The Republican Party is starting to realize that it's extremist and racist policies do not appeal to the majority of Americans. They could change those policies and move back into the mainstream, but it seems they would rather destroy our democracy and move the country into an authoritarianism in which they can seize and maintain power. It's a sad epitaph for a party that once was valuable to the democracy.
Here is part of an op-ed on today's GOP by Charles M. Blow in The New York Times:
Over the years, America has expanded the definition of “the people” to include more Americans, but conservatives have resisted the expansion at every turn. And now, they are trying to drag the country backward, to pare down the ranks of those who can vote and to deny or invalidate elections in which voting populations, not yet pared down enough, deliver results with which they disagree.
We keep hearing people say that candidates, like some of the ones competing in Tuesday’s primaries, threaten our democracy. We heard during the Jan. 6 hearings about threats to our democracy. We have heard for years that Donald Trump is a threat to our democracy.
But it seems to me that we have to take a step back and realize that the current Republican Party has abandoned the idea of a full democracy.
Republicans want to revert the country to the way the founders conceived of it, when white men had outsize influence, when patriarchy prevailed, when white supremacy masqueraded as conventional wisdom.
Liberals often seem to me overly vexed by why Republicans don’t recognize the threat that Trump’s election denialism poses. The reason is clear to me: They have turned their backs on democracy.
For anti-democracy Republicans, Trump is an incredibly useful tool. His motivations are selfish and small, but the Republicans balking at full democracy have plans that are grand. They see themselves falling into a minority, so they want to devise a plan for minority rule.
And they are attacking the electoral process at every level to realize their goals.
By calling themselves traditionalist and constitutionalist, and by canonizing the flawed founders, they disguise their regression as preservation. . . .
In their telling, the will of the majority itself seems to be a problem. I interpret this broadly: that a fuller democracy is, in the view of many conservatives, a disaster waiting to happen.
So we are seeing an epic clash playing out in America in which the parameters are not being fully, loudly delineated: The Democrats want a democracy; the Republicans don’t. The Republican Party is anti-democracy, post-democracy. While Democrats are screaming about a collapsing country, Republicans are already surveying the landscape of the America that will emerge from the wreckage. . . .
Perversion, distortion and deceit now appear to be the spine of the Republican Party. It is no longer a party of ideas, but rather a party of atavism. It is a party frantically running down an ascending escalator.
The problem is that there is a real risk that the party will succeed in bringing the country down with it.
