The Republican party reckoning that never came

Over the years, Republican delusion. politicians seemed many times Republican politicians have to be on the cusp of a reckoning had ample motives to decide — a realization that enough was enough, that that a lunatic they had lost control of a onceuseful fringe had strain of the paranoid seized control of style in American politics and the party’s more that the golem must be decommissioned. pragmatic center and that conspiracy-theorizing, More recently, Republican fellowship with unstable bigots has race-baiting, science-denigrating alienated segments of the population their party wishes to woo demagogues had — women, minorities, immigrants transformed the GOP base into and others who might be ungovernable paranoiacs. The otherwise open to right-of-center situation seemed untenable; the ideas. fever had to break eventually. Plus, should a party that

Yet the party’s radicalization houses such rabble manage to continued, and the reckoning capture power, governing is difficult never came. Today, U.S. democracy if the base believes bonkers is paying the price as millions things. Such as the premise of Americans refuse to acknowledge that the greatest threat to public the results of a legitimate safety today isn’t a deadly pandemic election, and their leaders but a fictional, Democratrun appear too cowardly or too powerless child-sex ring. to disrupt the collective Still, Republican leadership refused to eject the nutters from their party when, say, birtherism swept through the base. They may have privately winced at the racist conspiracy theory, but they nonetheless found it too useful to delegitimize the first Black president.

The reckoning also didn’t come after Mitt Romney, endorsed by one of the leading birthers, lost in 2012. The GOP dissected Romney’s defeat in an infamous “autopsy” report that concluded the party needed to develop more “non-inflammatory and inclusive” messaging — a recommendation it promptly ignored.

The reckoning didn’t come after then-candidate Donald Trump cleared the 2016 primary field, barking inflammatory and non-inclusive messaging that other Republicans had merely whispered or winked at. Perhaps afraid to out themselves as the “establishment” Trump railed against, Republican officials shrugged as Trump promulgated ever more cynical conspiracy theories about fake unemployment numbers, a climate change “hoax”and homicidal immigrant hordes. At the time, I predicted that Trump’s electoral loss would force the GOP to acknowledge it needed another Buckley-esque purge, draining the right-wing fever swamps, at least if it wished to survive.

I was wrong, of course. The reckoning didn’t come then, either, because Trump won.

Nor did it arrive after Trump crossed multiple lines Republicans once considered uncrossable. Yet with rare exceptions, party elders stood by Trump. They feared Trump’s itchy Twitter finger and the populist base that he now fully controlled.

And so the fever never broke, the frog never leapt from the now-boiling water, the reckoning never came.

Then, last month, something happened that seemed grounds for hope: Trump lost. Surely this, I thought, must force his party to finally excise its necrotic political tissue, once leaders recognized it had cost them not just their principles and 300,000 American lives but also the White House.

Instead of learning from their loss, however, GOP officials simply deny it happened. They indulge Trumpers’ conspiracy theories that he won reelection. They turn a blind eye as the president provokes threats of violence against state officials (including fellow Republicans) responsible for ballot counts. Nearly two-thirds of House Republicans signed onto a lawsuit seeking to overturn the election, even as they surely knew the case would get laughed out of court.