It's been brewing for a long time. Ronald Brownstein writes on the party's surrender in The Atlantic.
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Of course, the biggest difference between now and the Birch era is that today’s far-right extremists are operating under an umbrella of protection from a former president who remains the most popular figure to the GOP’s base. “I love Buckley dealing with the Birch Society, but he was able to repudiate a group that never had the support of any president and was sort of repudiated by Goldwater,” Kristol told me. Now most GOP elected officials have concluded that the risk of pushback from Trump is too high to speak out. “They think that the danger of getting in a fight with Trump and splitting the party is so much greater than a little bit of accommodation with some wackos and a little bit of groveling to the Trump base,” said Kristol, one of the leading voices in the conservative Never Trump movement.
Kevin McCarthy’s half-hearted slap on the wrist for Greene this week was a measure of the GOP’s limited appetite for constructing a clear boundary against extremism. The likelihood that the majority of Senate Republicans will soon vote to exempt Trump from any punishment for the Capitol riot underscores that message. As does the likelihood that the large majority of House Republicans will vote to defend Greene when Democrats try to remove her from her committee assignments.
These choices may carry political consequences: In a recent Public Religion Research Institute survey, nearly two-thirds of all Americans, including one-fourth of Republicans, said Trump encourages white-supremacist groups. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee last week started running ads tying potentially vulnerable GOP House members to both QAnon’s rising presence and Trump’s role in provoking the riot. Democrats believe that the GOP’s tolerance of extremism, symbolized by its acceptance of Greene, will deepen the party’s retreat in the well-educated suburbs that consistently moved toward Democrats in the Trump era. “They can do QAnon, or they can do college-educated voters. They cannot do both,” Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, the new chair of the DCCC, told Politico this week.
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the republican party's end of life stage
Tom Nichols writing in The Atlantic.
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The Republican Party has, for years, ignored the ideas and principles it once espoused, to the point where the 2020 GOP convention simply dispensed with the fiction of a platform and instead declared the party to be whatever Comrade—excuse me, President—Donald Trump said it was.
Like Brezhnev, Trump has grown in status to become a heroic figure among his supporters. If the Republicans could create the rank of “Marshal of the American Republic” and strike a medal for a “Hero of American Culture,” Trump would have them both by now.
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06:55 in Current Affairs, General Commentary, history | Permalink | Comments (0)