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Sunday, October 20th, 2019

The Crisis of the Republican Party

Author:     The Editorial Board
Source:     The New York Times
Publication Date:     Oct. 18, 2019
 Link: The Crisis of the Republican Party
Stephan:   One of the central problems facing America's democracy is that we are historically a two-party system only now we no longer have a viable two-party system. The Republican Party has become the racist political arm of a christofascist cult. You can see this in the failure of their response to the almost comically blatant criminality of Trump. The New York Times, lays it out pretty well. The period between today and the next election will, I think, reveal to us the future of America's democracy, and it is going to depend on you, your family and your friends. Only citizen action will save America. Start working, I am. Is it possible to achieve our goal? Read the morning's headlines and notice that Trump has abandoned the grift of using the Doral for the G-7 meetings. Nothing but citizen outcry scared the Congress and caused this.

At the Peace Monument near the United States Capitol, Grief weeps on the shoulder of History.
Credit: Damon Winter/The New York Times

In the summer of 1950, outraged by Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist inquisition, Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican senator from Maine, stood to warn her party that its own behavior was threatening the integrity of the American republic. “I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny — fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear,” she said. “I doubt if the Republican Party could — simply because I don’t believe the American people will uphold any political party that puts political exploitation above national interest. Surely, we Republicans aren’t that desperate for victory.”

Senator Smith surely knew her “Declaration of Conscience” would not carry the day. Her appeal to the better angels of her party was not made in the expectation of an immediate change; sometimes the point is just to get people to look up. In the end, four more years passed before […]

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1 Comment

  1. Albus Eddie on Monday, October 21, 2019 at 9:10 am

    The two party system as served the elites well but not the population as a whole. This has been true for at least the past 40 years if not longer. The concept that two political parties can represent 300 million people is ludicrous on its face.