George H. W. Bush broken promise that changed the Republican Party - General

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TImO_RquoW8

This is quite an insightful video. The question now is: is there a breaking point? Is there a point in which the increasingly authoritarian kleptocratic policy of the Republican party collapses on it itself? Trump is clearly the madness of their rhetoric, policy, and propaganda given flesh. So, if Bush Sr was seen as the the symbol of failed moderate policy that triggered this decades-long shift towards political extremism, is this frightful avatar of that extremism given form in Donald Trump ultimately going to force them to snap back to more moderate positions? There's a hell of a lot of uncertainty for our future, and it's hard to look past Donald Trump. For better or worse, I think he's going to herald another dramatic shift in our political system.

The Republicans are going to hit that "ceiling" at some point. That particular political position that is so extremely conservative that it just does not win votes no matter what. It's just a matter of whether they'll bounce off that wall back to centrism, or stick to it and ride along it into the future.

I mean the Overton window in America leans ridiculously right considering we can't even get universal healthcare, something every person in every other nation in the world doesn't criticize. Yet we like to speak for them over how terrible Canada's, UK's, Germany's, etc systems are.

when the likes of limbaugh and hannity no longer have an exceptionally big megaphone, and when the rich and corporate are knocked down a few pegs, otherwise the average joe has no chance to move their leaders or platform.

No doubt about that. Fox News is largely at the center of the rapid growth of right wing extremism, with the assistance of other pervasive right wing propagandist sources like Sinclair Broadcasting. They have enormous reach throughout our country, and bombard their viewership with dishonest propaganda designed to instill isolate, frighten, and outrage people into supporting increasingly radical political perspectives. That this trend needs to be combated is certain, but it's a dangerous line to begin attacking media entities with legislation, no matter how justified it may be under the specific circumstances. I generally try to call bullshit on "slippery slope" arguments, but when it comes to limiting the freedom of the press, you run some risks of serious unintended consequences with even the best-intentioned legislation, as you may be establishing a legislative toolkit that could be abused by later parties.

Or gerrymander and supress votes for the foreseeable future.

Won't be able to do that forever, especially with the orange making the party look bad

This is my biggest fear, currently. I obviously despise this administration's actual policy, but am much more concerned in the long-term about the state of our democracy. We're dealing with an administration that is doing nothing whatsoever is being done to combat a hostile state from interfering with and/or hacking our elections on the grounds that the beneficiaries of those attacks are radical right wing politicians. Furthermore: gerrymandering is being overtly justified, disenfranchising voters through complicated registrations and voter ID laws is basic party platform, disinformation and outright lies are being fed to the voting public on an unprecedented scale, talk of congressional term limits expressly designed to force out opposition are gaining traction, attacks on the rule of law designed to break down the checks and balances on the limit of congressional and presidential powers are being orchestrated among party leadership, and so on. The general attitude among the right wing right now seems to be that anything goes as long as it keeps those Dirty Dems out of office -- even if it undermines the foundational values of our democracy. Hell, the President of the United States suggested that we should consider just making him president for life, and not one voice among the leadership of the GOP bothered to address him on that. Shitty policy can be undone, with time, but the erosion and/or destruction of our democracy is much, much harder to set straight.

The largest issue we face moving forward is that we have set an unfortunate precedent for a complete disregard of truth. You can argue with people who hold different perspectives on a subject. Even liars and bigots can sometimes be proven wrong or otherwise shamed into the margins. But Trump is a new breed entirely. He literally cannot distinguish the concepts of truth and untruth. He is not simply a petty man trying to get his way, he is directly uprooting the trust in intelligence and objective analysis that has defined western democracy, and every ideology within it, for hundreds of years.

This isn't unique to the United States. This particular flavour of propaganda, that attacks the very basis of what is true, has become pervasive throughout the entire world. This is a problem we must all face and solve, and do it as soon as we can. I agree with BDA that we can't do it through censorship laws but we must fight back. Information campaigns, source vetting, statistic checking, lie debunking and so on. There is no going back to the way things were before, this is how it works now. Just like a battlefield - when one side adopts a new destructive weapon to the war, everyone adopts it and there's no going back to swords and spears.

> All this stuff just suddenly happened No, no it did not. The republican part was this way since the late 40s. it didn't happen during the rise of the cattle and oil barons, and it's not going to happen tomorrow either He's about as new as Andrew Jackson roflmao, no. Not even at all. It's always been here. It's even been just this vocal. The human race existed before 1990, and you should prolly be watching some clips from the 1960, and possibly note how rather similar they still sound to the various marches held in the south last year.

You haven't been watching the video then, theirs clear scientific evidence that the GOP has shifted more radically to the extreme while the Democrates have stayed the same, what we're seeing from them now is a recent phenomenon.

The Republican Party today is not the same Republican Party as there was 100 years ago. They used to be the progressives, and the Democrats the conservatives, until the 1960s. The Republican Party freed the slaves. The Republican Party pushed the Civil Rights Act.

Nope. the CRA was a bipartisan act and has the vote record to prove it; and there still are republican progressives. Should the republicans lose the next election there will be more. Should thye win there will be less; that's how groupthink in America works. An animated graphic with compressed arrows is not scientific evidence or a kind of scientific evidence. The Democrats also have very much not stayed the same, Hilary's stance on China and Russia was quite different than her husband's. Recent phenomenon my ass; Strom Thurmond served for 50 years and Mitch McConnell is a literal fucking lich.

I think things seem really dark right now, like really bad in congress, in the executive branch, hell even for the future of this country. But what you're missing is that this is another match to the firestorm that is brewing within the nation's liberal half, which actually outnumbers the conservatives. You've got millions of millennials who were either whipped up to support Hillary and Bernie or got their sunny worlds flip-turned upside down from both party infighting and the rise of Trump. Republicans seem powerful now because of the democratic party's inept and aging leadership in the past decade. However the faces are changing, young politicians are being elected on the democrats side, who are more in tune with the millennial mindset. Healthcare, education, and combating inequality are going to be thee issues that they will be tackling. With the influx of new congressmen and women coming into office this election I think we will finally see a turn around, not only because of a switch of power, but because democrats are starting to fight each other and those who can't gain the trust of the millennials in the next few years are not going to last long. Progressivism will make its long awaited return in the coming years, and I think this whole Trump debacle will be seen as the country's wake up call. Or you know we can descend further into chaos and end up like Russia lol