This is an interesting interview with a right of center scholar, Geoffrey Kabaservice, who argues not only that the Republican Party has become a radical party - something I've been arguing for years - and not a conservative party. In particular, he identifies spasms within conservatism that are primarily about "lost causes." These backwards looking attempts to stall progress usually fail, and there's a certain accretion of failure that has increasingly radicalized people.
Most importantly, he looks at Newt Gingrich's role in cynically creating this idea of anti-government. As I've taught it, Reagan had a nice quip "Government isn't the solution to your problems, it IS the problem." Reagan understood this to be campaign rhetoric; Gingrich and those that followed him see it as a the philosophical bedrock of their politics.
America needs a center-right party. Currently, it has a far-right party. Unless the GOP suffers a few decades in the political wilderness, it won't change.
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