The GOP took full control of the federal government and decided that big government was fine as long as the GOP was in control of it.
That's pretty much it. At least some folks get it.
I guess they don’t mind being a minority party...as long as they control the remnant and get a few bread crumbs.
“The GOP took full control of the federal government and decided that big government was fine as long as the GOP was in control of it. “
Thats about right. Years of wild spending and expanding government with Bush as the President and a Republican Congress kinda destroyed our credibility on fiscal issues.
A bigger reason is that social/religious “conservatives” decided that anything and everything was worth sacrificing, for even incremental advancement of their anti-abortion, anti-contraception, anti-gay, and anti-sex-outside-of marriage agendas. Since taken together, this group of anti- agendas are unacceptable to a substantial majority of voters, a large percentage of voters who would otherwise prefer to vote for candidates supporting drastic shrinking of the federal beast, end up voting for whoever the Democratic candidate is, and a large percentage of “conservatives” vote for and eagerly support any candidate or elected official who at least pays lip service to their social agenda, no matter how many additional billions of tax dollars that candidate or elected official pours into various federal schemes.
The nation would be a lot better off if conservatives tossed these social issues off the political cliff, and relocated these debates to homes and churches and synagogues. Socialist strategists are having a field day keeping the masses on both the left and right focused on these social issues, which easily provoke irrational emotional responses from both sides, and keep them distracted from the much more important issue of how government is appropriating ever larger chunks of the lives of all productive citizens, through ever larger schemes of taxation and regulation.