An Emboldened Extremist Wing Flexes Its Power in a Leaderless G.O.P.

[Zorro]

As more far-right Republicans take office and exercise power, party officials are promoting unity and neutrality rather than confronting dangerous messages and disinformation.

Knute Buehler, who led Oregon’s Republican ticket as the candidate for governor in 2018, watched with growing alarm in recent weeks as Republicans around the nation challenged the reliability of the presidential election results.

Then he watched the Jan. 6 siege at the United States Capitol in horror. And then, to his astonishment, Republican Party officials in his own state embraced the conspiracy theory that the attack was actually a left-wing “false flag” plot to frame Trump supporters.

The night after his party’s leadership passed a formal resolution promoting the false flag theory, Mr. Buehler cracked open a local microbrew and filed to change his registration from Republican to independent. “It was very painful,” he said.

His unhappy exit highlighted one facet of the upheaval now underway in the G.O.P.: It has become a leaderless party, with veterans like Mr. Buehler stepping away, luminaries like Senator Rob Portman of Ohio retiring, far-right extremists like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia building a brand on a web of dangerous conspiracy theories, and pro-Trump Republicans at war with other conservatives who want to look beyond the former president to the future.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/01/us/politics/republicans-trump-ronna-mcdaniel.html

[alwaysinasnit]

1. Like Dr. Frankenstein, the Establishment Republicans cynically created and encouraged this rabid dog

monster and now they can no longer control it. The "monster" has tasted power, and it likes it.

[hedda_foil]

2. The whole Republican problem boils down to this ....

The "establishment" Republicans are wholly owned subsidiaries of global corporations and psychotic "libertarian" billionaires. Their carefully developed base consisted of upper middle-class suburban whites and small business owners who they convinced to feel oppressed by taxes and regulations that often didn't apply to them, bigots, evangelical Christians (anti-abortion, anti-gay, authoritarian followers), and gun-humper insecure males with severe big penis envy. Not the nicest or most coherent group but it worked for decades.

The problem is that the whole bunch had to stick together and believe the party was responding to them even though its only real focus was to cut taxes and regulations for their donors. The percentage of voters who believe the party's fiscal policies are important enough to them to vote R for that reason is around 5%. There's probably another 15-20% of automatic Republican voters whose families voted for Hoover both times.

The rest of the gang was excited by the radical faux populism of Trump. He told them they were the real Americans and that they were RIGHT in their off-the-wall beliefs as long as they voted for Trump. They've finally received true validation -- something that, let's face it, they never really got from the establishment types who never actually cared about any of their issues but pandered to them at election time. Trump is for THEM and they are for TRUMP as far as they're concerned.

So the establishment has lost the moderates of the party and continues to hemorrhage educated suburbanites and small business owners (who used to be the heart of the party) to the Dems. What do they do now and how do they attract enough voters that gerrymandering and suppressing Democratic voters of color will continue to be sufficient for them to win? And what about the big donor money?

[Thekaspervote]

3. Really good points..especially the last paragraph

Are the pukes going to be able to win anything in a little less than 2 years? The cult is really disillusioned and that’s going to grow as the deposed idiot king reveals how he used them.

Plus if Biden stays popular we may very well keep the house blue in ‘22

[hedda_foil]

4. I'm marginally hopeful for keeping the House and Senate blue in '22