Trump Is Just the Symptom. The Republican Party Is a Disease Eating Away Our Democracy.

Authored by thedailybeast.com and submitted by randy88moss
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In January 1998, after Bill Clinton lied publicly about his brief affair with Monica Lewinsky, he also lied privately. He told his lawyer, David Kendall, that he had not suborned perjury or obstructed justice, but as far as coming clean went, that was it. He told the White House staff and his Cabinet secretaries—and his wife—that the affair never happened.

He knew, as he wrote in My Life, that he’d have to confess someday. But he calculated—as it turned out, accurately—that after the initial hysteria subsided, the public would focus more on Ken Starr’s inquisitorial tactics than on his relatively minor transgression, and he’d survive.

Clinton lied to his people for one reason: He knew that if he told the truth, they would abandon him. His support within his party would collapse, he knew, if he acknowledged having sullied the presidency in that way. He’d have faced mass resignations from his staff and Cabinet members, and on Capitol Hill, support among Democrats would have dwindled down to the real diehards. There is no question about it: He would have had to resign. (I’m not defending his lie, just laying out his reasoning for it.)

a_fly_effect on April 15th, 2019 at 13:02 UTC »

Mitch McConnell has done more to erode democracy in our country than anyone else I can think of in my lifetime.

SpockShotFirst on April 15th, 2019 at 10:18 UTC »

Since the article is subscription only, here is WaPo articke from 2012, written by political scientists: Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem..

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

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“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.

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But the real move to the bedrock right starts with two names: Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist.

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Today, thanks to the GOP, compromise has gone out the window in Washington.

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On financial stabilization and economic recovery, on deficits and debt, on climate change and health-care reform, Republicans have been the force behind the widening ideological gaps and the strategic use of partisanship. In the presidential campaign and in Congress, GOP leaders have embraced fanciful policies on taxes and spending, kowtowing to their party’s most strident voices.

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And Mike Lofgren, a veteran Republican congressional staffer, wrote an anguished diatribe last year about why he was ending his career on the Hill after nearly three decades. “The Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe,” he wrote on the Truthout Web site.

Shortly before Rep. West went off the rails with his accusations of communism in the Democratic Party, political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, who have long tracked historical trends in political polarization, said their studies of congressional votes found that Republicans are now more conservative than they have been in more than a century. Their data show a dramatic uptick in polarization, mostly caused by the sharp rightward move of the GOP.

If our democracy is to regain its health and vitality, the culture and ideological center of the Republican Party must change. In the short run, without a massive (and unlikely) across-the-board rejection of the GOP at the polls, that will not happen. If anything, Washington’s ideological divide will probably grow after the 2012 elections.

viva_la_vinyl on April 15th, 2019 at 09:59 UTC »

Trump has always been the symptom, not the disease.

Every moment that Republicans continue to stand by his disgraceful behavior is a moment that continues to insult the integrity of this country.