This is why we need both parties to be strong, effective, and thriving. To avoid tyranny of either the majority or the minority. Or for that matter, authoritarian leadership.
What may save the Republican Party is a thorough ass kicking in November where they have no choice but to course correct.
https://open.substack.com/pub/heatherco ... dium=emailAnd they do far more than that. Before political thinkers legitimized the idea of political opposition to the king, disagreeing with the person in charge usually led to execution or banishment for treason. Parties allowed for the idea of loyal and legitimate opposition, which in turn allowed for the peaceful transition of power. That peaceful exchange enabled the people to choose their leaders and leaders to relinquish power safely. Parties also create a system for criticizing people in power, which helps to weed out corrupt or unfit leaders.
But those benefits of a party system depend on a level political playing field for everyone, so that a party must constantly compete for voters by testing which policies are most popular and getting rid of the corrupt or unstable leaders voters would reject.
In the 1980s, radical Republican leaders set out to dismantle the government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights. But that system was popular, and to overcome the majority who favored it, they began to tip the political playing field in their direction. They began to suppress voting by Democrats by insisting that Democrats were engaging in “voter fraud.” At the same time, they worked to delegitimize their opponents by calling them “socialists” or “communists” and claiming that they were trying to destroy the United States. By the 1990s, extremists in the party were taking power by purging traditional Republicans from it.
And yet, voters still elected Democrats, and after they put President Barack Obama into the White House in 2008, the Republican State Leadership Committee in 2010 launched Operation REDMAP, or Redistricting Majority Project. The plan was to take over state legislatures so Republicans would control the new district maps drawn after the 2010 census, especially in swing states like Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It worked, and Republican legislatures in those states and elsewhere carved up state maps into dramatically gerrymandered districts.
In those districts, the Republican candidates were virtually guaranteed election, so they focused not on attracting voters with popular policies but on amplifying increasingly extreme talking points to excite the party’s base. That drove the party farther and farther to the right. By 2012, political scientists Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein warned that the Republican Party had “become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
At the same time, the skewed playing field meant that candidates who were corrupt or bonkers did not get removed from the political mix after opponents pounced on their misdeeds and misstatements, as they would have been in a healthy system. Social media poster scary lawyerguy noted that the story about Robinson will divert attention from the lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets, which diverted attention from Trump’s abysmal debate performance, which diverted attention from Trump’s filming a campaign ad at Arlington National Cemetery.
When a political party has so thoroughly walled itself off from the majority, there are two options. One is to become full-on authoritarian and suppress the majority, often with violence. Such a plan is in Project 2025, which calls for a strong executive to take control of the military and the judicial system and to use that power to impose his will.
The other option is that enough people in the majority reject the extremists to create a backlash that not only replaces them, but also establishes a level playing field.
The Republican Party is facing the reality that it has become so extreme it is hemorrhaging former supporters and mobilizing a range of critics. Today the Catholic Conference of Ohio rebuked those who spread lies about Haitian immigrants—Republican presidential candidate Trump and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance were the leading culprits—and Teamsters councils have rejected the decision of the union’s board not to make an endorsement this year and have endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris. Some white evangelicals are also distancing themselves from Trump.
And then, tonight, Trump told a Jewish group that if he loses, it will be the fault of Jewish Americans. "I will put it to you very simply and gently: I really haven't been treated right, but you haven't been treated right because you're putting yourself in great danger."
Mark Robinson has said he will not step aside.
