GOP's advance to the rear

As I said before, Republican Party leaders are no longer able to lead because they’ve forgotten how to. Additionally, they have politicized science, making the potentially fatal decision of choosing anti-science as the Republican position.

Accordingly they are totally unequipped to perform the day-to-day business of a nation participating in a global economy, much less address the monumental problems presented by global warming and the mitigation thereof. I asked my friend Claude.ai to help me figure how this came about, and here’s what we found:

Republican Party leaders have long “championed” limited government and expressed that by opposing any government regulation of business. Many of those regulations, like the child labor laws, deal with the health and safety of employees and arose from continuing advances in the sciences, especially human physiology. So their anti-government stance slowly became anti-science as well.

The Republican Party has long had strong ties to evangelical Christianity, where statements consistent with their faith do not require factual, science-based evidence to support them. As the religious right became an increasingly important part of the Republican voting bloc, the party adopted more and more anti-science positions, like denial of evolution and an anti-Covid-19 vaccine stance, that appealed to this voter base.

Additionally, fossil fuel interests (aka Big Oil) are major funders of the Party’s political campaigns and think tanks, which espouse anti-science views, particularly the scientific consensus that fossil fuels are a major contributor to man-made climate change.

Also note that after Citizens United passed, the Party received millions in direct campaign support and untold millions (billions?) in a continuing propaganda campaign to denigrate and gaslight the Democratic Party, the Government, and science.

To summarize. The anti-science stance in the Republican Party has grown ever-stronger over time. That stance has hardened and is now an integral part of the Party's identity. There is no way forward for the Party, only down.

John H. Terrell