Marjorie Taylor Greene: The Face of the GOP's Degradation

By just about any objective standard, newly elected Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is batshit crazy and the face of the lunatic fringe that increasingly controls and defines the Republican Party.  A summary of Greene's lunatic and racists statements and actions can be found here.  Among these are Greene's previous approval of calls for the execution of Democrats, embrace of QAnon conspiracy theories about a global pedophilia cabal that includes leading Democrats, her calls for Joe Biden’s impeachment even before he took office, her suggestion that mass shootings such as that in Parkland High School in Florida, Sandy Hook, and Las Vegas were all staged, and her claim that California's disastrous wildfires were the result a laser fired from space by bad people.  It goes without saying that Greene has a history of racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Muslim outbursts. In the GOP of old, she would never have been allowed to be a party candidate for Congress. Now, Greene is increasing mainstream in a party that is so afraid of upsetting the crazies, white supremacists and religious extremists that it needs to be competitive in elections that basic moral standards o longer exist.  A column in the Washington Post looks at Greene batshit craziness and the GOP's refusal reprimand or expel someone as unfit for office as Greene. Here are column highlights:

Republican leaders were shocked, shocked to learn about revelations that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) once approved of calls for the execution of Democrats. They are so troubled by this that they plan to sit her down and give her a slap on the wrist with a little plastic ruler.

In so doing, they will be reminding us of a story about the GOP and conservative movement that goes back at least a half century: Their failure to adequately police the extremists in their midst.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is set to have a talk with Greene about her vile new antics. CNN reports that Greene “liked” a social media post that suggested “a bullet to the head” for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and seemed to approve of a suggestion that other prominent Democrats should be hanged.

[R]ight now, we’re seeing Republican leaders backpedaling from taking on their party’s destructive crackpottery on multiple fronts.

The GOP’s Greene problem is metastasizing with particular force. As Aaron Blake reports, Greene has supported QAnon conspiracy theories about a global pedophilia cabal, approved of suggestions that mass shootings were staged and made a variety of racist comments.

Greene’s apparent approval of the killing of Democrats should take this to another level with GOP leaders, if only because it comes after the storming of the Capitol, which may have almost resulted in lawmakers’ executions.

But at this point, many Republicans still refuse to unambiguously renounce the lie that inspired the assault — that the election was illegitimate — and many still won’t declare forthrightly that Joe Biden fairly won the election, in effect still refusing to fully recognize the legitimacy of his presidency.

For her part, Greene has also lied that the election was “stolen” in Georgia, and she called for Biden’s impeachment even before he took office. But the dispiriting truth of the matter is that this doesn’t make her much of an outlier in today’s GOP.

So it remains to be seen whether Greene will face serious disciplinary action from GOP leaders. But the mere fact that this is an open question itself points back to a decades-long story.

[T]he GOP and conservative movement have allowed the boundary between fringe and mainstream to remain “porous” going back through Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist crusades in the 1950s.

That lapse, according to this thesis, is grounded in a fundamental feature of the post-war right wing, its constant addiction to a “politics of conflict” that lacks any “sense of limits, whether tactical or substantive.”

The result: The GOP and conservative movement have failed at “policing boundaries against extremism,” which defined a “half century of Republican politics.”

Examples include conservative movement leaders flirting with the John Birch Society; allies of 1964 presidential candidate Barry Goldwater refusing to disavow a Ku Klux Klan endorsement; Newt Gingrich’s conversion of GOP politics into nationalized scorched earth warfare; and, of course, the rise of Trump.

The unpopularity of the GOP agenda to the U.S. mainstream has made it necessary to fire up increasingly far-flung reaches of the base with what Kabaservice calls “entertainment” and “jihadist ecstasy.”

And so GOP leaders continue humoring tales that the election was stolen from Trump, because such “jihadist ecstasy” energizes the base. Recall that GOP officials declined to recognize Biden’s victory for weeks precisely in order to keep the GOP base fired up for the Georgia runoffs.

Meanwhile, the explosion of extreme right-wing news sources has “opened up a path to power and popularity for people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who reject governing altogether,” Kabaservice continued. Policing people like her [Greene] risks alienating the voters she has energized.

McConnell’s calculations are trapped between the recognition that if the party sticks with Trump, it will keep alienating “women and suburban voters,” and the understanding that Trump brings “new voters into the Republican fold.”

For now, the latter calculation is winning out for McConnell: With huge swaths of GOP voters still backing Trump as the party’s leader, moving away from him is too risky.

Meanwhile, Trip Gabriel reports this remarkable tidbit about the thinking of Republicans in Pennsylvania:

G.O.P. leaders recognize the extent to which the former president unleashed waves of support for their party. In Pennsylvania, just as in some Midwestern states, a surge of new Republican voters with grievances about a changing America was triggered by Mr. Trump, and only Mr. Trump.

As Kabaservice summed it up to me: “They’ve lost any sense of why conservatives would need to police” the GOP’s “boundaries against kooks and extremists.”