Can the Republican Party Return to Reality?

Can the Republican Party Return to Reality?

From lying about the last election to embracing authoritarianism, the party’s mainstream seems increasingly addled.

La La Land.

La La Land.

Photographer: Jon Cherry/Getty

I try not to write about it too much, but I should be clear: One of the most important facts of U.S. politics right now is the terrible shape the Republican Party is in. It has been dysfunctional for more than a decade, and more recently the mainstream of the party has been acting as if they live in a fantasy world. 

Just to look around over the past several days …

Republicans on the Senate judiciary committee decided to gang up on a nominee by pressing for her views on a Virginia criminal case, which they presented as evidence that trans kids are lurking in restrooms, ready to commit violence. Only it turns out that they botched the facts of the case, which does not appear to have anything to do with school bathroom policies. There’s nothing new about the occasional reality-challenged member of Congress. But this wasn’t some kook in the House; it was senator after senator repeating what were basically wild, inaccurate rumors. Nor was this an isolated incident. These sorts of panics run constantly in Republican-aligned media, and are rapidly picked up and repeated by party politicians, often with further exaggeration. So one week the republic is in danger because people are censoring Dr. Seuss; the next week it’s because not enough people are censoring Toni Morrison. 

A second example? Fox News’s Tucker Carlson … you know what? I’m not even going to go into it.

And of course, we have former President Donald Trump still out there repeating an array of lies about the 2020 election — including in a letter printed in the Wall Street Journal. If anything, there are fewer high-profile Republicans willing to challenge Trump on this nonsense now than there were nine months ago, and more officials amplifying his message.

This whole thing is hard to describe because of course all politicians are prone to exaggeration, and it’s not hard to find examples of Democrats getting facts wrong. Nor is it hard to find Republicans who stick to reality. So it’s easy to conclude that everyone does it, and anyone who says otherwise is simply making partisan attacks. Easy, but very wrong. What’s happening now among Republicans is more extensive and mainstream than any distortion of fact within the Democratic Party — or, for that matter, within the 1980s Republican Party.

The same applies to the antidemocratic views that some Republicans have expressed. Again, it’s not hard to find examples of frustration with U.S. institutions, or ideas to reform them that would help one’s party at the expense of the opposition — including ideas that scholars of democracy would consider misguided or dangerous. But Republican thinking has moved well beyond that, as with their fascination with the authoritarian government in Hungary. Of course, we’ve seen such things before — many American socialists expressed enthusiasm for Stalin’s U.S.S.R., after all. And it’s entirely reasonable to consider Southern segregationists, who had a central place in the Democratic Party, antidemocratic. Is this worse? Perhaps not, but even if it’s just as bad as Stalin sympathizers and Dixiecrats, then it’s dangerous in its own right.

Even now, there are a lot of Republicans, some with moderate policy preferences and some with very conservative ones, who embrace democracy and reject fantasy and conspiracy thinking. But many others are with the Republican-aligned media outlets, and the rest of the party hasn’t come close to restraining their influence. Many members haven’t even tried; they’re happy to accept whatever allies they can get, even if doing so erodes the party’s ability to govern and harms the democratic system. Others don’t know where to start.

Nor does anyone else. I attended the American Political Science Association’s annual conference in Seattle last month and heard nothing but a string of pessimism about the Republican Party — something that simply was not the case even 10 years ago. Of course, not everyone was pessimistic about the future of the republic. But no one seems to be able to imagine how the Republicans can turn themselves around, and I can’t remember the last political scientist I’ve spoken with (yes, Republicans included) who didn’t see serious problems here.

I suppose if I wanted to look for optimism, I could think about the Democrats in 1948, who broke from both the Henry Wallace faction and the Dixiecrats (although the latter was only the beginning of a long, ultimately successful, struggle). But then I look at today’s Republican Party. And I just don’t know how to get there from here.

1. Excellent item from Lee Drutman and Meredith Conroy about the relationship between policy and elections.

2. Megan A. Brown, Jonathan Nagler and Joshua Tucker on why Twitter spreads what conservative politicians say.

3. Simon Jackman on climate policy in the U.S. and Australia.

4. Bridget C.E. Dooling on presidents and the bureaucracy.

5. Thomas B. Edsall on new differences between Democrats and Republicans.

6. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Tyler Cowen on inflation.

7. And Margot Sanger-Katz on lowering prescription-drug prices.

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