How the sustained GOP erosion of economic fairness set the stage for Trump and the MAGA takeover.
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The reason Donald Trump won the election is simple but it has a complex history.
The majority of Trump’s voters perceive that the fact-based policies which traditionally fueled prosperity and stability have been failing since the Reagan era. Disillusioned by their visible decline attributed to these factually rooted policies, and a tidal wave of persecution propaganda, they have turned to the false and perilous comfort of “alternative facts.”
This is not merely the result of ignorance but a legitimate reaction to decades of disillusionment with a failed system and a growing distrust of its basic economic, scientific, and medical tenets.
Figures like Joe Rogan, Alex Jones, and Elon Musk have also played a pivotal role in this situation by normalizing the corrosive idea that all internet data — no matter how fringe or absurd — is equally accurate and valid. This, combined with the directed algorithms that prioritize engagement over facts and the pattern-recognition flaws in AI that fabricate nonexistent sources, has effectively drowned out objective truth and replaced it with agendas that are masquerading as legitimate facts.
As a result, as many as 670 million people worldwide now believe bizarre, easily debunked nonsense, such as:
- Brown cows make chocolate milk (debunked by every brown cow).
- Drinking bleach cures COVID-19 (debunked by every bleach drinker).
- Nuclear bombs stop hurricanes (debunked by any 8th-grade Earth science class).
- The moon landing was faked (debunked by the Apollo 11 laser mirror).
- The Earth is flat (debunked with sticks and sunlight — thanks, Eratosthenes, 240 BCE).
This phenomenon isn’t just about a screaming-fire-in-a-crowded-internet informational free-for-all, or even about Trump himself — he simply rode an escalator down into a country that’s been descending into an alternate reality for years.
The Roots of the Chaos and Division
The chaos and division plaguing the country are not merely the product of the current rapid technological changes, which created a more fragile system and supercharged wealth concentration. They are the direct consequence of the Republican Party’s long track record of destabilization — a deliberate strategy to undermine democracy that has been shaping this nation for decades.
If you look at the data over the last 70 years, it’s impossible to ignore the GOP’s dismantling of the critical structures of social, economic, and environmental stability that have been the foundation of the nation’s widespread prosperity since the end of World War II.
The end of broad-based prosperity in America is directly linked to the GOP’s specific legislative and judicial actions that thwarted democracy and elevated business interests over the public good. It wasn’t triggered by some imagined “woke” ideology or failed Democratic policies.
The GOP has passed more than 30 major legislative acts over seven decades that eroded the middle class economically and politically, compared to fewer than 10 (like NAFTA) from the other side of the aisle — and most of those were concessions to the GOP.
From Post-WWII Prosperity to Systemic Erosion
Let’s rewind to just after World War II, when America was thriving. The middle class was at its peak, corporate taxes were high, and the nation was at the apex of its economic development. It wasn’t perfect (racial segregation, the marginalization of women and minorities, etc.), but it worked pretty well — for a significant majority of the population.
Since World War II, the GOP has not just systematically dismantled, but has completely overcorrected, the democratic socialism policies of the New Deal — policies like the 50 percent corporate and 91 percent (uber-wealthy) tax rates that were critical to America’s victory in World War II and its prosperity in the decades that followed.
Rather than merely amending these policies to accommodate evolving economic realities, the GOP absolutists eradicated them entirely. They completely reshaped the nation’s economic framework to prioritize corporate profits and wealth accumulation at the expense of stability and the broader public good. This overcorrection — an agenda now pursued in concert by White House, Congress, courts, and media — erased the very structures that sustained the longest period of economic prosperity in modern history.
Those effective structures were replaced by tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, attacks on labor unions, and the creation of an ideologically-driven judiciary — all of which accelerated instability and the concentration of wealth and power, leaving the middle class more vulnerable with each passing year. Seventy-plus years of deregulation and top-income tax cuts have never trickled down, only up.
Key Moments in the GOP’s Overreach
Republicans have landed one punch after another, relentless in their attack on behalf of concentrated wealth. Here are a few of those blows:
- The Taft-Hartley Act: Undermining unions.
