Politics

The Republican Party’s Descent Into Madness

The GOP’s long march toward tyranny continues

As the United States absorbs its humiliating defeat in Afghanistan after our long and blundering experiment in nation-building finally succumbed to the Taliban’s AK-47s, America finds itself torn apart and bleeding internally from self-inflicted wounds on the twentieth anniversary of September 11th. The American people themselves are bitterly divided, and seem to be under the same hypnotic spell of political and religious tribalism our military sought and failed to stamp out in the Middle East.

As politicians attempted to conceal our boiling domestic turmoil under a camouflage patina of patriotic platitudes emptily mimicking national unity, in his 9/11 speech George W. Bush offered surprisingly candid observations about the “violence that gathers within” threatening America.

Bush noted that “there is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit.”

While the former president refused to identify these “violent extremists” in our midst, there can be little doubt about to who it was he was referring.

Indeed, it is the Republican Party he once led that has acted as both incubator and purveyor of that “malign force” that now threatens the literal unity of these United States, as our democracy teeters on the edge of an incomprehensible abyss. The vicious assault on the Capitol demonstrated that for all the fear and anxiety provoked by Islamic terrorists in the decades since 9/11, the direst threat facing America lay far closer to home than anyone preferred to imagine.

On January 6th the veil was pulled back on the monstrosity inside our politics, and we are now forced to confront this cancer before it consumes us.

Since that deadly attack on our democracy, Republicans have only intensified their campaign to obliterate American elections. Their loyalty to the demagogue that brought America to this precipice has only deepened, his devastating lies hardened into official party orthodoxy.

Now that America has finally lost the last of the foreign wars the Republican Party began, it seems that the same burning rage that fueled its ruinous warmongering abroad has suddenly turned inward, instead focusing its wrath on the American people themselves.

With Donald Trump as its undisputed leader, and an engaged militant movement motivated by a shared and destructive vision reminiscent of some of the deadliest nationalist and fascist political programs in history, the GOP has turned far away from democracy and toward something altogether new and terrifying in American politics.

There can be no doubt about the nature of the politics of a Republican Party that has actively sought to silence voters using the letter of the law, enacting targeted legislation in Republican-controlled states to stifle large chunks of the American electorate based only on Trump’s blatant lies about voter fraud in the last election.

Indeed, the GOP’s raft of voter suppression laws are simply the natural extension of Donald Trump’s campaign to undo the unfavorable results of the 2020 election.

Donald Trump is not the aberration establishment Republicans prefer to paint him as. He is a dark reflection, rather, of a political party that has operated so far outside of decency for so long that it has become unrecognizable to all but its most virulent exponents. The nativism, conspiracy, seething racism, distaste for democracy, and capacity for political violence were bubbling right beneath the surface for all to plainly see.

Donald Trump was simply the American apotheosis of a malignant strain of nationalist politics the world has known before, in Weimar, Germany and fascist Italy in the 1930’s. American exceptionalism has blinded us to what the Republican Party was becoming, and now that it’s happened here, we seem almost too stunned to react.

The fact that Donald Trump continues to lead the Republican Party to such an extent that he has frozen the Republican primary field in 2024 by simply implying that he will run again is proof positive that the GOP has lost any concept of meaningfully participating in American democracy.

A majority of Republicans continue to insist that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, against all available evidence and logic. This fallacy has become the only meaningful litmus test in conservative politics, as elected Republicans continue to fan the flames of Trump’s paranoid delusions, writing and passing laws to suppress voting.

It seems nothing can separate the Republican Party from Trumpism, and Donald Trump, personally.

Today it was reported that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, ordered top American military commanders to report any orders to him before carrying them out during the last chaotic days of the Trump administration, as Milley was concerned that an unhinged and unstable President Trump might attempt to order a nuclear strike to keep himself in power. Milley even called his Chinese counterpart twice to make sure he understood America would not attack.

The idea that the highest-ranking military general was so concerned that an American president might start a nuclear war to stay in power that he intervened in the normal chain-of-command would ordinarily startle and unsettle American voters. Tragically, this isn’t even surprising anymore, and will likely have no discernible effect on Republican voters who continue to adore Trump.

That after the torrent of ugly revelations the American people have learned about the Trump administration there is still no meaningful opposition within the GOP is simply astounding.

Indeed, this helps to explain how the Republican Party was overtaken in the first place by Trumpism. It’s spinelessness and limitless capacity for deception and avarice are ingrained in its political DNA to such an extent that it cannot even resist its own destruction.

The Republican Party is an empty vessel, motivated only by the accumulation of power and intent on subverting freedom to achieve political supremacy. It has become the single greatest threat to peace in our times, a bad actor within our American nation-state.

This is precisely what the founding fathers of the American constitution most worried about when they designed our democracy. Alexander Hamilton called political parties “the most fatal disease” of popular governments.

It seems those fears were entirely prescient.

The Republican Party is now nothing less than a vehicle for corrupt and fascistic leaders, and a profound threat to the peace and stability of the Western world, and beyond.

Donald Trump revealed the Republican Party’s innate foulness even as he amplified it. The fate of our nation’s democracy remains precarious, as the assault on democracy continues, unabated.

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