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The GOP Is Dead
And with it, American democracy.
Vladimir Illich Ulyanov, the architect of the October revolution of 1917, who was also popularly known as Lenin, was well known for his use of the term ‘useful idiots’.
According to Wikipedia, the definition of the phrase, goes thus:
useful idiot is a derogatory term for a person perceived as propagandizing for a cause without fully comprehending the cause’s goals, and who is cynically used by the cause’s leaders
Back in the 1920s and 1930s, the newly installed Bolshevik government was desperately in need of Western allies, who would happily trumpet the positives of the revolution and conveniently ignore the huge negatives. The likes of Harold Laski, Beatrice and Sidney Webb and major intellectual heavy weights on the left in Britain were only too happy to do the bidding of Lenin and Stalin.
These days ‘useful idiocy’ no longer seems applicable to the left but to the players on the right and no other institution than the Grand Old Party or the Republicans encapsulate the term ‘useful idiot’ so powerfully.
Over the course of the last ten years, we have seen the party of Lincoln and Reagan lurch to the right in ways that would have been deemed inconceivable, ten years ago.