Longtime Republican laments the GOP collapse into the 'gutter'

Republican strategist Steve Schmidt says he’s been a Republican for nearly 30 years, long enough to see it’s sad “devolution” over the last few.

“Yesterday, was the 172nd anniversary of the Republican party being born in 1854,” Schmidt wrote on his Saturday Substack. “Horace Greeley, one of its founders, promised that it would be ‘the greatest party for freedom the world had ever seen.’”

The party, he points out, was born in the 1850s “in opposition to the expansion of slavery.”

“It was the party of Abraham Lincoln, the party that prosecuted the American Civil War and preserved the Union. Its founding purpose was rooted in human liberty and the belief that the United States could not endure half-slave and half-free. That mattered. It meant something. It was a party animated by a moral cause larger than itself,” said Schmidt.

But over the last two decades, the Republican party has been “pulled off course and into a low and perfidious gutter.”

“It is the party that Newt Gingrich built. It is a party of grievance, resentment and bigotry,” said Schmidt. “ … The party has become … in the main what the cranks who once lurked on its periphery were shunned for. It is a vessel of bigotry, extremism, religious nuttery and a radical ideology that places the jackboot of the state above the rights of human beings.”

The Party took a turn after the election of Barack Obama, when Schmidt said “what presented itself as a grassroots revolt against taxation and government overreach carried, beneath the surface, something darker: a politics increasingly fueled by resentment, identity, and conspiracy. Compromise became betrayal. Governance became secondary to performance.”

But the decisive break was the ascent of Donald Trump who “revealed what it had become.”

“The party that once claimed Lincoln as its moral compass embraced a leader who trafficked in lies, who attacked democratic institutions, and who redefined loyalty not to the Constitution, but to himself,” said Schmidt, adding that the ultimate transformation was at the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

“A mob, inflamed by a sitting president, attacked the seat of American democracy to overturn a free and fair election. And what did the party do? In large measure, it rationalized, minimized, or outright defended it,” said Schmidt. “That is the devolution.”

Today, said Schmidt, the party that once stood for the preservation of the Union and the expansion of freedom, stands for “power at any cost.” Its language of liberty has been replaced by the “language of victimhood,” and its commitment to truth has been replaced by a “willingness to believe anything — so long as it serves the cause.”

Today, he says, it is the party of “cowardice and treachery, submission and debasement,” as well as the party of “Florsheim shoes three sizes too big, and ideas that are uniformly small, cruel and dumb.”

“Political parties change. They adapt. They evolve,” said Schmidt. “But there is a difference between evolution and abandonment.”

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