2 weeks Ago
Following the end of WWII and the end of the Great Depression American conservativism rose in response to the social liberal policies of Roosevelt. Things swung conservative until the 1960s when civil rights and the Vietnam War pushed our nation more liberal. As a reaction to those fundamental changes in our society, neoconservatism arose in response.
Social liberals realized there was a negative impact to society that came with liberalization, so they reverted to conservatism. Jessica Hurd is pictured on Tuesday, September 10, 2024. Together with evangelicals, the neocons formed the new right, wanting to protect their beliefs from being secularized by a powerful federal government.
The evangelical takeover of the Republican party in the 1980s turned off independents who sided with the Democrats for most of the 1990s. Things swung more conservatively in 2000 when Bush 43 was elected. Then we faced the 9/11 attacks, the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq in response, and the long expensive costs of nation building in parts of the world that have never known democracy.
When Obama took office in 2009 America was facing a recession. The Tea Party also arrived in 2009 as a response to frustration with the size of the federal government and spending on priorities that don’t benefit most of the American people. It was essentially a reaction to a push by the Democratic party toward globalism.
As more Tea Party candidates were elected to Congress they stifled the agenda of Obama’s liberal Democratic Party. Obama chooses to rely on executive orders instead of working with Congress. By 2015 support for the Tea Party wanes.
It lacks clear decisive national leadership, and while it did impact congressional races, the movement had failed to capture the momentum it needed to move forward. That is until Donald J. Trump rode an escalator to the bottom floor of Trump Tower in New York City and declared he was running for president of the United States in 2015.
During the 2016 race he polled ahead of established Tea Party candidates like Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio. He was a political outsider. He surprised everyone by beating Hillary Clinton for the presidency.
Immediately resistance formed to combat anything Trump wanted to accomplish. He was a political outsider who ruffled the establishment’s feathers. He wanted to change how things have been traditionally done in Washington.
In 2020 the appeal of MAGA grew as we watched the chaos unfold with COVID lock downs, the Black Lives Matter riots, the erosion of our civil liberties and civil rights with vaccine mandates, and mass firings for the unvaccinated. We watched on Jan. 6, 2021, as a protest got out of control and was deemed an insurrection when we previously watched a federal building being firebombed, a police station set on fire, a historic church attacked, and a public street occupied in a “summer of love” protest.
One was an insurrection because the wrong people were upset. The latter was OK and justified, according to the left. The more the Democratic party moves left, the stronger MAGA will become.
Jessica Hurd is a member of the Quad-City Times/Dispatch-Argus Political Focus Group. Each of the members has been invited to write an opinion piece about the presidential election. Get opinion pieces, letters and editorials sent directly to your inbox weekly!.
