Excellent piece from Richard North Patterson in Bulwark (a home for displaced Republicans) which describes eloquently and in detail the neuroses of today’s Republican Party. Here’s a sample:
Substantively, the GOP is largely barren of coherent policies. The party which strove to repeal Obamacare with nothing to replace it was, by 2020, literally without a platform. Now, observes Ron Brownstein, “Republicans are doubling down on a core bet they’ve made for [Joe Biden’s] presidency: that the GOP can maintain support among its key constituencies while fighting programs that would provide those voters with tangible economic assistance.”
I agree wholeheartedly with his conclusion: the GOP is, today, a mortal threat to America. It is not “fixable”, it’s not going to “sort itself out”, it’s not a big tent with a few nutjobs, it is irredeemably bad. Liz Cheney is not the face of the new GOP, Ron Johnson is. Today’s Republican Party is quite simply an enemy of the people — all the people, white and Black, rural and urban, left and right.
Burn it down.
Cato the Elder’s prescription for Rome’s greatest enemy was stringent. He concluded every speech with this singular imperative: Carthago delenda est—Carthage must be destroyed. Until, at last, it was.
Now American democracy has a more lethal antagonist. Regardless of ideology, our imperative must be the political destruction of today’s Republican party. Until then, all the rest—trying to reform the GOP; founding a third party; or imagining a sweet spot in the political center—are dangerous distractions.
The GOP’s pathologies run too deep to temporize. Their most glaring manifestation is but a symptom: the party’s enthrallment to a dangerous, unstable, bigoted, and nihilistic narcissist possessed by autocratic cravings, a contempt for law, and a poisonous disdain for all other human beings—epitomized by his murderous neglect of a deadly pandemic which needlessly killed over half a million Americans and, thereafter, by his incitement of, and pleasure in, a deadly attack on our Capitol by extremists inflamed by his lies and determined keep him in power.
Here’s the crux: All that is toxic in Trump, and more, defines the GOP’s essence—and would if he disappeared tomorrow.
Today’s Republican party is addicted to racism, sexism, nativism, cultural revanchism, fundamentalism, extremism, and authoritarianism. It scorns science; subverts governance; and reinvents reality. Its leaders traffic in ostentatious mendacity.
It reduces “conservatism” to a retrograde tribalism steeped in fear and anger. Its congressional wing exists to satisfy donors. It has no coherent policy or purpose save perpetuating its power through minority rule.
It is, in short, an existential threat to our survival as a pluralist democracy.
Continue reading… (no paywall, free to read)