End the GOP - In order to save our democracy, we must not merely defeat the Republican Party.

[kpete]

Trump is not a departure from the values of the GOP, but the culmination of its efforts to secure power.

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The capacity of our political elites to be shocked anew by the Republican Party has been more shocking than anything Republicans have stooped to doing in the Trump era. It should be no surprise that a party willing to deny the reality of a climate crisis that imperils all civilization has given the presidency to a man who denied his black predecessor is an American. It is entirely logical that a party currently dismantling the right to vote has turned itself over to a man willing to undermine faith in the democratic process. Despite what the Democratic Party’s chosen rationale for impeachment has implied, the gravest offenses President Trump has committed against our country can be found not in the White House’s call logs but in the detention centers where the president has caged the children of migrant parents—children abused and traumatized in the service of a racist mythology Trump has crafted about the impact of immigration. The Republican Party has helped him promulgate it and stands ready to help him do worse, because Donald Trump, beyond holding office as a Republican president, embodies the very soul of the Republican Party.

Every single aspect of his administration has been foreshadowed not only by fringe figures within the GOP and voices in the conservative media, but also by the last Republican president—a man now embraced, sometimes literally, by liberal and moderate conservative figures decrying Trump’s conduct. Trump’s own rhetoric of division and exclusion was preceded by the 2004 reelection campaign for George W. Bush, which took advantage of homophobia to boost turnout from social conservatives. Before thousands of Puerto Ricans devastated by Hurricane Maria were forced by the Trump administration’s shoddy recovery effort to ask themselves whether they were really Americans after all, thousands of African Americans failed by the Bush administration’s relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina posed the same question to themselves. Trump’s intimations that the federal executive is above the law may well have been bolstered by the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance of the American people. Even Trump’s efforts to integrate his companies within the processes of the state were preceded by the Bush administration’s curious keenness for contracts with Halliburton, the company Vice President Dick Cheney ran before Bush took office.

The propaganda and misinformation campaigns that characterize what some have called a new post-truth era under Trump should, in fact, be quite familiar to those who remember the denialism that characterized defenses of the Iraq War and the hundreds of thousands of casualties it produced. The two Republicans who have occupied the White House in the first two decades of the new millennium have shared not only an address, but an enthusiasm for torture and war crimes, a zeal for using fear and the threat of terrorism to quash political dissent, and near-total support from the Republican political establishment.

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It’s left to the rest of us to face the truth squarely: Donald Trump is not a departure from the values defining the Republican Party, but the culmination of its efforts to secure power in this country. The question before us is not how much more the Republican Party might be willing to tolerate from the president but how much more we are willing to tolerate from the Republican Party.

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What we become in this decade and this century depends entirely upon what we decide to do with the Republican Party we have before us today. Either we will be a nation committed to prosperity and political equality for all—a new republic for the many and not the few—or we will not. Our choice is clear—and is, in fact, being made for us by the functionaries of prejudice and business as we speak. We must wrest that choice back and set the country forward. We must end the GOP.

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MORE:
https://newrepublic.com/article/156411/end-gop

[Joinfortmill]

1. I second that notion

[Hermit-The-Prog]

2. GOP is a coalition of hate and greed -- purely selfish.

[2naSalit]

3. K&R

[ArtTownsend]

4. Bump. Thanks!