There are two articles that make essentially the same point. A point that really needs to be internalized, especially by the political press. First, American democracy is under siege and that siege is almost exclusively coming from within the Republican Party. The GOP has fled from or undermined democratic norms at numerous points throughout the last three decades. It is getting worse, not better. Since the GOP tends to draw its support from American authoritarians anyway, the positions of the party leads to obedience from the Base.
Secondly, Jon Chait lays out how the modern GOP was created by constant insurgencies. The GOP constantly eats its own in a spiral towards some imagined purity of essence that will create the One True Faith and lead America into Reaganland Utopia. The fundamental problem, of course, is that the GOP vision of American government is both unworkable and unpopular. So they consistently fail to accomplish their outlandish goals. Rather than reconsider their flawed ideology, they retreat further into "purity" and purge the latest person who fails to make the impossible possible.
Trump, with his assault on just about everything, is not an outlier; he IS the GOP. American democracy will not be truly secure until we recommit ourselves to democratic norms and values, and that will only really happen once the fevered madness that has gripped the GOP is relinquished.
It can't happen soon enough.
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