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Monday open thread: The Republican Party is dying


The Republican Party is dying.

Intellectually and morally, it's already dead. The rotting began when, instead of shunning Dixiecrats in the wake of the 1960s Civil Rights revolution, it actively courted them, shifting the party base from patrician liberalism to culture war conservatism. This turn had been presaged by the likes of Joe McCarthy and Barry Goldwater. And even the late Mr. Goldwater, as his life was ending, realized that the wedding of the party to vicious culture wars was dooming it.

The only thing keeping the husk of the GOP ambling along like a giant zombie is the animating force of that culture war. Gays are evil, Blacks are evil, independent women are evil. Anyone who doesn't adhere to white, Christian, male dominance is a threat to the country. The party base is so far gone down the hole of hatred and evil that they boo even their own orange messiah when he urges them to get vaccinated against COVID:

Of course, that's not the only thing keeping the party alive:
Yes. Our "fair, impartial, objective" political media keeps treating a cult as a valid political party. They keep inviting their unhinged representatives onto their airwaves. They keep treating their views with a respect they don't deserve. As the meme going around says: if one person says it's raining and the other person says it's dry, your job isn't to just write down what each one says, but to stick your head out the window and find out the truth.

We've seen the lack of this basic journalistic principle in the coverage over the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Rather than giving viewers and readers in depth analysis on how we arrived at this point, the media turned to the people who got us involved in the quagmire to begin with, absolving them of all responsibility and pinning the blame squarely on the man who inherited a twenty-year mess. The media does more to keep the husk of the GOP stumbling along than any Koch or Walton. A responsible media would put their heads out the fucking window to see if it was raining or dry; not only do they not do that, they outright favor Republican narratives. The media in the past week has been a handmaiden to war—a war it had largely ignored since 2003.

Every once in a while, there's a moment of clarity, as when Chuck Todd said this in an interview:
We ended up in this both-sides trope. We bought into the idea that, oh my God, we’re perceived as having a liberal bias. And I think for particularly the first decade of the century, I’d say mainstream media overcorrected. And we bought into the Fox motto of “balance.” And it’s like, Jesus, there’s no balance, they need the truth. There’s fairness, that’s different than balance. And so in that sense, this is why we’re in this defensive posture today.
But this, too, soon passes, and we go back to the general order of things.

At the end of the day, we have only ourselves to rely on. Our voices, our votes, our actions. We can't rely on the supine political media. We can't rely on Republican politicians becoming rational. All we can do is crush them politically, by standing united and not losing sight of the prize. It really is that simple.
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