The GOP reckoning never came
Opinion by Catherine Rampell
Over the years, Republican politicians seemed many times to be on the cusp of a reckoning — a realization that a lunatic fringe had seized control of the party’s more pragmatic center and that conspiracy-theorizing, race-baiting, science-denigrating demagogues had transformed the GOP base into ungovernable paranoiacs. The situation seemed untenable; the fever had to break eventually.
Yet the party’s radicalization continued, and the reckoning never came. Today, U.S. democracy is paying the price as millions of Americans refuse to acknowledge the results of a legitimate election, and their leaders appear too cowardly or too powerless to disrupt the collective delusion.
Republican politicians have had ample motives to decide that enough was enough, that they had lost control of a once-useful strain of the paranoid style in American politics and that the golem must be decommissioned. Public association with tinfoil-hatters is usually bad PR, after all. Or, as William F. Buckley Jr. put it in his quest to purge the Birchers from conservatism 60?years ago, linkage with extremists might allow the media “to anathematize the entire American right wing.”
More recently, Republican fellowship with unstable bigots has alienated segments of the population their party wishes to woo — women, minorities, immigrants and others who might be otherwise open to right-of-center ideas.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-gop-reckoning-never-came/2020/12/14/b94ba866-3e43-11eb-9453-fc36ba051781_story.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
