Republican Extremism and the Decline of American Politics

Seemingly across the country the biggest obstacle to addressing the nations problems (and here in Virginia, Virginia's many problems including transportation) is Republican intransigence and an effort to turn the clock back to some mythical 1950's version of America that never existed in fact.   In the GOP's mythical America, white males rule supreme, women, blacks and non-Christians all know their place, and gays are invisible if they know what's good for them.  The irony is that to the extent any form of the "Ozzie and Harriet" middle class world worshiped by the GOP actually existed, much of it stemmed from the financial security that unions had brought to many families - the exact security that the GOP seeks to destroy.  A column in The New Yorker looks at the threat the GOP poses to responsible government.  Here are excerpts:

At least since President Obama’s Inauguration, political observers have been taking note of the Republican Party’s trend toward the right, and away from compromise. “After 2010, it was impossible for a fair-minded person who knew what was going on in Washington and around the country to maintain the fiction that there was an equivalent extremism, and polarization, and ugliness on both sides,” George Packer says in this week’s Political Scene podcast. But there was an impulse among pundits and citizens alike to believe that Democrats, too, bear some of the blame for the country’s polarization, an impulse only now beginning to fade.

Packer traces the polarization back to Newt Gingrich. Starting with his Speakership, Packer says, Republicans have been exhibiting a “willingness—even an eagerness—to use every tactic short of law-breaking to demonize the opponent on the way to winning power.” And that, of course, includes this election.

“With Mitt Romney, there’s the extremism about taxes and about the Catholic Church and its conflict about contraception,” Davidson says. “And then there’s the ugliness as well in things like birtherism and in Mitt Romney’s flirtation with Donald Trump.” 

Packer believes President Obama—who, he notes, “has always been skeptical of hard ideological lines,”—will have trouble in the current landscape. His lack of ideological stance “means that he’s having to start from scratch in assembling a clear argument that opposes the extremism” of the G.O.P.

Beyond this election, even if Romney loses, Packer predicts that Republicans will not relent, but will continue to bog down government and prevent a return to respectable politics. He quotes Barney Frank’s idea for a Democratic Party-wide slogan: “We’re not perfect, but they’re nuts.”

I would add to the analysis of causes for the growing GOP extremism the rise of the Christofascists as the puppet masters of the party.  When those who utterly reject science and who seek to impose a far right Christian theocracy take charge, there is no compromise.   When hate filled people who claim to have God on their side steer the party, extremism is the only result that can be expected.  Unfortunately, the mainstream media remains afraid of exposing the true ugliness of conservative Christianity in this country.  This needs to change NOW.