- The Revenue Act of 1954: Shifting the tax burden from corporations and the wealthy onto the middle class.
- The Revenue Act of 1964: Another GOP concession that further burdened the middle class.
- The HMO Act: Enabling the rise of privatized health insurance.
- Abandonment of the Gold Standard: Designed to increase monetary policy flexibility but ultimately leading to greater economic volatility.
- The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act and The Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (EGTRRA): Disproportionately burdening the middle class and removing crucial safeguards separating commercial and investment banking, enacted by Bushes 41 and 43.
- The Federalist Society’s judicial philosophy (est.1982): Spending hundreds of millions of dollars appointing conservative judges to undermine the neutrality of the entire judicial system, especially on the Supreme Court, which then served to advance the rest of the agenda.
- The Fairness Doctrine repeal (1987): Established the trend of partisan media. It was sponsored by Ronald Reagan who ushered in a wave neoliberal economic austerity policies and deregulations.
- Citizens United (2010): Created super PACs and completely vanquished the last vestiges of any real public influence and representation in government.
The GOP Surreal Is the New New Deal.
Reagan’s media policies ignited a firestorm of misinformation that would ultimately consume the public’s trust in all institutions and even in objective truth.
Rather than fostering a “healthy diversity of opinion,” his deregulation opened the floodgates to false narratives and the manufactured victimhood of perpetual Republican persecution — a message first embedded in Richard Nixon’s invention of the “silent majority.”
Reagan didn’t invent rabid conservatism but his actions fracturing the public’s perception of objective truth energized it. It’s no coincidence that public trust in facts, logic, and reason began to collapse after Reagan’s media deregulation and the GOP’s refusal to impose broadcast standards on cable media, in keeping with their market-driven ideology.
This erosion of objective truth was further accelerated by media consolidation and the rise of partisan cable outlets, like Fox News, and conservative radio networks, which thrived on additional Reagan-era deregulations. This agenda-driven GOP campaign to undermine truth escalated throughout the 1990s, as right-wing talk radio and cable networks intentionally distorted reality.
This paved the way for the 2017 embrace of “alternative facts” — a concept first given that name by Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, but championed by the 1970s GOP, popularized by Karl Rove’s 2004 mantra to “create your own reality,” and weaponized by partisan media outlets ever since.
These are the fruits of the GOP’s long-term strategy: When economic stability and institutional trust is destroyed, people are more likely to believe whatever aligns with their subjective emotions and biases — no matter how nonsensical.
Any assertion that deregulation, austerity, and a free-market approach fosters long-term prosperity and stability is completely contradicted by the evidence. These policies have clearly and overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy and large corporations, while exacerbating inequality, economic instability, and the erosion of the middle class. America became a casino country and the owners of the house never lose.
Enter bankrupted casino owner Trump, proclaiming “Everyone lies but me!” With his media manipulation skills he was able to capitalize on this landscape where truth was no longer a shared commodity.
The challenge now is not just deprogramming the cult of Trump, but reconciling progress with the harsh realities of people’s lives. But this task has been made nearly impossible by the accelerating pace of institutionalized misinformation and the AI-enhanced collapse of critical thinking.
As it stands, the supporters of the rising wave of MAGA incompetence and perfidy will all deny they’re drowning — even after the tsunami crashes down and pulls them under.
A necessary first step is acknowledging that, for the majority of the population, the system is in fact broken — economically, socially, and politically — and that no meaningful change can occur in the public psyche without addressing this fundamental truth. Paradoxically perhaps, though the MAGA agenda promises to bring more harm and no healing, its ascendance sheds bright light on the work that must be done.
For further reading:
Impact of artificial intelligence on human loss in decision making, laziness and safety in education
Why Competition in the Politics Industry Is Failing America
The Lost Decade of the Middle Class | Pew Research Center
Corporate tax rates and economic growth since 1947
Demands for a Democratic Political Economy | Harvard Law Review
