Is Repubican Extremism Permanent?

Here is a long and well-researched article from CNN about the extent of extremism, in the US, especially extremism in the Republican party. It reaches some rather disquieting conclusions. It does note bode well for the future of the US political system.

Madrid, one of the founders of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, agrees. The biggest challenge for the country, he argues, is not "the extremists" themselves but "the enablers" inside the GOP who are creating more oxygen for extremism to gain strength. The GOP's situation, he says, resembles the dynamic in Northern Ireland with the Irish Republican Army during the years of their violent resistance to British rule.

"They would go out and blow things up," Madrid says. "You could ask Irish Catholics who would say, 'I'd never be part of the IRA, but I kind of get what they are doing ... They are on the right side; they've got a point.' And that's where we are already at in the Republican Party, and that's what that polling data suggests."

 This tacit acceptance of extremists and violence carries a clear political risk for the GOP: a continued loss of support among racially moderate voters in the white-collar suburbs who already moved steadily away from the party under Trump.

But if conspiracy theorists and other extremists solidify, or even expand, their beachhead in the GOP, the risk for the country could be much greater. The growing racial and religious diversity that triggers the retreat from democratic values among a growing number of GOP voters will only accelerate in the next decade. If the Republican Party does not find more will to explicitly renounce the dark forces circling around Trump, persistent outbursts of White nationalist political violence could be the deadly drumbeat for the years ahead.

"Clearly they think that's where the base is and they can't change it," Neumann told me. "But I would argue we are at a moment where ... if nobody steps up and tries to tell the truth and tries to lead people out of this echo chamber of stolen elections and [the belief that] violence is justified, that is catastrophic for the country. We will not survive as a democracy."

Just to make you feel even better, here's a quote from an article from Slate written after Trump was acquitted.

If any doubt had been left, the Senate established what we are, or what this government is. Donald Trump is still in command of one major political party and free to run for president again, in hopes that the next election might be closer, or that his next mob might bring more guns. Immediately after the trial ended, the Louisiana Republican Party voted to censure Sen. Bill Cassidy, who had been one of the seven Republicans to find Trump guilty. To oppose the coup was to oppose the party.