Is The Only Problem in American Politics the GOP?

Continuing the theme of the previous post, a piece in New York Magazine ask the question of whether or not the only real problem with American politics is the Republican Party.  True, there are far left elements in the Democrat Party, but is the false equivalency that many pundits and self-appointed mavens of the media try to construct between the far right and the far left true?  In view, it is not and I tend to agree with the author that most of the pathology we see in the political realm comes from the far right, the Christofascists and white supremacists who now dominate the Republican Party. Say what you will about the far left, it doesn't seek to disenfranchise, deport or perhaps even kill its political opponents and/or those who look different or adhere to a different faith or no faith.  Like it or not, most of the hatred we see and domestic terrorism comes from and is committed by right wing extremists. Here are column excepts:

Political scientist Lee Drutman argues in a Vox essay that American politics is descending into what he calls “doom-loop partisanship.” Drutman notes that Americans have been “retreating into our separate tribal epistemologies, each with their own increasingly incompatible set of facts and first premises,” . . . Drutman attributes this to winner-take-all elections, the expanding power of the presidency, and the growing influence of money in politics. I think, despite all the very real design flaws in American politics, the problems he describe stem mainly from the pathologies of the Republican Party.

It is certainly true that the psychological relationship between the parties has a certain symmetry. Both fear each other will cheat to win and use their power to stack the voting deck. . . . But while it is not true that Democrats have allowed illegal voting in nontrivial levels, it is extremely true that Republicans have deliberately made voting inconvenient for Democratic-leaning constituencies. The psychology is parallel, but the underlying facts are not.

Likewise, there is a superficial similarity to the terror with which partisans now greet governments controlled by the opposing party. Obama’s presidency made Republicans [wrongly] terrified of rampant socialism and vengeful minority rule. . . . Trump’s presidency has inspired a similar terror among liberals terrified that Trump would take their insurance and deport immigrants.

Liberal fears have had a much closer relationship to reality. The reason is that the Democratic Party is racially and economically heterogeneous. Even if he had wanted to take vengeance upon white America for its sins, Obama had far too many white supporters to make such a course of action remotely practical. (A majority of Obama’s voters were white, in fact.) On economic issues, the Democratic Party relies on support and input from business and labor alike. Whatever terrors of rampant Jacobinism may have gripped the economic elite, there are limits to the fiscal and regulatory pain Democrats can impose on a constituency that has a seat at the table (many seats, actually).

There is little such balance to be found in the Republican Party. . . . [Republicans] have bottomed out on their minority support and proven able to win national power regardless, by using racial wedge issues to pry away blue-collar whites. Advocates for labor or the poor have no voice whatsoever in the Republican elite. It took a massive national mobilization to narrowly dissuade the party from snatching health insurance away from millions of people too poor or sick to afford it.

[T]he fact is that the Democratic Party is fundamentally accountable to the mainstream news media. And that [mainstream] media play[ers] try to follow rules of objectivity that the right-wing alternative media does not bother with.

What matters is that Democratic politicians need to please a news media that is open to contrary facts and willing — and arguably eager — to hold them accountable. The mainstream media have have its liberal biases, but it also misses the other way — see the Times’ disastrously wrong report, a week before the election, that the FBI saw no links between the Trump campaign and Russia and no intention by Russia to help Trump. One cannot imagine Fox News publishing an equivalently wrong story against the Republican Party’s interests — its errors all run in the same direction.

Whatever interest liberals may have in finding congenial media, they don’t dismiss the mainstream media out of hand in the way conservatives have been trained over decades to do. When the conservative news media criticizes Republicans, it is almost always to play the role of ideological enforcer, attacking them for their lack of fervor. One party has a media ecosystem that serves as a guardrail, and the other has one that serves only as an accelerant.

The left has no equivalent to a Rush Limbaugh in influence and sheer lunacy. . . . . There are figures just as crazy as Limbaugh on the left, but they are almost uniformly outside the Democratic Party coalition.

[W]hatever the very real flaws in the American political and electoral system, it is simply impossible to design any kind of a system that can withstand a stress test like a major party captured by a faction as radical as the conservative movement. Its absence of limiting principles to its ideology, indifference to empirical evidence, and inability to concede failings of its dogma lead to an endless succession of failures explained away to the base as faintheartedness.

Republicans are sealed off in a bubble of paranoia and rage, and Democrats are sealed off from that bubble. Democrats fear Republican government because it is dangerous and extreme. Republicans fear Democratic government because they are dangerous and extreme.

 Like the Christofascists who hijacked the GOP base in earnest around the time I left the Republican Party, today's GOP is defined by hatred of others and the embrace of ignorance.  It IS the problem behind so many of the nation's political woes today.