While President Joe Biden and the Democratic Congress were pushing through a massive pandemic relief package earlier this year, the leaders of the Republican Party seemed obsessed with talking about Dr. Seuss.
As the New York Times reports, this is a marked difference in how Republicans in 2009 were relentlessly focused on attacking former President Barack Obama's "socialist" economic and health care plans, and it marks a shift in the party toward non-stop culture war grievance above all else.
The Times notes that the all-culture-war-all-the-time focus of the GOP has left party leaders in "a state of confusion over what they stand for," with many of them now going so far as to say they want corporate America to stay out of politics.
"2010 had the veneer of philosophical and ideological coherence, but we don't even bother paying lip service to that now," GOP lobbyist Liam Donovan explained to the Times. "Trump made grievances that were the aperitif into the entree."
GOP strategist Scott Jennings similarly told the Times that the party's base simply wants to stick it to liberals and media rather than enact a policy agenda.
"This is the beating heart of the Republican Party right now — the media has replaced Democrats as the opposition," he said. "The platform is whatever the media is against today, I'm for, and whatever they're for, I'm against."
