There Is A Pro-Putin Cult Within The Republican Party

The following is part of an op-ed by Paul Krugman in The New York Times: 

How can any American, a citizen of a nation that holds itself up as a beacon of freedom, not be rooting for Ukraine in this war?

Yet there are significant factions in U.S. politics — a small group on the left, a much more significant bloc on the right — that not only oppose Western support for Ukraine but also clearly want to see Russia win. And my question, on the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion, is what lies behind right-wing support for Vladimir Putin? . . .

Putin, by contrast, very much is the subject of a personality cult not just in Russia but also on the American right and has been for years. And it’s a fairly creepy cult at that. For example, back in 2014 a National Review columnist contrasted Putin’s bare-chested horseback riding with President Barack Obama’s “metrosexual golf get-ups.”

Until the invasion of Ukraine, Putinphilia also went hand in hand with extravagant praise for Russia’s supposed military effectiveness. Most famously, in 2021 Ted Cruz circulated a video contrasting a Russian military recruitment ad featuring a muscular man doing manly stuff with a U.S. ad highlighting the diversity of Army recruits. “Perhaps a woke, emasculated military isn’t the best idea,” Cruz declared.

What was the basis for this worship of Putinism? I’d argue that many people on the right equate being powerful with being a swaggering tough guy and sneer at anything — like intellectual openness and respect for diversity — that might interfere with the swagger. Putin was their idea of what a powerful man should look like, and Russia, with its muscleman military vision, their idea of a powerful country.

It should have been obvious from the beginning that this worldview was all wrong. National power in the modern world rests mainly on economic strength and technological capacity, not military prowess.

But then came the invasion, and it turned out that Putin’s not-woke, unemasculated Russia isn’t even very good at waging war.

Why has Russia’s military failed so spectacularly? Because modern wars aren’t won by strutting guys flexing their biceps. They’re won mainly through logistics, technology and intelligence (in both the military and the ordinary senses) — things, it turns out, that Russia does badly and Ukraine does surprisingly well. (It’s not just Western weapons, although these have been awesomely effective; the Ukrainians have also shown a real talent for MacGyvering solutions to their military needs.) . . .

The key to understanding right-wingers’ growing Ukraine rage is that Russia’s failures don’t just show that a leader they idolized has feet of clay. They also show that their whole tough-guy view about the nature of power is wrong. And they’re having a hard time coping.

This explains why leading Putinists in the United States keep insisting that Ukraine is actually losing. Putin is “winning the war in Ukraine,” declared Tucker Carlson on Aug. 29, just days before several Ukrainian victories. There’s still a lot of hype about a huge Russian offensive this winter; the truth, however, is that this offensive is already underway, but as one Ukrainian official put it, it has achieved so little “that not everyone even sees it.”

None of this means that Russia can’t eventually conquer Ukraine. If it does, however, it will, in part, be because America’s Putin fans force a cutoff of crucial aid. And if this happens, it will be because the U.S. right can’t stand the idea of a world in which woke doesn’t mean weak and men who pose as tough guys are actually losers.

GOP Willing To Hurt The Country To Prove Loyalty To Trump

The Republican Party has no agenda. They showed that in their 2020 convention, when they didn't even bother to propose a platform -- instead just saying that whatever Trump wanted to do was OK with them. Now they are engaged in fighting against masks and vaccinations, obstructing everything Democrats try to do, and even flirting with default and a government shutdown -- all things that hurt this country and its citizens. Why? Just to show their loyalty to Trump. They are now just another cult.

Here's part of how Paul Krugman puts it in his New York Times column:

Under Obama, leading Republicans claimed that their fiscal brinkmanship was motivated by concerns about budget deficits. Some of us argued even at the time that self-proclaimed deficit hawks were phonies, that they didn’t actually care about government debt — a view validated by their silence when the Trump administration blew up the deficit — and that they actually wanted to see the economy suffer on Obama’s watch. But they maintained enough of a veneer of responsibility to fool many commentators.

