Today's Republicans Are the Real Extremists

As long time readers know, I grew up in a Republican household and had both parents and grandparents who were Republicans for the majority of their lives.  I followed in their foot steps and became a party activist, served on the Virginia Beach City Committee and even incorporated that body (as Virginia SCC documents available online confirm).  Yet before the end of my parents' life times they and the rest of my family fled the GOP.  It's not that we had change.  Rather, it was the Republican Party that had changed drastically as a result, in retrospect of the Party's embrace of Christofascists and white supremacists. The end result has been a GOP that is extreme and bears no resemblance to the GOP of the 1950, 1960's or even the 1980's under Reagan.  Yet, many Republican "friends" continue to close their eyes to the reality that the GOP they remember is no more and that the party for which they continue to vote has become both extreme and something ugly, especially under Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer.  A column in the New York Times makes the case that the real extremists today are Republicans, not the Democrats they target for abuse and perhaps even violence.  Here are excerpts:

All of Donald Trump’s major policies have failed substantively, politically, or both. His one big legislative achievement, the 2017 tax cut, remains unpopular. His attacks on Obamacare have only enhanced public approval of the program. His fearmongering has cemented majority opposition to his proposed border wall.

But while today’s G.O.P. can’t do policy, it commands a powerful propaganda machine. And this machine is now dedicated to a strategy of portraying Democrats as extremists. It might work — but it shouldn’t, because Democrats aren’t extremists, but Republicans are.

The attack on Democrats has largely involved demonizing two new members of Congress, Representative Ilhan Omar and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Omar is Muslim, and the usual suspects have gone all-out in using an out-of-context quotation to portray her, completely falsely, as sympathetic to terrorists.

It’s surely not an accident that these two principal targets are both women of color; there’s a sense in which supposed concerns about extremism are just a cover for sexism and white nationalism. But it’s still worth pointing out that while both Omar and AOC are on the left of the Democratic Party, neither is staking out policy positions that are extreme compared with either expert views or public opinion.

Take AOC’s famous advocacy of a 70 percent tax rate on very high incomes. Economists who knew anything about public finance immediately recognized that number as coming from a widely cited paper by Peter Diamond and Emmanuel Saez, two of the field’s leading figures. You don’t have to agree with their analysis to recognize that AOC, far from showing her ignorance, was actually drawing on solid research.

Nor does the public find the idea outrageous. An overwhelming majority believe that people with high incomes pay too little in taxes, and polls show wide support for AOC’s proposal.

Republicans, on the other hand, really are extremists. As Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it in 2012 — long before the rise of Trump — the modern G.O.P. is “ideologically extreme” and uninterested in “facts, evidence, and science.” For example, major figures in the party routinely dismiss global warming as a hoax perpetrated by a vast global conspiracy.

Or consider the views of Stephen Moore, who Trump is trying to put on the board of the Federal Reserve.

He’s a former editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal, a former chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, a fixture at conferences like FreedomFest. Given this background, it may not be surprising that he’s a firm believer in failed economic doctrines, especially the insistence that tax cuts for the wealthy have magical effects.

What’s coming out only now, however, is the extent of Moore’s political extremism. Many of his past statements — like his assertion that “capitalism is a lot more important than democracy” — sound like a liberal caricature of conservatism. But it’s not a caricature; Moore shows us what the right actually thinks.

I mentioned that an overwhelming majority of Americans believe that the rich pay too little in taxes. Moore, on the other hand, wants to eliminate income taxes and replace them with sales taxes, which would dramatically shift the tax burden away from the rich and onto the middle class.

He also wants to privatize Social Security, a program that is both hugely popular and the bedrock of retirement security for American workers. Moore would convert it into a 401(k)-type system. He is also fiercely hostile to Medicaid, which covers 65 million Americans.

Finally, Moore has proposed, in advance, a purge of the institution Trump wants him to join, calling for firing “hundreds” of Federal Reserve economists “who are worthless.” These would, presumably, be the economists who considered low interest rates and monetary expansion valuable tools in fighting the Great Recession, at the same time Moore was predicting that these policies would send inflation soaring. Guess who was right.

So even if you cherry-pick left-leaning Democrats, a look at their actual positions shows them to be not at all extreme. At the same time, pillars of the right-wing establishment hold views that are utterly at odds with both evidence and public opinion. Republicans are the real extremists.

Again, this is why I ceased to be a Republican two decades ago.