QUOTES by Heather Cox Richardson
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In 1884, for the first time since the Civil War, voters had elected a Democrat to the White House. Grover Cleveland promised to use the government to protect ordinary Americans, and to stop congressmen from catering to wealthy industrialists.
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Mt. Rushmore was conceived in 1923 in a desperate attempt to draw tourist dollars to a state that had been rushed into the Union to protect Republican political dominance and could not manage to achieve economic stability.
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Since 1981, when President Ronald Reagan took office promising to scale back the federal government, Republican leaders have promised to cut regulation and taxes, and to return power to individuals to arrange their lives as they see fit. But they have never entirely managed to eradicate the New Deal government.
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The Tax Cuts and Jobs Acts slashes taxes on the very wealthy and kills regulations with the idea that rich businessmen will invest their money into the economy to support workers - the same idea that Republicans embraced in the 1920s.
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By 2015, the top 1 percent of families took home more than 20 percent of income. Wealth distribution was 10 times worse than that: the families in the top 1 percent owned as much as the families in the bottom 90 percent.
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Republicans who controlled the government in the 1920s insisted that national prosperity depended on government protection of the rich, who they believed would plow their capital back into the economy to provide jobs and higher wages for workers.
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Men like Abraham Lincoln recognized that if the slaveholders were not stopped, it would only be a question of time until they spread their system of elite rule to the entire country. Poor men would be bound for life into menial labor, and American democracy would die.
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In the 1850s, as the numbers of Americans who were not invested in the slave system grew, the South's leaders felt they had to entrench their power in the government or it was only a question of time until lawmakers would begin to regulate, or even outlaw, slavery.
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The fight is over two fundamentally different ideas about the nature of America. On one side are those who believe that that every hardworking person should be able to rise. On the other are those who believe that wealthy white men should always rule over a permanent class of workers.
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While the government underwrote the West more than any other region, the myth claimed that hardworking Western cowboys and settlers wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone to work out their own destiny.
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The rise of a new kind of political science in the 1960s has been driving a wedge between political insiders and voters ever since. By turning voters into interest groups, it stopped establishment leaders from articulating a national narrative. It opened the way for Movement Conservatives to create today's political crisis.
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Since the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, Movement Conservatives have tapped into the idea that an activist government redistributed wealth to lazy minorities. But they have also pushed hard on the idea that true Americans are Western individualists.
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The political construct that idealized cowboys fell into disrepute during and immediately after the New Deal. In those years, Americans turned away from Western individualism and toward the idea of an activist government.
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In psychology, trying to force others to accept the reality of a fake world is called gaslighting. It got its name from the 1944 film 'Gaslight,' in which a husband convinces his wife and their neighbors that she is insane.
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During the Civil War, the fledgling Republican Party constructed the nation's first activist government, using taxes to fund social welfare legislation for the first time in American history.
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Trump is a populist in the same mold as the nineteenth-century Populists who gave their name to American grassroots political movements. Historians and pundits argued themselves blue in the face over whether Populists were reactionary or progressive, but they were both.
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The idea that the country should be led by white men goes back to antebellum slaveholders, who argued that the world was naturally divided between working drudges and elite leaders, who directed their workers and used the wealth the workers produced to promote progress.
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The roots of Nixon's political descent lay at least as far back as May 1970, when the shooting of four young Americans at Kent State University began to turn the president's moderate supporters against him.
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At the turn of the last century, extremists were forced back to the political fringes while younger politicians resurrected the vitality of the original Republican vision. They recognized that the nation could only develop and grow by protecting equality of opportunity for hardworking Americans at the bottom of the economic ladder.
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In the 1880s and 1890s, extremists in the Republican party also threatened the future of the US. Just when it seemed the extremists' control of the government was complete, their political machinations, propaganda, and demonization of their opposition fueled a dramatic backlash.
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When the 1929 crash wiped out disposable income, there were not enough consumers to fuel a recovery.
