Today’s GOP and the East German Government in 1989 — Note the Parallels

Paul Krugman nailed it in his column titled A Tale of Two Parties.  He says:

“Do you remember what happened when the Berlin Wall fell? Until that moment, nobody realized just how decadent Communism had become. It had tanks, guns, and nukes, but nobody really believed in its ideology anymore; its officials and enforcers were mere careerists, who folded at the first shock.”

And how does this compare with our own corporate-owned-and-operated Republican Party?

“The Republican establishment was easily overthrown because it was already hollow at the core. Donald Trump’s taunts about ‘low-energy’ Jeb Bush and ‘Little Marco’ Rubio worked because they contained a large element of truth. When Mr. Bush and Mr. Rubio dutifully repeated the usual conservative clichés, you could see that there was no sense of conviction behind their recitations. All it took was the huffing and puffing of a loud-mouthed showman to blow their houses down.”

Today’s Republican Party is basically just a few billionaires who are in total iron-fisted control over their rank-and-file prostitutes/politicians who are scared shitless of saying the wrong thing or getting their talking points bollixed up.

The Democrats, on the other hand, are a loose undisciplined group of environmentalists, labor unions, anti-war groups, liberal social activists — you name it.  This is NOT an effective way to steamroll an unpopular agenda through Congress.  But this is what makes the  Democrats a lot more resilient against an attack than the house-of-cards-disguised-as-a-monolith GOP.

Paul Krugman closes with:

“…the Democratic establishment in general is fairly robust…the various groups making up the party’s coalition really care about and believe in their positions — they’re not just saying what the Koch brothers pay them to say…What worked in the primary [Trump’s attacks on his GOP rivals] won’t work in the general election, because only one party’s establishment was already dead inside.”