They’re worthless traitor filth.

The GOP has becoming increasingly authoritarian since 2009, when a black man dared to win the presidency and a third of the country lost their ever-loving goddamn minds. The GOP seized on the opportunity to absorb these disaffected racists by leaning into what they liked - unsurprisingly, disaffected racists are typically low-information voters as well, and low-information voters tend to be both easily swayed by flashy propaganda (like, say, Fox News and other ‘infotainment’) and resentful towards candidates which posit complex solutions to ongoing issues (ie they generally prefer candidates promising easy solutions and ‘strongman’ style rhetoric). The party then shifted to suit these new and very loyal voters.

As such, the GOP has leaned more and more into a (sometimes explicitly) anti-democratic viewpoint that even neocons have started to balk at. Putin’s Russia looks like what they want America to look like - a few people at the top getting very wealthy (what the GOP elite want), and minorities kept ‘in their place’ and a vain strongman putting on a circus of showing off how very powerful and totally secure he is (what the GOP’s absorbed voters want).

It goes much deeper than this, of course. There are other causes and problems, but that, I think, is most core to it.

In the 60s the evangelical christians in the US realized there was a path to essentially coopt the Republican party. This roughly coincided with the implementation of the southern strategy. In the 70s Richard Nixon’s presidency collapsed in the wake of the Watergate scandal. From this point on, efforts were made to ensure that no Republican president could ever be taken down due to, essentially, anything.

This is where the origins of Fox News lie. The whole strategic purpose of it isn’t to deliver news (in fact there’s studies showing that Fox news viewers are less informed than people who don’t watch any news), it’s to offer consistent spin in favour of whatever the Republican mainstream happens to be. Once Trump’s nomination was inevitable , they started supporting him despite their initial opposition.

Fox News is not unique, it’s just the most high profile part of a right-wing media (and “news”) ecosystem designed to ensure that a strong majority of Americans will never see Democrats as anything other than the enemy (despite many Democratic policies being quite popular even among Republicans if not presented with democratic party branding ). There are hundreds of talk radio stations that throughout the 80s and 90s and 2000s spewed nothing but hateful nonsense and poisoned the minds of millions. These people are trained to never expose themselves to media outside of this ecosystem . Anything “woke”, even objective facts, may be dismissed because “media has a left wing bias”.

The recent issues with Russia are just down the fact that it turns out Republicans are a lot cheaper to bribe than most people thought. Putin, a brutal dictator, can be cast as anti-woke, where “woke” ( like "antifa) means whatever they happen to be hating in that moment. Putin hates most of the same groups they’re trained to hate so common Republicans can be talked into supporting Putin’s regime. After all, the alternative is to potentially give the Democrats a win, and that must be avoided at all costs.

I don’t see a way out from this for the US. The media ecosystem doing this has its claws deep into huge swathes of the population and it’s all perfectly legal. There’s no real recourse. In whatever civilization follows us, this will be studied by their historians.

They are jealous of the Russian oligarchs like Putin. They want to be like him.

Reagan’s policies laid the foundation for the capitalist fascism we see today. Since then American politics has been taken over by corporate interests.