This time, Republican obstructionists aren’t even pretending to care about red ink. Instead, they’re threatening to shut everything down unless the Biden administration abandons its efforts to fight the coronavirus with vaccine mandates.

What’s that about? As many observers have pointed out, claims that opposition to vaccine mandates (and similar opposition to mask mandates) is about maintaining personal freedom don’t stand up to any kind of scrutiny. No reasonable definition of freedom includes the right to endanger other people’s health and lives because you don’t feel like taking basic precautions.

Furthermore, actions by Republican-controlled state governments, for example in Florida and Texas, show a party that isn’t so much pro-freedom as it is pro-Covid. How else can you explain attempts to prevent private businesses — whose freedom to choose was supposed to be sacrosanct — from requiring that their workers be vaccinated, or offers of special unemployment benefits for the unvaccinated?

In other words, the G.O.P. doesn’t look like a party trying to defend liberty; it looks like a party trying to block any effective response to a deadly disease. Why is it doing this?

To some extent it surely reflects a coldly cynical political calculation. Voters tend to blame whichever party holds the White House for anything bad that happens on its watch, which creates an incentive for a sufficiently ruthless party to engage in outright sabotage. Sure enough, Republicans who fought all efforts to contain the coronavirus are now attacking the Biden administration for failing to end the pandemic.

But trying to shut down the government to block vaccinations seems like overreach, even for hardened cynics. It’s notable that Mitch McConnell, whom nobody could accuse of being a do-gooder, isn’t part of the anti-vaccine caucus.

What seems to be happening instead goes beyond cold calculation. As I’ve pointed out in the past, Republican politicians now act like apparatchiks in an authoritarian regime, competing to take ever more extreme positions as a way to demonstrate their loyalty to the cause — and to The Leader. Catering to anti-vaccine hysteria, doing all they can to keep the pandemic going, has become something Republicans do to remain in good standing within the party.

The result is that one of America’s two major political parties isn’t just refusing to help the nation deal with its problems; it’s actively working to make the country ungovernable.

And I hope the rest of us haven’t lost the ability to be properly horrified at this spectacle.

GOP Is No Longer Interested In Legislating Or Governing

We used to have two political parties. They disagreed on many issues, but they negotiated and came up with solutions that were good for the country. That is not true today. Now there is only one political party interested in legislating or governing -- the Democratic Party. The Republican Party has devolved in a cult of fealty to their orange demagogue that is not interested in either legislating, negotiating, or governing.

The following is a tiny part of an op-ed by Michael A. Cohen at MSNBC.com:

As Congress gets closer to an agreement on a multitrillion-dollar budget package, there is one actor notably missing from the negotiations: the Republican Party.

While Democrats are fighting over the details of policy proposals that could create the nation’s first paid family and medical leave program, make pre-K universal, lower the cost of child care, expand Medicare and prepare the nation for the effects of climate change, the GOP is contentedly sitting on the sidelines, throwing spitballs and complaining that the whole thing is going to cost too much money.

Republican campaigns are increasingly defined by a laser-like focus on cultural issues, such as "critical race theory" or nonexistent voter fraud, with barely a mention of serious substantive policies. None of this is even considered unusual or surprising anymore. It’s just the way things are in politics today.

Ironically, it wasn’t that long ago that Republicans boasted about being the party of ideas. Conservative think tanks proudly rolled out policy proposals and encouraged Republican officials to embrace them. Today, other than venerating former President Donald Trump or accusing Democrats of being socialists or communists, it’s hard to find a single policy issue that defines the modern Republican Party. . . .

All of this is simply taken for granted. The national news media simply accepts that the default Republican position on any and all policy issues is steadfast opposition with no alternative proposals. To evoke a phrase by a former Republican president, the modern GOP is profiting from the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”. . .

The result is that voters are being given two options: the policy ideas Democrats want to implement or not implementing those policy ideas. To put it mildly, this is not a healthy situation for American democracy, particularly one in which the tools of obstructionism are so numerous. America doesn’t just need a Republican Party that isn’t beholden to Trump and his authoritarian politics. They need one that actually thinks governing matters.