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In 1860, the Republicans put Lincoln in the White House, and Southerners left the Union. Their absence opened the way for the new party to reshape the national government, from protecting the wealth of propertied men to promoting economic opportunity for everyone.
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Only a few years after building a federal system that cleared the way for equal opportunity, Republicans faced a racist and xenophobic backlash against an active government - and they folded. By the 1880s, the party's leaders had abandoned their message of opportunity and tied themselves to big business.
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The Trump administration is hammering again and again on the idea that Democrats will bring chaos and violence to American streets.
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While crime is indeed up in some cities in the last month or so since the stay-at-home orders lifted, crime is nonetheless down overall for 2020. Indeed, violent crime has trended downward now for decades.
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Republican ideology says the government has no business supporting ordinary Americans: they should work to survive, even if that means they have to take the risk of contracting Covid-19.
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To make sure Republicans stayed in power, they suppressed voting by people likely to vote Democratic, and gerrymandered states so that even if Democrats won a majority of votes, they would have a minority of representatives.
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Since 2012, the USPS has not been able to meet its prefunding requirement, but without it, the agency would have made a modest operating profit every year since 2013.
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Democracy was always a gamble. In 1776, the founders rejected the old idea that government should be based on hierarchies according to wealth or birth or religion.
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Three times before, in the 1850s, the 1890s, and the 1920s, oligarchs took over the American government and threatened to destroy democracy. In each case, they overreached, and regular folks took back their government.
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Trump's alliance with Russia's Vladimir Putin, in defiance of America's own intelligence community, the Department of Justice, and the bipartisan report of the Senate Intelligence Committee, forces us to face that the fundamental principles of our nation are under attack.
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Traditional Republicanism grew up in the 1850s as opposed to the Democrats, who always saw the world kind of as a 'us vs. them' proposition. That the world was limited; the economy was limited.
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In the 1820s, westerners and political outsiders worried that rich men in the east had commandeered the government for their own ends.
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In the individualist ideology, a man is responsible for his wife and children. This relegates women to domestic roles as wives and mothers protected by their menfolk, or silences them as special interest harpies demanding government benefits that will destroy individualist men.
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Since 1980, Republican shredding of the social safety net has disproportionately hit women, particularly women of colour.
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In short, Republicans under Trump have finally destroyed the New Deal, turning the government over to a small cadre of wealthy businessmen, unhampered, to run the country as they see fit.
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Roosevelt's New Deal regulated business, protected social welfare and promoted national infrastructure on the principle that the role of government was not simply to protect the property of the wealthy, but rather was to promote equality of opportunity for all.
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When a president, as Trump does, demonises opponents as an un-American mob trying to destroy the country, it is not a lunatic who tries to harm them, it is a patriot.
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In the mid 19th century, it had taken a generation of political rhetoric to induce southern soldiers to fight for the interests of a small ruling class in the name of democracy.
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Republicans are a shrinking minority ruling an increasingly angry majority that not only wants to change the Republican policies that are moving wealth upward, but also threatens to hold Republican leaders accountable to the law.
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When Ronald Reagan's administration was exposed for having illegally sold arms to Iran to raise money covertly for the Contra rebels fighting the Nicaraguan government, Reagan acknowledged that the evidence was damning - yet defended the principle behind the scheme.
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The question of impeaching Donald Trump is about replacing the toxic partisanship of today's Republican party with America's traditional rule of law. It has become a constitutional imperative.
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Nixon clearly broke laws. He clearly believed he needed to stay in power to protect the country. But he recognized that he was breaking the law, and he tried to cover it up.
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Today, the District of Columbia has more residents than at least two other states; Puerto Rico has more than 20. With numbers like that, admitting either or both to the union is less a political power play on the Democrats' part than the late-19th-century partisan move that still warps American politics.
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New states were supposed to join the union when they reached a certain population, but in the late 19th century, population mattered a great deal less than partisanship.
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