The Implosion of the MAGA dominated Republican Party

We are watching their political self destruction in real time

The corrupt super majority of Republicans in the Tennessee State House yesterday voted to expel two young black Democratic members, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, because they engaged in peaceful protest to demand that the legislature there pass gun reforms after the school shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville. Republicans and Right Wingers have been lying to and gaslighting the American public and claiming that their peaceful protest was some kind of insurrection, including one member of the Tennessee State House who participated in the actual Insurrection on January 6th. How far the GOP has fallen when a peaceful protest by three Democratic members and some of their supporters is an Insurrection and the beating of cops. And chanting of “hang Mike Pence” and the attempt to take over the Congress by force to stop it from counting the electoral votes is somehow a “normal tourist visit,” as stated by Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA). This illustrates just how far the lying and gaslighting by the current corrupt MAGA far-right extremist Republican Party has gone

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The extreme decline of the GOP is extremely well documented with empirical evidence in the recent book How The Right Lost Mind by Charlie Sykes, a conservative former talk show host from Wisconsin who now edits a sane and non-MAGA conservative publication called The Bulwark. The Republican Party used to be a party of ideas and proposed alternative policies from what the then majority and dominant Democrats advocated for decades. Whether one agrees with their ideas and policies, Republicans in the age of Jerry Ford and Ronald Reagan and even the Bushes proposed alternative ideas from those advocated by the Democrats.

Republicans used to propose ideas to make government smaller and more efficient,now they are the party of big government that wants to ban women from traveling to other states where abortion is legal, ban teaching they don't like in public schools, and ban books they don't want children to read as if critical race theory and books about history have killed as many children as AR-15s have. Republicans used promote what they viewed as free market alternatives to a variety of government programs supported by the Democrats, but now they support big government policies to ban so-called woke investing, even if that leads to a lower return on investment of publicly managed funds. There used to be a time when Republicans actually supported ideas on public policy.

As well documented by Sykes, the Republican Party has become entirely a non-ideas-based full fledged cult of Donald Trump and it no has a policy-based agenda to promote while seeking votes for their candidates. There is no more clear proof of this than the fact that the GOP did not adopt a party platform in 2020, the first time they had done this in the history of their party. Why even adopt a platform if your party doesn't have ideas, and it simply says we're going to rubber stamp whatever Donald Trump wants. That is exactly what they showed by not putting out a statement of their party's ideas, since it become very clear that they no longer had any ideas or policies.

As Republicans in Tennessee used their raw political power in a brazen and blatantly racist manner to expel these two members, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, who have become political rock stars nationally and will raise money and advance their ideas, which in this case revolve around promoting common sense gun reforms. It is such a radical idea, that Tennessee Republicans do not want heard or debated in the halls of their state house, that we should be preventing our children for being slaughtered in the schools by mass murderers wielding AR-15 weapons of war. These two, and others will support them, have an opportunity and advance their ideas even far more effectively than before yesterday's brazen abuse of power, and we will see many constituencies including younger voters, who are already turning out in droves to defeat Republican candidates, and voters in many other communities that will turn out in much higher numbers to support reform minded candidates. These movements for reform and justice will only gain much more political strength as a result of this clear abuse of power and corrupt behavior by radical Republicans in Tennessee.

The sheer political stupidity of what happened in Tennessee is only outmatched by the idiocy of what a corrupt GOP Congress is doing in Washington D.C. Jim Jordan, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee in Congress, who has issued a subpoena for Mark Pomerantz, the form of prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney's office that resigned because the previous DA before Alvin Bragg was not moving swiftly enough in the prosecution of numerous alleged crimes by Donald Trump. While I'm not an attorney and I don't know whether Pomerantz should or should not comply with that subpoena, I do know the political risk for Jordan is that Pomerantz will go before that committee and use this as an opportunity to highlight and prosecute, in an informal sense, the numerous crimes of Donald Trump that he wanted to be actually prosecuted by the Manhattan DA's office. This attempted show trial by Jordan will likely backfire spectacularly and it could show the American people, by the case that Pomerantz would make, just how criminal and corrupt Donald Trump truly is. This could only further make the American people more aware of why there is no way that Donald Trump should ever be allowed anywhere near the White House, not even as a visitor, let alone to actually be elected president once again so he could abuse that power in the way he did during the four years that he was president, that lead to two perfectly valid impeachments that each should have and would have secured Senate conviction and removal in politically saner times.

We saw the defeat of many extreme MAGA-oriented candidates in the 2020 election when voters rejected their extremism in favor of more reasonable and rational moderate Democratic candidates running against them. We saw blatantly election denying Trumpist candidates be defeated for secretaries of state, governors, and United States Senator offices. How does the GOP respond to this, do they moderate their views and positions and act more responsible in an effort to gain more voters? Absolutely not, they are doubling down on the extreme MAGA politics of grievance and revenge and retribution (Trump did ominously promise the ultra MAGA base that he is there retribution) and abusive power, and as a result of this they will lose even worse in the future. The GOP is almost demographically doomed because they are massively losing with Gen Z and Millennial voters and as the aging Baby Boomers and Generation X members become a smaller percentage of the electorate, the most GOP supporting sectors of the electorate will become a smaller and smaller portion of those who actually vote on election day. And polling that is showing that these younger generations are not becoming more Republican as they get older because they're seeing just how extreme this MAGA GOP is and they are rejecting it, and they will continue to reject it well into the future. This extreme direction of the Republican Party is causing the GOP to implode and they are headed to becoming a long-term minority party in the United States where the only places that they will have majorities are in the deepest of red states while the rest of the country will turn much more blue politically.

If reform minded Democratic candidates play this right they will be a majority party for the foreseeable future for a long time until the Republican Party actually starts advocating ideas that appeal to the voters rather than the politics of extremism, division, and grievance that they are currently advocating. What we are watching is the full implosion of the Republican Party in real time.