It started in the late 60s quietly when the GOP happily welcomed racist Southern "Dixiecrats" running from the Democrat Party after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But for a couple of decades it was pretty quiet. We had Nixon, who by today's standards would be quite liberal (opened up China to the West, started EPA, etc.). Ford was a fiscal conservative but quite mild in perspective. Reagan... was pragmatic and raised taxes but here's where we start to see a real shift in the *people* that are part of an administration. We had James Watt, for example, a young earth end times wacko heading up the Interior Department. We had a big banking crisis with corrupt Senators, a big stock market crash due to deregulation. Bush, Sr. was the last "old style" Republican and the anti-tax faction of the GOP buried him for making the same sort of compromises Reagan did. In the early '90s we had Contract With America ala Newt Gingrich and a big scare in '94 when enough people thought the Democrats were going to go nuts with firearms bans that the House flipped to the GOP for the first time in 40 years (whatever you think about guns, it was a badly written ineffective idiotic piece of legislative garbage and it cost the Dems the House).
That flip gave the social wingnuts their first serious influence in the GOP and the "country club" Republicans leveraged those hot button issues happily while they began the starvation of public services, the privatization (transfer of wealth and loss of bang-for-buck), and the deregulation of all large corporate and banking activities.
Somewhere in the late '90s, the traditional GOP "blue bloods" started to lose control of the party to the social conservatives but I don't think they realized it until this year. Complicating matters are the plutocrats who are both "libertarian" AND "cult zealot wingnuts". Those 40 or 50 billionaire nutcases are the ones flooding dollars into the election this year thanks to the Citizens United ruling.
And most of you are old enough to remember the election flip of 2000, as we've discovered, that key states were flipped via vote count suppression to throw the election to the Supreme Court (Reagan appointees) who handed the election to Bush, Jr.
There's something very Orwellian about watching the neo-cons of today and their history revisionism, their inability to critically reason, or to even know when they're saying things that get them in trouble.... like Mr. "Facts Don't Matter" today.
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New research suggests that misinformed people rarely change their minds when presented with the facts — and often become even more attached to their beliefs.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...ryId=128490874