[Chicks]

Five Strategies to Support U.S. Democracy
https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/0...racy-pub-87918

Reich-wing extremists, like Whell, have weakened democracy in this country to a dangerous extent. They must be defeated, lest the country be turned into an authoritarian state by Whell and his despicable fellow travellers.

Of the Republicans in Congress on the day former president Donald Trump took office, half are now gone. Since the Republicans’ Tea Party revolution, a supposedly populist upsurge partially engineered from the top in 2008 to alter the power structure in the party, approximately 75 percent of Republican House and Senate seats have changed hands.5 The Republicans leaving are those who—like former congressmen Jeff Flake, Peter Meijer, and Rob Portman—have been more bipartisan or willing to stand for democratic norms. Those elected after 2008 include Representatives Lauren Boebert, Madison Cawthorn, and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Among those known to have asked Trump for preemptive pardons for their role in the insurrection, nearly all were elected after 2008.6 The extremist wing of the Republican Party is a recent phenomenon whose nationwide reach and depth within states is already extensive. A report by the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (an organization that has for a long time been tracking white nationalism and anti-Semitism) found that 21 percent of Republican state legislators had joined extremist social media groups.7 Trump is an accelerant of this trend, but his absence alone will not undo the damage.

The Republican Party is no longer the party of former president Ronald Reagan, nor is it even the party of long-serving conservatives like Representative Liz Cheney. A paper classifying over 1,000 political parties across 163 countries by ideology and tactics finds that the current Republican Party looks far closer to authoritarian populist parties—like Fidesz–Hungarian Civic Alliance in Hungary and the Justice and Development Party in Turkey—than to mainstream conservative parties such as Germany’s Christian Democratic Union or Canada’s Conservative Party.8

That is because leaders of this new Republican faction are not only further right but are also far less committed to democratic institutions, practices, and norms.9 They are aware that in increasingly safe seats, their main threat is from a primary challenger.10 A base whose majority is White, evangelical, rural men, and which in 2016 gained a larger percentage of formerly swing voters who cared about identity issues but wanted more government economic redistribution, is more easily motivated by identity than by traditional conservative policy issues such as small government or low taxes.11 These politicians have also come of political age seeing that bipartisanship can enable hit ads that hurt their chances in primaries but that violence and voting manipulation will not be punished at the ballot box.12