The biggest threat to America is the Republican break with reality
Opinion by Eugene Robinson
The greatest threat to our nation’s future is not covid-19 or the rise of China or even the existential challenge of climate change. It is the Republican Party’s attempt to seize and hold power by offering voters the seductive choice of rejecting inconvenient facts and basic logic.
For the American experiment and people to survive, much less prosper, this iteration of the GOP must fail.
The blind-loyalty-even-to-dishonest-insanity Republican litmus test that is about to cost Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) her leadership job is only the most acute manifestation of the party’s decline into utter irresponsibility. It’s bad enough that those who want to remain in good standing must embrace the “big lie” about purported fraud in the 2020 election. But the requirement doesn’t stop there. On issue after issue, Republicans are cynically adopting a kind of pre-Enlightenment insistence on the primacy of belief over evidence.
If some voters want to believe that covid-19 is somehow being overblown by the world’s leading experts in infectious disease, then it becomes mandatory for GOP governors — ambitious ones, at least — to reopen their state economies, no matter the cost in needless illness and death. If some voters want to believe that systemic racism does not exist, then it becomes mandatory for Republicans to declare, as Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.) did, that “America is not a racist country.” If some voters want to believe that poverty is a choice made by lazy people, then it becomes mandatory for GOP to try to force the poor back to work by slashing unemployment benefits.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-biggest-threat-to-america-is-the-republican-break-with-reality/2021/05/10/22117f54-b1b9-11eb-9059-d8176b9e3798_story.html
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