Today is the tenth anniversary of this blog. A few observations are pertinent:
- For better or for worse–ok, just for worse–this era has been dominated by Donald Trump, a man whose greatest accomplishment has been to win over the reactionary base with harsh rhetoric and to leverage that relationship into control first of the rest of the GOP and then the entire country. As a result, liberal democracy in America is being both rotted out from the inside (i.e., by perfectly legal means) and burned down from the outside. Things are going to get worse before they get better.
- The central thesis of the blog from its beginning has been the existence of four different threads of opinion–what I call the four factions–within the Republican Party. That thesis has aged extremely well and explains why the GOP has so much trouble doing anything positive when it is in power. There has been an evolution within the party, however; the CDs have mostly left, and the Reactionaries run the place, subject to a lingering affection for tax cuts for rich people. Ten years ago, the Reactionary-PBP compact was dominated by the PBPs; today, it is the opposite.
- The evidence that Trump is following the Orban playbook of stifling dissent by bullying and buying out his critics is becoming more obvious every day. All I can say is that it won’t happen here. This blog isn’t written with financial gain in mind, and it never will be.