The Current GOP is Beyond Rescue

A piece in The Atlantic makes the case for something I have long thought, especially from November, 2016 onward:  the Republican Party is beyond saving.   The once insane fring within the GOP now controls the party base and the rationality of the vast majority of Republicans is on the same level as a dog with rabies.  Some Republicans like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger continue to cling to the hope that facts and information can sway party members - and Republican elected officials - to cast aside insane conspiracy theories and every kind of obsurdity that now passes as accepted party dogma.  This hope misses two points: (i) the base is so insane that it cannot be rescued, and (ii) elected officials only care about avoiding a primary challenge and remaining in office and will prostitute themselves to the base no matter how dangerous and disturbing the demands of the base become.  Civic duty, the good of the nation, and common morality mean nothing to these elected officials that care only about power and personal advancement at any cost.  Meanwhile what few rational Republicans remain are for the most part in denial as to what their party has become.   A few may be awakening as in Pennsylvania where noteworthy Republicans have come out and endorsed the Democrat candidate for governor because the GOP nominee is utterly insane and dangerous.  Here are article excerpts:

In 1991, the last president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, was briefly deposed in a coup by hard-line members of the Soviet Communist Party. Gorbachev, upon his return to Moscow, tried to differentiate between the plotters and the Party itself. One of his closest advisers, Aleksandr Yakovlev, told him that this effort was pointless, akin to “serving tea to a corpse.”

Republicans such as Senator Mitt Romney—an honorable man for whom I voted in 2012—and a handful of others in the GOP, including Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, should take note of Yakovlev’s phrase. Over the weekend, The Atlantic published a plea from Senator Romney for Americans “across the political spectrum” to stop ignoring “potentially cataclysmic threats.” The senator from Utah is right to be worried about the detachment of so many Americans. But Romney, Cheney, and Kinzinger cannot rescue their party, either—at least not in its current form.

In fact, I wonder if the Republicans can ever return to being the kind of party that once nominated someone like Mitt Romney for the American presidency. I say this not because of Donald Trump, nor as the apostate Republican I am. . . . . I say this not because I disagree with the Republicans on many policy issues; I do, but as a New England Republican who identified with (and worked for) moderates of a bygone era, I have always had differences with the hard-right social conservatives.

Rather, I say this because millions of Republicans seem to have irreversibly lost touch with reality itself.  Senator Romney, for his part, seems to share this concern, but he softens this criticism of his own side . . . .

But as the old song from Sesame Street goes: One of these things is not like the other. Unfounded optimism about droughts or recessions is one thing; it’s another thing entirely to embrace the idea that an insurrection and an attack on the Capitol was conducted by agents of the United States government itself.

Other Republicans have blown past such pedestrian crackpottery and now have escaped the last tendrils of Earth’s gravity.

The Republican candidate for secretary of state in Michigan, for example, believes that people can transmit demonic possession through “intimate relations,” according to CNN. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania Republicans have nominated a candidate for governor, Doug Mastriano, who has implied that he might invalidate any election result he doesn’t like in 2024—and that’s probably the least disturbing thing about him. As Jonathan Last put it recently, the Democratic nominee, Josh Shapiro, is an ordinary politician, while Mastriano “is an insane person. A seditionist. A Christian nationalist. A conspiracy nut.”

Almost every other national Republican is either silent or on board with the dark fantasies and deepening paranoia that now rule the GOP. For example, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the relentlessly ambitious third-ranking House Republican, endorsed the developer Carl Paladino for a newly redistricted House seat in the state; in 2021 Paladino said that Adolf Hitler was “the kind of leader we need.”

When Senator Ron Johnson, of Wisconsin, is paddling about in the anti-vaccine fever swamps, and Senate candidate J.D. Vance is cozying up to people like the congressional conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene and the execrable Matt Gaetz, what exactly counts as “going rogue” and how can anyone distinguish it from just another day in the Republican Party?

In the end, despite the efforts of Senator Romney and other reasonable Republicans, the fringe is now the base. The last rational members of the GOP—both elected and among the rank and file—need to speak even harsher truths to their own people, as Liz Cheney did last week at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Otherwise, the madness will spread, and our institutions will continue an accelerating slide into a nightmare that will engulf all Americans, regardless of party.