The new GOP and the power flow that created it

This WaPo opinion by EJ Dionne is spot on (whole opinion not paywalled off):

Let’s just say it: The Republican problem is metastasizing

Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein shook up Washington with their argument that the U.S. government wasn’t working because of what had happened to the Republican Party.

They made their case in a 2012 book, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” and in a powerful Post op-ed titled “Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.”

“The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics,” they wrote. “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. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.”  

Events of the past week not only ratify what they wrote but suggest that matters are, to borrow from them, even worse now.

Power in the GOP has moved away from elected officials and toward those right-wing “commentators” on television, radio, podcasts and online. The creation of ideological media bubbles enhances their power. Republicans in large numbers rely on partisan outlets that lied freely about what Lankford’s [border bill] compromise did and didn’t do, rather than on straight news reports.

The party’s hostile vibe can also be traced back to a habit in the Bush years to distinguish between “real America” (the places that vote Republican) and what is presumably unreal America. Declaring a large swath of the population to be less than American means they’re not worth dealing with and, increasingly, easy to hold in contempt.

In the 2020 book, Political Science for Dummies, the first sentence of the first chapter reads: 

Political science is the study of politics and more precisely power 

Mann and Ornstein were among the first of prominent observers I am aware of to point out in 2012 that the GOP had degenerated. In my view the degeneration was moral rot, because by then, I had adopted pragmatic rationalism as the most moral way to do politics in a democracy.[1] With fidelity to facts and true truths as core moral values, the sheer mendacity and alt-facts the GOP had come to accept and help normalize made the GOP party leadership look morally rotten and authoritarian. 

The question what about the rank and file became more urgent after DJT came on the scene. Nowadays I have an opinion about that, but will keep it to myself.

The point of this post is to just remind people to keep an eye on where power flows and who wins and who loses from power flow, no matter what the power seekers tell you. They are usually lying.

Footnote:

1. With authoritarianism, morals are mostly irrelevant. Authoritarian systems operate on the basis of power and how much the usually kleptocratic dictators, plutocrats and theocrats can get away with before they cause a major rebellion. For authoritarians, facts, true truths, sound reasoning and service to the public interest are all ignored, downplayed, denied or deflected when inconvenient for the power party line. Demagoguery, lies, slandering and crackpottery are dominant. Hybrid authoritarian-democratic systems are some mix of those things.