GOP Is An Autocracy & And They Want The Same For Us

The Republican Party used to be a political party, with conservatives, moderates, and even some liberals -- and those elements combined to make the party's policy, which was carried out by elected officials. That is no longer true. Today's Republican Party has devolved into an autocratic cult of personality, where everything is decided by "Dear Leader".

The following is part of an op-ed about this by Paul Krugman in The New York Times:

“The Mechanisms of Cult Production” compares the behavior of political elites across a wide range of dictatorial regimes, from Caligula’s Rome to the Kim family’s North Korea, and finds striking similarities. Despite vast differences in culture and material circumstances, elites in all such regimes engage in pretty much the same behavior, especially what the paper dubs “loyalty signaling” and “flattery inflation.”

Signaling is a concept originally drawn from economics; it says that people sometimes engage in costly, seemingly pointless behavior as a way to prove that they have attributes others value. For example, new hires at investment banks may work insanely long hours, not because the extra hours are actually productive, but to demonstrate their commitment to feeding the money machine.

In the context of dictatorial regimes, signaling typically involves making absurd claims on behalf of the Leader and his agenda, often including “nauseating displays of loyalty.” If the claims are obvious nonsense and destructive in their effects, if making those claims humiliates the person who makes them, these are features, not bugs. I mean, how does the Leader know if you’re truly loyal unless you’re willing to demonstrate your loyalty by inflicting harm both on others and on your own reputation?

And once this kind of signaling becomes the norm, those trying to prove their loyalty have to go to ever greater extremes to differentiate themselves from the pack. Hence “flattery inflation”: The Leader isn’t just brave and wise, he’s a perfect physical specimen, a brilliant health expert, a Nobel-level economic analyst, and more. The fact that he’s obviously none of these things only enhances the effectiveness of the flattery as a demonstration of loyalty.

Does all of this sound familiar? Of course it does, at least to anyone who has been tracking Fox News or the utterances of political figures like Lindsey Graham or Kevin McCarthy.

Many people, myself included, have declared for years that the G.O.P. is no longer a normal political party. It doesn’t look anything like, say, Dwight Eisenhower’s Republican Party or Germany’s Christian Democrats. But it bears a growing resemblance to the ruling parties of autocratic regimes.

The only unusual thing about the G.O.P.’s wholesale adoption of the Leader Principle is that the party doesn’t have a monopoly on power; in fact, it controls neither Congress nor the White House. Politicians suspected of insufficient loyalty to Donald Trump and Trumpism in general aren’t sent to the gulag. At most, they stand to lose intraparty offices and, possibly, future primaries. Yet such is the timidity of Republican politicians that these mild threats are apparently enough to make many of them behave like Caligula’s courtiers.

Unfortunately, all this loyalty signaling is putting the whole nation at risk. In fact, it will almost surely kill large numbers of Americans in the next few months. . . .

The G.O.P. has become something different, with, as far as I know, no precedent in American history although with many precedents abroad. Republicans have created for themselves a political realm in which costly demonstrations of loyalty transcend considerations of good policy or even basic logic. And all of us may pay the price.

The Republican Party Has Become The Cult Of Trump

We used to have two major political parties in this country -- the conservative Republican Party and the liberal Democratic Party.

They were not enemies, even though they pursued different economic goals. They talked to each other, and debated the important issues facing the country. And then they negotiated to find compromises that moved the country forward.

This is the way it must be in a democracy. At least two parties are needed to prevent either party from making a mistake in their passion for their beliefs. Throughout our history this has worked well to preserve our democracy and solve our problems.

Unfortunately, that is no longer true. The Republican Party has died --  or at least is critically ill and unable to act like a true political party. It has been taken over by racists, white supremacists, religious bigots, and conspiracy theorists. And those people have only one true belief -- supporting Donald Trump and his lies.

They even said as much in their 2020 political convention. Instead of writing a party platform, they simply stated that their party believed whatever Donald Trump wanted to do was what they want. 

