[SEE THE UPDATE AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS POST]
From the N.Y. Times:
What do you call members of a party who, from top to bottom, from elected officials to voters, largely believe a lie and a liar determined to undermine, corrupt and even destroy our democracy? What do you call a party whose leaders use that lie as a pretext to suppress the votes and voices of Americans with whom they disagree? What do you call a party slavishly devoted to a cult over the stability and prosperity of a country?
What do you call a party where many of its members have worked against a lifesaving, society-freeing vaccine in the middle of a pandemic, exposing many of their own followers to the deadly virus, all for the sake of being contrarian, anti-establishment and anti-science?
I call that party a national security threat and a cancer on our democracy.
Charles M. Blow is not having it any more, the demand that civility must be maintained, the pretense that the Republican Party still has any legitimacy.
...But as Malcolm X once put it, “I’m for truth, no matter who tells it.”
I have heard all the things that the moderates and neutralists have to say: Overheated language helps nothing and alienates people who could otherwise be converted. Don’t cast as evil someone with whom you simply have a disagreement. Build bridges, don’t burn them…
...America has seen the darkest of seasons.
But we should also not underplay or sugarcoat the darkness of the current season.
I don’t see how we continue to pretend that this is politics as usual, that it’s normal squabbling between ideological opposites. No, something is deeply, dangerously wrong here. This is not the same as it has always been.
This Republican Party is a menace to society. That must be said. That is the truth.
And when one of the country’s two major parties is so close to the brink of the falls, it threatens to pull the entire country over.
So I have no intention of treating this Republican Party the way I treated it just 10 years or 20 years ago. That party doesn’t exist anymore. It died. This thing we have now is its zombie. Zombies can’t be reasoned with.
READ THE WHOLE THING.
HIs opinion piece was triggered by the steady stream of information now coming out about all the ways Donald Trump was and is a threat to democracy — and the number of allies he had and still has in the Republican Party.
Exegeis.
For me personally and for many here at Daily Kos, the reaction is likely to be “What do you think we’ve been trying to tell everyone for years?”
Hindsight may be 20/20 — but people still have to open their eyes to take a look. Willful blindness is something Upton Sinclair summed up well: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
The Republican Party has been a danger to this country for decades — the policies it has been pushing have been a slow-rolling disaster all by themselves. They don’t even bother to do policy anymore — just tax cuts and deregulation, and whatever is playing well with the mob from Fox ‘News’.
The devolution into an authoritarian cult has been underway since Reagan, and goes back to Nixon and Goldwater. The Paranoid Style in American Politics is not new; it has always been present in one form or another. What’s critical now is the way the Republican Party runs on it.
- Has everyone forgotten Nixon’s “When the president does it, it’s not a crime.” This is the man who sabotaged the Paris Peace Talks, let Henry Kissinger run wild.
- Remember Reagan’s “Government is not the solution to our problems; government IS the problem”? The Reagan of the October Surprise, Arms for Hostages, Iran-Contra. The invasion of Grenada; the Marine Barracks in Lebanon.
- George H.W. Bush and his “thousand points of light” — and his pardons of so many who deserved to go to jail. (See Reagan’s legacy above.) The invasion of Panama. Gulf War One.
- Newt Gingrich and the Contract With America — not to mention Language: A Key Mechanism of Control. Gingrich, the serial adulterer. Gingrich, the corrupt book deal scam. And so on and so on…
- George W. Bush — has it really been so long that people have forgotten how we used to think of that man who presided over 911, the pivot from Bin Laden to the invasion of Iraq on the basis of lies, “Heckuva job” Katrina, the Great Recession, the NeoCons? He was the worst president ever — until he wasn’t.
- Do I even need to bring up the GOP’s calculated demagoguery, the politics of Destruction? The great Clinton Penis Hunt; the Tan Suit; the Birth Certificate; Benghazi; her Emails?
(TL;DR alert. Go ahead and skip to the poll if you’ve read enough. Otherwise, press on….)
