Why Republicans are scared of everything and everyone right now [View all]

[applegrove]

Why Republicans are scared of everything and everyone right now

By Daniel W. Drezner at the Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/09/30/why-republicans-are-scared-of-everything-and-everyone-right-now/

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In the wake of House Speaker John A. Boehner’s announced resignation from Congress, there’s been a lot of chatter about how the GOP House caucus has changed since the Ohio Republican was first elected. And as FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver and The Washington Post’s own Christopher Ingraham demonstrate quite clearly with charts, the data is pretty incontrovertible. As Silver notes, “The most conservative Republicans in the House 25 or 30 years ago would be among the most liberal members now.”

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Indeed, the current GOP is the most conservative iteration of the party in the past century.

None of this should be a surprise to regular readers of Spoiler Alerts or The Post. But it’s worth noting that, in many ways, the GOP has moved further to the right at the same time that a lot of other forces are pushing the country and the world in the opposite direction. Which, if you’re a Republican, sounds pretty scary.

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But the problem is not just limited to the United States. The GOP looks increasingly out of step compared with other conservative parties in the rest of the world. As Jonathan Chait noted recently, on issues such as climate change, the Republican party does not resemble other conservative parties:

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