Josh Marshall routinely refers to a William Saletan quote that is among the most pithy and accurate summations of Trumpistan: "The GOP is a failed state and Donald Trump is its warlord." That's right up there with Adam Serwer's "The cruelty is the point."
Today's news that Tom Emmer won the plurality of the GOP caucus, but cannot unify the caucus behind his bid. Marshall sums it up nicely:
What we see here is the same core message of the last three weeks and in many ways the last dozen years. The only way to get to 217, the hold outs argue, is a coalition of the rule-breakers and the rule-followers. For years the latter group has mostly gone along with that. What happened last week is that a section of the rule-followers rebelled and wouldn’t have it.
This is more basic than a fractured caucus or any of the personalities involved. It is the logical end result of a party and political movement based on rule-breaking, as a central value and mode of operation. When rule-breaking becomes the norm organizations and polities fall apart … without a strongman. For eight years Donald Trump has been that strongman.
That's the current crisis in American democracy. Too much of the GOP has decided that the rules that govern our country are invalid if they don't work on behalf of the GOP, or in other words, they do not believe in rules as rules.
Even as Trump's co-conspirators in the efforts to destroy electoral democracy are admitting in court that it was all bullshit, we can see the House continue to flounder between the few Republicans who still believe in rules-based governance and the Trumpist wing of an authoritarian movement.
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