They are no longer a Conservative party. Trump has tossed many conservative values under the bus, and that is OK with the members. They no longer believe in free trade, but have accepted Trump trade war tariffs. They no longer believe in democracy, but are willing to overturn the results of a democratic election. In fact, they only have one value -- loyalty to Trump. They have truly become the Cult of Trump.

This is bad, because Trump sees the country (and world) as peopled only by friends and enemies. The friends are those who praise him and show loyalty (regardless of what he might do). The enemies are those who dare to speak the truth. And he will not negotiate with those he considers an enemy.

That means the elected officials in his cult cannot negotiate either. Whatever Democrats want, or try to do, they must oppose it. They call for bipartisanship, but for them that means surrender to whatever they want.

I have never voted for a Republican, and disagree with the policies they used to have. But they performed a valuable function in our democratic form of government. We need them. Sadly, I don't know if the party can survive its current illness. I hope it can. Our democracy cannot survive without two viable parties.
 

GOP Has No Platform - It's Now Officially A Cult Of Trump

Political parties have a platform -- a document voted on by convention delegates that explains what the party believes in and the policies they support.

Democrats passed a platform during their convention. It was far too long, about 91 pages, and few people will ever read it. But they have one, and anyone wishing to know what the Democratic Party supports can easily access it online to find out.

It's what political parties do. Without a platform, a party is rudderless and the public cannot know whether they agree with the party or not.

This year, the Republican Party decided it doesn't need a platform. Instead, they passed a resolution saying that the party accepts and supports the agenda of Donald Trump. They don't say what that agenda is, and evidently it doesn't matter -- whatever Trump does is what they support.

That's not a political party. It's a cult bowing to whatever their leader wants -- the Cult of Trump. If you agree with Trump, you're a good Republican. If you don't, then you're not a Republican.

Here is their pathetic resolution:

The Republican Party, Under Trump, Is A Death Cult

There's simply no other way to put it. The Republican Party, by following and excusing Donald Trump, has become a cult of DEATH!

Here's part of how Tom Nichols puts it in an op-ed in USA Today:

America has now passed the milestone of 4 million COVID cases, and we’re still arguing with doctors and epidemiologists about masks and school closures. I expected some of this, because I literally wrote the book over three years ago on why so many Americans think they’re smarter than experts. What I did not expect is that this resolute and childish opposition to expertise would be hijacked by the president of the United States and an entire American political party, and then turned into a suicide cult.

It did not take a lot of foresight to know, even before the coronavirus arrived, that the United States was leaving itself vulnerable to a crisis that would require the public to trust experts. We long ago became a narcissistic nation whose citizens believe they can become competent in almost any subject by watching enough television and spending enough time on the internet. But I was certain that a true national crisis — a war, a depression, or yes, a pandemic — would snap people back to reality.

I was wrong to be so optimistic. . . .

There is no one more responsible for this particular moment than President Donald Trump, but all he has done is play to a gallery whose seats were already full by the time he ran for office. Trump appealed to a powerful sense of narcissistic grievance among millions of Americans, nurturing it and feeding it. An entire claque of enablers joined in, knowing there was plenty of money to be made feeding this self-centered, anti-social nihilism.

When the pandemic arrived, these enablers in the conservative media and among the cowardly Republican political class took their cues — masks, no masks, closing, opening — from Trump, whose statements for months were a fusillade of nonsense that reflected only his own pouty anger that Mother Nature had the sheer brass to mess up his presidential grift. . . .

Americans who are now driving the pandemic are not sudden skeptics about masks or distancing or expert opinion because of street protests. Some of them reject expertise because of the previous “failures” of experts. This is always one of the reflexive explanations for the refusal to listen to the educated and experienced. Expert failures are real and happen every day, but the people who sullenly refuse to wear a mask during a pandemic are not doing so because the United States failed to find Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, or because the housing market crashed in 2008.

Rather, they are doing so because they see endangering others as empowerment, a way of telling people whom they believe look down on them that no one, no matter how smart or accomplished, can tell them what to do. For these people, our national motto is not “In God We Trust” or “E Pluribus Unum,” but rather: “You’re Not the Boss of Me.”