This Is Not New News; It’s Been Out There For Those With Eyes to See - Essential Mandatory Reading to Understand the Threat
The devolution of the Republican Party into an authoritarian cult is something that should not have been a surprise. I keep linking to these writings and other sources because maybe with enough repetition, the message will sink in. Playing Cassandra gets old fast. The red flags have been flying for years — look at the dates with the links below.
John Dean’s 2006 Conservatives without Conscience draws on his experiences in the Nixon White House and the subsequent course of the Republican Party through the lens of Professor Bob Altemeyer’s research into right wing authoritarianism.
Altemeyer has made his work available in book form — The Authoritarians — and as a free download. His latest, written with Dean regarding Trump and his followers is Authoritarian Nightmare.
Sara Robinson did a series at Orcinus in 2006 that gives a quick introduction to Altemeyer’s work. It lays out in clear language the two elements of authoritarian cults: leaders and followers. Cracks In The Wall, Part I: Defining the Authoritarian Personality is a good primer on the subject. The rest of the series, and the companion series Tunnels and Bridges are well worth reading.
If you can’t understand how otherwise rational people adamantly refuse to get a lifesaving vaccine in the middle of a pandemic, the material above will make much clear, along with why so many believe the Big Lie.
If you can only read one of the linked items above, start with Robinson.
We are trying to come to grips with the existential threat the Republican Party has become. It’s not hysteria. It’s not based on lies. (Over 600,000 dead from the pandemic alone thanks to GOP incompetence is not something we’re imagining.) The Republican Party truly is an existential threat to America — and not so great for the rest of the world either.
And here’s the thing: they believe that WE are the real threat. You are either with them or against them — and if you’re against them you are evil Q.E.D. End of discussion. This is why compromise is impossible. The one thing tolerance cannot accommodate is intolerance. This is just the way authoritarian cults work. We are where we are today because of the failure to grasp that, or to appreciate what the GOP has become.
Additional Reading to fill out the picture.
Rick Perlstein looked at the presidential run of Mitt Romney in 2012 with The Long Con. While Romney seems almost creditable these days, it’s only by comparison to the crazies running loose now. Perlstein shows how damned profitable the conservative conspiracy machine can be — it really took off under professional con man Trump, but it’s been going for decades. When you see how “An Oilfield in the Placenta” works, much is made clear.
Mann & Ornstein were conventional enough observers of the political scene, until they could no longer explain away what the Republican Party had become. They came out with It’s Even Worse Than It Looks — how The American Constitutional System Collided With The New Politics Of Extremism. NPR covered the 2012 book.
"One of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition," they wrote at the time.
The Trump era forced them to recalibrate it in 2016 — It’s Even Worse Than It Was.
Charles P. Pierce wrote a prescient book in 2009: Idiot America — How Stupidity Became A Virtue in the Land of the Free. The publisher tags it as “humor” and “politics”. No one is laughing now. Pierce may not have realized it at the time, but it almost seems like it has become the operating instructions for America. Pierce has been writing at Esquire the last few years. (The NY Times might almost redeem itself for Brooks, Douthat, and Stephens if they’d give him a slot.)
With “The Reign of Morons is Here” in 2013, Pierce gifted us with some vivid imagery describing what happened when Republicans took Congress in 2010:
We have elected the people sitting on hold, waiting for their moment on an evening drive-time radio talk show.
We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too. We have elected people to govern us who do not believe in government.
By 2018, we had arrived at this, according to Pierce.
Scrapie is a prion disease, similar in its effect to Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (Mad Cow Disease) and to the wasting disease that afflicts herds of deer, and to kuru, a disease first seen among tribes in Papua New Guinea that was transmitted in part through the ritual cannibalism of the tribe’s dead. Elsewhere in Asia, the custom of eating the brains of a monkey was responsible for cases of Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease, yet another prion illness. Once established in the victim, prion disease destroys the human nervous system. It eats away at the higher functions of the brain. So, when I talk about the prion disease that afflicts the Republican Party, and the conservative movement that is its only life force any more, I do not use the metaphor idly. The party has lost what’s left of its mind.
