The Rise of the Ultra-Conservative

I was born just before the Reagan era. Back in this time period, there was really no such thing as the ultra-conservative movement. With the exception of the John Birch Society, there really wasn’t much. Sure, there were extreme conservatives, but they were not the mainline politicians of the day. However, this was the beginning of their rise.

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Ronald Reagan took office at the beginning of 1981, and he immediately began implementing his plans for the country. I could talk about Reaganomics, Iran-Contra, and his obsession with the Star Wars program, but that is not what this article is about. Some of the things he put into place are still causing damage to this day, but the conservative groups who followed him have since left him far behind. After all, Reagan was too liberal for them.

When Bush, Senior, took office, things were more moderated. He was still a Republican, but he didn’t really follow in Reagan’s footsteps. There are many reasons why Bush only served one term, but I believe the major reason he wasn’t re-elected had to do with his moderate Republican values. The ultra-conservative set didn’t want this, and they offered only weak support for the president during his re-election campaign.

I remember when Clinton took office and the liberal-leaning Americans celebrated the end of twelve years of Republican rule. They acted as if this was the end of the conservative rule and seemed to believe that we were free of them. Oh, how wrong they were!

Enter Newt Gingrich and his followers, known as Newties. Anyone remember them? This was the first real instance of the ultra-conservative movement forming into an actual group that influenced politics, and they had politicians backing them.

The Newties were known for causing chaos on Capitol Hill. This included more than one government shutdown due to their stubborn activities, the delay of several important bills in Congress, and at least once incident where they openly laughed at Bill Clinton while he addressed Congress. It seemed that their entire purpose in life was to just cause havoc and sabotage the Clinton Administration.

The Newties eventually disappeared again, crawling back under their rocks from where they first sprang. No one really noticed their disappearance, they simply slipped out of the collective American memory, which only seems to last about four years. But they were never really gone, they just changed form.

In 2000, George W. Bush ran for office, and they crawled out of the woodwork again. This time they didn’t call themselves Newties. After 9/11, they simply called themselves patriots, and they blindly followed Bush and everything he said. It did not matter if he said something that went against what they used to believe when Reagan or Clinton were in office, they would follow along and worship at his feet. (Isn’t that the way with any voter who follows strict party lines, though?)

This caused considerable concern among the liberal set. They began making all sorts of noise about how Bush was trying to bring about the authoritarian rule of the United States. Bumper stickers and refrigerator magnets comparing Bush to Hitler appeared everywhere. Some even started calling him “King George” and making fun of his verbal missteps. A broadcast of the biography of Hitler included a technical glitch, and of course the liberals howled that this was obviously on purpose to make people stop watching.

I knew of one man who acted as if he was going to war against Bush every day. He would draw his curtains, turn out the lights, and blast Air America and CNN all day while he typed up his latest “rebellious” article against Bush. He even had emergency plans to move to Canada, always convinced that Bush was going to declare martial law any day.

These responses were alarmist and extreme. This was also the start of the life or death election cycles that we have experienced ever since. Haven’t you noticed that? Since 2004, every election is always billed as the choice between American freedom and dictatorship, no matter what side you’re on. The media is fully milking the fear angle, and people fall for it every time. But that is not what this article is about, either, so we’ll save that discussion for another day.

As the Bush era continued with its paranoia about terrorism instead of Communism, a new crop of ultra-conservatives popped up. They were known as the Tea Party. Yeah, you remember those guys? They were pretty active during the Obama Administration, where they caused all sorts of trouble on the same level as the Newties.

This time, however, they had more power behind them. Several conservative politicians who had won so much during the Bush Administration were now crying foul over Obama and acting as if we were in a liberal dictatorship. This caused all sorts of problems, from government shutdowns to delayed bills. Again.

There were several Tea Party politicians who took pride in causing trouble, displaying sophomoric behavior for their voters, who were stupid enough to eat it up. You had people like Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, and Michele Bachman, who would stand before Congress with crap-eating grins on their faces as they acted like high school freshmen. And the more they did it, the more attention they got from the equally childish ultra-conservative voting public.

This curried favor of the ultra-conservative set only encouraged this type of behavior even more. By the end of the Obama Administration, however, the term Tea Party had run its course. This marked the rise of Donald Trump, a charlatan of the worst order. If those extreme liberals thought Bush was Hitler, they hadn’t seen anything yet.

The Tea Party became MAGA, and in the process, they became even more extreme. These people were not only sophomoric in behavior, they were willing to break the law to get what they wanted, even going as far as storming the U.S. Capitol when their candidate didn’t win the 2020 election. Worse, they believed in crap like Qanon and looked up to groups like the Proud Boys. They are openly white supremacist, and some have even been called terrorists.

This change in the ultra-conservative power base happened so fast that it left Democrats’ heads spinning. They had no idea what had just happened. It was like they had stuck their heads on a live wire and were knocked down. They had no idea how to handle the onslaught.

Their response was to keep on keeping on with their super-cautious, go by the numbers approach, even as their popularity plummeted. On social media, I find a lot of Democrats trying desperately to defend the Biden Administration, but when you look at it closely, it wasn’t that good. It consisted of a lot of thumb-twiddling, cautious hesitation, and presentation of idealistic legislation that had no basis in reality. (Electric car mandate, anyone?) Worse, he stubbornly sat on things like the legalization of marijuana and the Israel situation, and he abandoned several people to death in Afghanistan. Biden wasn’t a terrible president, no, but when compared to the rest of the presidential list, I predict he will not be very memorable. He was what I refer to as a Democratic space filler.

As I said before, it seemed to the Democratic Party that this shift in ultra-conservatism was sudden and baffling, but when you look at the history closely, it’s been evolving for a very long time. In 1992, a friend of mine left a Southern Baptist church because representatives from the Southern Baptist Convention and Christian Coalition came into the church and told people that voting for Clinton was favoring Satan. Not only did they threaten voters in that congregation, they arranged to put together buses to the polls so that everyone would vote for the “Christian candidate.” And that is just one example of the type of things that were going on behind the scenes. Why the Democrats didn’t see it is anyone’s guess.

Today, the Republicans look in glee at the loss of popularity among Democrats. The last time I checked the polls, Democratic favorability was in the forties. What the Republicans aren’t seeing is that their popularity is also in the forties, if not lower. It’s like laughing at your neighbor because their house burned down while an ember starts flaming in your gutter behind you.

People are tired of the two-party system. Their choices today include the billionaire-run Republican Party, with its hatred of immigrants, women, trans people, and minorities, or the billionaire-run Democratic Party, with its unrealistic ideals and paternal, look down the nose attitude toward voters. Third parties are not much better, as they all represent extremes that are too liberal or conservative to be functional, or the Libertarian Party, which is just the Republican Party in disguise. They are all jokes.

We’ve got to find something better, because the system we have now isn’t working. There are a lot of things that should’ve been put into place long ago, but our founding fathers were very stubborn about some of them. “Well, we’re not going to put that in because that’s how England is doing it, so it must be bad." It's the same sort of black and white thinking that has led us to a second Trump Administration.

Let’s be blunt, the system is broken. We can always try to blame the left or the right, Trump, or Bush, or Clinton. The fact of the matter is, the articles of self-destruction were put into place hundreds of years before any of them took office. The American experiment is failing. What are you willing to do to fix it?