For decades now, though major media has spoken and written about “the” Republican Party as if it were a fixed, coherent thing, it has been unclear exactly what has been holding this ideologically diverse group of people together. Indeed, one may need to go all the way back to the middle of the 19th century — when the party was founded explicitly to fight slavery — to find Republican ideological coherence.
For most of the latter half of the 20th century, and especially since the Reagan revolution, the party has claimed to be skeptical of big government — while at the same time insisting on a monstrously large, powerful and unaccountable government program in the form of an empire-sustaining military.
The party also argued for a government robust enough to regulate the most intimate decisions a human can make about sex and reproduction: from contraception, to homosexuality, to the creation of embryos, to abortion.
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