Far too many people are far too delicate about this. The Republican Party is completely mad, and it has been going in that direction for a very long time. It has been raving through all the halls of all the governments, large and small, like a lost soul with a big knife. The symptoms of the enveloping disease have been obvious for decades, ever since Ronald Reagan served up the first helping of monkey brains in 1976, when he nearly wrested the party’s nomination from Gerald Ford. It is full-blown now, and it is general throughout the Republic. The Republican Party has infected every institution with its own private insanity.
emphasis added
Eric Boehlert at Press Run Media has a full time job documenting the atrocities — not just what the GOP is doing, but the way the media reflexively enables and amplifies it. (Subscription highly recommended.)
There’s more essential reading out there, but this will do for a start.
(Bonus reading. If you are interested in developing actual fact-based policy that solves real problems, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett lay out a strong case that we could improve a lot of serious quality of life issues IF we addressed what seems to be the driver they have in common: inequality. This has been out since 2009. I am not aware of any politicians willing to acknowledge it, but Sanders and Warren are keeping inequality on the radar at least.)
To return to Charles M. Blow, one of the points he makes about the reflex tendency to dismiss how serious things have become is this.
...I could understand and appreciate all of that in another time. I can recall being impressed by how well a conservative argument was asserted, even if I disagreed with it. I can remember when conservatism was just as intellectual as liberalism, and compromises could be made to feel like the combining of the best of both.
But I’m also not consumed by romantic, hagiographic illusions of yesteryear. No time in American politics has been perfect and without strife and drama. This is not the first time that the country has been gravely rived. We fought a Civil War, for Pete’s sake. We had Jim Crow that robbed most Southern Blacks of the right to vote for three-quarters of a century.
emphasis added
Kevin Drum wrote the bit quoted below in 2018 while he was still at Mother Jones: GOPus Delendus Est. (The GOP must be destroyed). Drum notes that one reason the party has gone totally bonkers is because they have been on a long losing streak on social issues — and they're pushing back hard. That’s what the culture wars are all about, and all the fear-mongering about where the country is headed. They know they can’t win at the ballot box with their real agenda.
Rather than change, they’ve doubled down. (As Digby noted in 2005, Conservatism can never fail. It can only be failed.) Drum has what is still one of the most succinct descriptions of what the Republican Party is all about today:
...Today, the Republican Party exists for one and only one purpose: to pass tax cuts for the rich and regulatory rollbacks for corporations. They accomplish this using one and only method: unapologetically racist and bigoted appeals to win the votes of the heartland riff-raff they otherwise treat as mere money machines for their endless mail-order cons.
Like it or not, this is the modern Republican Party. It no longer serves any legitimate purpose. It needs to be crushed and the earth salted behind it, while a new conservative party rises to take its place…
Drum was calling for the replacement of the current Republican Party with something that would operate like the imaginary one so many still pretend is out there: a legitimate partner in debate offering real policy alternatives, able to take coherent political positions on a consistent basis, one rooted in the real world, with actual competence, one that might help to keep the Democratic Party grounded as well.
Not going to happen.
We seem to have arrived at the point where “...neither can live while the other survives...”
I know which outcome I’d prefer.
UPDATE: Charlie Sykes at The Bulwark has a “Morning Shot” that adds more to this discussion of the threat from the G.O.P.
Salazar, Orban, and the yearning for an American Caesar
This quote summarizes the horrifying picture Sykes reports:
Ideas that would have been unthinkable just moments ago are now being normalized and, if anything, the drift toward authoritarianism seems to be accelerating. This includes the explicit embrace of the idea of an American dictator — an American Caesar. Literally and seriously. (This is not a parody.)
From Arizona to Hungary, the right is going full fascist. Sykes reports on a number of developments that confirm everything we’ve been warned about.