So committed are these Americans to assuaging their sore egos over their imagined lack of status that they are literally willing to die for it. Unfortunately, they seem all too willing to take many of us with them. This is not Jonestown or Heaven’s Gate, whose cult members fled society to go and die together. This is worse. This is an attempt to create a Jonestown in every American city and town and then invite the rest of us over for a cool drink.

The irony here is that the same people who reject expertise because they believe they are smart and clued in to the mistakes of experts will accept the word of Donald Trump — a man who has obliterated most of the projects he’s ever been involved with and who stands as the uncontested champion of American public liars — as the gospel truth. . . .

On the same day that America hit a grisly new record, President Trump went on television to explain both that he must cancel his cherished plans for a political convention while insisting that children be sent back to school in the coming weeks. Millions of Americans nodded along with him, secure in the knowledge that scientists are quacks and that no one understands viruses like Donald Trump. They will likely still believe that even as they lie in a hospital bed and are given last rites with a ventilator down their throats.

If only the rest of us did not have to risk being in the bed next to them.

Trump Has Turned The GOP Into A Cult Of Death

I have never agreed with Republican economic policies. I think they favor the rich and the corporations over most other Americans, and their policies have resulted in a nation of economic inequality.

But there have been Republicans in the past that I grudgingly respected. While I thought their economic ideas were wrong, I believed they really wanted what was best for this country.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the modern Republican Party. They nominated (and got elected) the most corrupt, cruel, and incompetent man to ever inhabit the White House, and they refuse to hold him responsible for his actions.

That was bad enough, but Trump's actions regarding the Coronavirus pandemic have amplified all of his faults. He ignored all the warnings he received about the impending pandemic in December and January. His only action was to ban people coming in from China at the end of January -- but only after about 400,000 people had already arrived. Then he did nothing else until the middle of March. He rejected tests offered by W.H.O., and put this nation far behind on testing while the virus raged. Because of his incompetence, we still are far behind in the testing that's needed and are trying to fight the virus without the information needed to be successful.

He has refused to accept any responsibility for his incompetence, even though it has resulted in thousands of unnecessary deaths of innocent Americans. Instead, he is now trying to make it much worse. He is urging state governors to end stay-at-home orders and reopen their businesses. He is hoping the economy will quickly rebound and save his re-election bid. It won't, but he thinks it is his only hope to rehabilitate his image.

He doesn't seem to care that none of the states are ready to reopen (with the number of Coronavirus cases and deaths continuing to rise in all of them). He doesn't care that his pressure on the governors will cost many thousands more lives. He has made the choice that the profits of banks, corporations, and hedge funds are more important than the lives of American citizens. And to that end, he is praising the racist pro-virus protesters that put their fellow citizens in danger. For both Trump and these protesters, money is more important than deaths.

And Republican officials on both the state and federal level has joined Trump in making that assessment. They have become a death cult that worships money -- and if they have to see hundreds of thousands of Americans die to save the rich and the corporations, then so be it. They are Greedy Old Patriarchs, who are willing to trade lives for profit.

Most Americans Think Donald Trump Is A Criminal

The chart above reflects the results of the new Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between March 3rd and 5th of a national sample of 1,500 adults (including 1,304 registered voters). The margin of error for adults is 3.2 points, and for registered voters is 2.8 points.

It shows that a significant portion of Americans believe that Donald Trump has committed a serious crime -- all adults by a 24 point margin (49% to 25%), and registered voters by a 26 point margin (53% to 27%).

Most amazing to me is that only 52% of Republicans and 53% of Trump voters say he has not committed a serious crime. That means 48% of Republicans and 47% of Trump voters either believe he did or aren't sure whether he did or not. And yet they continue to support him, and say they would vote for his re-election.

It shows the power of hate. Those people don't support Trump because of his agenda. He really doesn't have an agenda (conservative or otherwise). His only agenda is to do what he thinks is good for himself (and that is subject to change at a moment's notice).

