cause. What actually happened on his watch? 2/

Well, for one thing it was the beginning of the great mortality divergence. America used to have about the same life expectancy as other rich countries; since 1980, however, we've fallen far behind. 3/

One contributing factor was a huge rise in income inequality, partly attributable to Reagan's policies, including union-bashing.  4/

Poverty, properly measured, was higher in 1989 than a decade earlier, especially for children and working-age adults 5/

People also forget how anti-science Reagan was; he denounced evolution as "just a theory" and wanted creationism taught in schools 6/

And while the practice of equating patriotism with political support for the current president (as long as he's a Republican) didn't start with Reagan — Nixon did it too — it got much more intense, paving the way for the Trump cult of personality 7/

As Adam Smith said, there is a great deal of ruin in a nation. America had and still has many strengths as a society. But given time and persistence, a malign political movement can undo those strengths. I'm very frightened about the future 8/