Choices have consequences.
Incidentally, it appears that it was McCarthy who ordered the immediate eviction of Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer from their courtesy offices on the very day of his ouster. This kind of pettiness is not going to help the GOP when the time comes from them to seek help from Democrats to get them out of messes of their own making, as McCarthy found out, when after repeatedly going along with the Trumpian demonization of Democrats, he expected them to throw him a life-preserver when his own job was on the line.
If you had told republicans eight years ago that this is what their party would become, they would have said “impossible.”
If you had told republicans TODAY that this is what their party has become, they would say “impossible” “absolutely not” and “yes, but it’s the Democrats’ fault”.
What Republicans say could not possibly be less important.
less important in terms of determining what is true, I mean. Obviously their terroristic threats have import. They just don’t inform us about reality beyond their very real intent to hurt others.
Thing is, they get voted in. I mean, one can talk about donations and about gerrymandering and whatnot, but it remains that these people in that party are being voted in.
They evidently represent enough of those who bother to vote (around half the eligible voters) to get the most votes. And that’s enough, under the USA’s system of non-preferential, non-obligatory voting. And of megabucks and gerrymandering and suchlike.
—
Matt:
If Republicans didn’t like what their party has become, they would decry it and seek to change it.
(They are doing neither)
The Republicans were well along the path to what they are today when they propped up the Tea Party. Even before that when every Democrat was demonized as a “socialist” and they made “liberal” a dirty word. It was inevitable that they’d snowball into full on fascism.
The only thing that’s not going according to plan here is this: people have noticed. Eight years ago the Republican party was indeed on a trajectory to get here (more or less), but crucially it was on a trajectory to get here quietly, in a way that they could semi-legitimately say to anyone who questioned it that no, this is just how politics is done, this is business as usual, it’s what we’ve always done, this is how it works get used to it, shut up, move along, nothing to see here. Eight years ago a bunch of no-marks lined up to be inevitably beaten by Jeb Bush, who, let’s be honest, would almost certainly have been beaten in the election by Clinton, who would therefore at this point likely still be President, depending on how disastrously her wars were going and how badly she mishandled Covid. Imagine that for a moment. And in the background, crucially in opposition, all the gerontocrats in the Republican party would have got on with what they get on with, and would have been lining up… someone? to challenge Clinton’s VP for the presidency next year.
Except all their plans were buggered when the orange fool threw his hat in the ring, dismantled all opposition for the nomination, and then WON an election he appeared to have stood in as an elaborate prank thanks to Clinton treating him (and anyone thinking of voting for him) as a joke, and started saying all the quiet bits out loud. More disastrously, everyone around him then realised that, hey, you can say the quiet bits out loud and you get away with it, and started emulating him, thus changing the landscape, possibly permanently. Even as he sits in courtrooms attempting to stave off his end, he still holds Republican voters entirely in thrall, which means he holds the party in thrall. It’ll take a generation to recover from the damage he’s done to US politics, if it ever recovers.
Then again, “recovery” in this context means going back to the Republicans still being the venal, racist, corrupt shits they demonstrably all are, just better at covering it up because they actually bother to try. I’m not sure that’s an improvement.
Am I being overly cynical?