A huge portion of the Party of Lincoln thinks Lincoln was the bad guy of the War of Northern Aggression. That’s pretty schizoid right there. That problem started as soon as Dixiecrats started changing their party affiliations to the R column, and it’s only grown as the South became solidly R and white nationalists adopted the Trump GOP too.

Okay, so forget Lincoln, that was so long ago, the Dems are moving on from Andrew Jackson too, right? Well, Dems are rightly moving on from the image of Andrew Jackson because they can no longer honor his abhorrent actions and policies, his historic position in the party notwithstanding. The fact that maybe the largest portion of the GOP cannot honor the 16th president, who is almost unanimously (other than the South) considered one of the top three or four presidents, is a problem. They disagree with their own legacy of federalism and anti-slavery and embrace the racist states’ rights ethos of Jackson. It’s like Freaky Friday for the parties.

But okay what about more recent times? The GOP is also the Party of Reagan! Yeah, Reagan, he’s our man!

Reagan passed restrictions on open carry as governor of CA, was in favor of banning assault weapons as late as 1989 and favored other gun control measures that are absolute anathema to the GOP in 2018. He also oversaw, again as governor, the enaction of the most liberal abortion laws in the country. This is on top of the 30 year long mythologizing of the man who tripled the national debt and grew the size of government as the great small government budget balancer he wasn’t. The GOP in this case embraces a man they fundamentally disagree with as their hero, by ignoring what he actually did and printing the legend, as it were.

Can they go further down the schizophrenic claim-a-virtue-but-defend-a-sinner hole? Oh you know where I’m going now. Since the embrace of Trump, you have the party of personal responsibility, moral superiority and fundamentalist religion insanely rationalizing the behaviors they once derided as demented, bizarre, immoral and unAmerican. Turns out that the left was always right in calling out the GOP as hypocrites with an ends justify the means ethos. The fact is they’re for strong moral values for Democrats, but anything goes for them. Literally, It’s OK if You’re a Republican. The left has been calling out Republicans for IOKYAR behavior since Reagan. The center right part of the Dems and the media just finally caught up.

Its all unsustainable, and has been since way before the GOP was supposed to suffer a humiliating loss in 2016, but didn’t! The time of reckoning not only got pushed off, the sociopaths of the GOP decided it doesn’t need to happen at all, they’re just fine. If Nixon had Fox News he’d have survived Watergate and they’re behaving accordingly. So why apologize and turn on Trump? Thusly, almost no elected Republicans have made more than temporary noises against Trump. Just mere anti-Trump farts have been released with dealers then pretending it wasn’t them who passed gas. In the opinion media there’s been a stronger break by a handful of self-identified conservatives who were okay with Bush’s wars and economic catastrophes, but draw the line at Trump. However, the subset of them that have renounced modern Republicanism is a very subby subset indeed.

The hideous reality on the ground of modern Republican values are the deportation of fathers and the separation of children from their mothers. The family values party is now explicitly against family reunification and for separating patents and children. The internal contradictions of the stated values of the party and their policies as dictated by the most deplorable of them is insane and so damaging to our country.  In a two party system you can’t have one party functionally unsound. It’s indeed like a family rendered dysfunctional by the mental instability of one of the parents.

The only apparent cure will be Blue Wave therapy in November.