Mike Lofgren, a former congressional staff member who served on the House and Senate budget committees, first came to national attention in 2011 with his powerful essay Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult. Lofgren has been a regular contributor at Truthout since then.
Lofgren has another must-read op-ed at the New York Times. Reagan’s ‘Party of Ideas’ Is Down to Just One: Tax Cuts:
It is a sign of our slide toward banana republic status when the president of the United States, leader of the world’s foremost democracy, publicly brands Democrats who failed to applaud his State of the Union address as un-American and treasonous. The largely partisan audience was fine with it.
What has become of the Republican Party, which I once served on Capitol Hill and which I now consider a dangerous extremist movement on a par with the ruling Fidesz party in neo-fascist Hungary? Where did its principles go? What became of Ronald Reagan’s “party of ideas”?
One by one, those ideas were tossed aside for expediency and power — except the tax cut. A time traveler from the Reagan era would no longer recognize the Republican Party, but most Republican politicians feel no embarrassment supporting policies they once condemned.