The Self-immolation of the Republican Party - by Hénock Gugsa

The Self-immolation of the Republican Party 

- by Hénock Gugsa -

~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ///// ~~~~~~~~~~~~
[extracted from "The G.O.P Created Donald Trump" - by Nicholas Kristoff, NY Times]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

.... 
So how did we get to this stage where the leading Republican candidate is loathed by the Republican establishment?

In part, I think, Republican leaders brought this on themselves. Over the decades they pried open a Pandora’s box, a toxic politics of fear and resentment, sometimes brewed with a tinge of racial animus, and they could never satisfy the unrealistic expectations [of smaller government] that they nurtured among supporters.
....
[An] echo chamber deluded its believers to the point that it sometimes apparently killed them. During the 2009-10 flu pandemic, right-wing broadcasters like Limbaugh and Glenn Beck denounced the call for flu shots, apparently seeing it as a nefarious Obama plot.

The upshot was that Democrats were 50 percent more likely than Republicans to say that they would get flu shots, according to a peer-reviewed article in The Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law. So when the pandemic killed up to 18,000 Americans, they presumably were disproportionately conservatives.
....
============================================