(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



How the GOP Lost Its Brain [1]

['Timothy Noah', 'James Bamford', 'Grace Segers', 'Daniel Strauss', 'Kim Phillips-Fein', 'Jess Bergman', 'The New Republic', 'Kate Aronoff', 'Illustration Zach Meyer']

Date: 2023-02-21

The Republicans’ failure to produce a party platform in 2020 proved beyond a doubt that there was no such thing as a GOP ideology. Instead, we have GOP nihilism.

The GOP no longer even pretends that its pursuit of power is rooted in any such commitment. The conservative ideas that came to fruition four decades ago during Ronald Reagan’s presidency didn’t stand the test of time, either because they were faulty from the start or because circumstances and public opinion changed, and the few new ideas taken up by some Republicans in recent years inspire too much disagreement, within either the party or the broader electorate, to rise to the level of party doctrine. The Republicans’ failure to produce a party platform in 2020 proved beyond a doubt that there was no such thing as a GOP ideology. There remains none today. Instead, we have what is commonly, and accurately, described by political observers, including many conservatives, as GOP nihilism: a party’s self-perpetuation for its own sake driven by an opportunistic indifference to fact and reason, expressed through coarse and incendiary rhetoric.

When you really pay attention to how today’s Republicans speak, I don’t know how you can call it ideological. During January’s 15-ballot donnybrook over choosing the next House speaker, was it ideological for Representative Kat Cammack, Republican of Florida, to accuse Democrats of bringing “popcorn and blankets and alcohol” to watch her party’s display of disunity? When the Democrats howled in outrage at this strangely arbitrary fabrication, was it ideological for Cammack to add, “As evidenced by my colleagues’ actions”? Give me a break. Witless, juvenile, and pointless, yes. Ideological? Don’t flatter her.

The most nihilistic project of the new majority-GOP House is the establishment of a Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. This is a brazen play to run interference against the various criminal investigations of former President Donald Trump. The select subcommittee’s chairman, Jim Jordan, is also chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Jordan’s chairmanship of the select subcommittee is a glaring conflict of interest, given that, along with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Jordan refused to comply with a subpoena during the last Congress from the committee investigating the January 6 insurrection. Jordan defended Trump during two impeachments, and he told Fox News after the 2020 election, “I don’t know how you can ever convince me that President Trump didn’t actually win this thing.”

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://newrepublic.com/article/170274/gop-lost-brain

Published and (C) by Common Dreams
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0..

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/commondreams/