So, why do these people continue to support him? It's because they value hate above morality and/or policy. The white supremacists and other racists like Trump because they see him as hating the same people they hate (minorities, Jews, etc.). The xenophobes like Trump because they see him hating the same people they hate (immigrants). The evangelicals like Trump because they see him as hating the same people they do (gays, lesbians, transgendered). The corporate powers like Trump because they see him as hating the same people they do (workers, the poor). Trump appeals to the hate in all those groups.

There are no positive values in the cult of Trump. They will tell you that's he's making the country great again -- but for them, making the country great means hating and discriminating against other Americans. They want to return the country back to a time when rich white men ruled, and no one else had any rights.

For those in Trump's cult, hate is the overriding belief. It "trumps" love, morality, honesty, fairness, equality, and generosity. And in Trump, they have found their leader. He shares their lack of any value but hate.

Trump's Followers Are Members Of A Terrifying Cult

(Cartoon image is by Nikola Listes at cagle.com.)

Cult members are people who have abandoned rational thinking. For them, only their cult's leader speaks the truth. Everyone else is lying. That's what their leader tells them, and they believe it.

Doesn't this sound familiar? Isn't that a valid description of the people who follow Donald Trump? Haven't they abandoned rational political thought to buy into the lies of their leader? And finally, doesn't that make them members of a new cult -- the cult of Trump? I think so.

The inimitable John Pavlovitz (pictured) also thinks so. Here is some of what he had to say about this in his own excellent blog:

America is in a cultic crisis, and Trumpism is the cult. There is no other way to approach these days.

When you believe one man above Science, above our Intelligence agencies, above former CIA directors and retired generals and revered journalists—when you believe that one man above even your own eyes and ears—you are fully indoctrinated.
This hasn’t happened by accident, but by sickening design. Cult leaders prey upon emotionally vulnerable people, leveraging their loneliness, their disenfranchisement, their disconnection. They bombard their targets with a steady stream of misinformation, incendiary rhetoric, and chaotic prophecy—and into the swirling confusion created inside their heads, they come promising safety and security, while having no concern for them at all. They start a fire—and rush in with a bucket of water.

Donald Trump has mastered the art of emergency manufacturing and danger generation. We saw this during the near month-long Government shutdown. He convinced his followers that violent, drug-carrying immigrants were streaming across the border to duct tape and rape women, he then feigned courage by boldly and publicly vowing to protect them by shutting down the Government. He then did so, and after weeks of complete inactivity and not a single change, stood in the White House Rose Garden, claiming victory against a fictional adversary by stopping an unnecessary crisis that he alone created.

Every day he designs a false threat, steps in to the nonexistent battlefield, and declares himself victorious to a group of now emotionally dependent human beings, whose internal story and well-being depends on him winning. That’s the only way their world makes sense anymore, it is the only outcome they can conceive of.

People who’ve tried to rescue their loved ones from such inculcation will tell you how incredibly difficult it is to deprogram them after such repeated deception, such prolonged lying, such protracted fear. They will detail the excruciating efforts to reach parents and best friends and adult children, through the haze of their addiction to the connection they have come to feel with someone who is predatory toward them.And many will describe the long and bloody battles they’ve fought for the people they love—battles they  sometimes ultimately lost to the cult. . . .

No one willingly joins a cult. They are lured and tricked and coerced all the up to the precipice of emotional and intellectual surrender—and then they fall in. Once there, it is nearly impossible for them to leave voluntarily. They can’t see that they are fighting against their own self-interest by aligning with the one holding them hostage.

The Republican Party Is Now A Trump-Worshipping Cult

(Cartoon image is by Adam Zyglis in The Buffalo News.)

The Republican Party is no longer recognizable. It was once the party of conservative principles and "family" values. It has abandoned both to follow and worship a man with no political principles or moral values. It has morphed into a cult of personality -- a cult willing to do whatever their leader demands of them. The once proud party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower is gone. It is now just the cult of Trump.

Daily Kos gives us 10 signs of this descent into cult status:

1. The leader is the ultimate authority

If you’re not allowed to criticize your leader, even if the criticism is true, you’re probably in a cult.

2. The group suppresses skepticism

If you’re only allowed to study your organization through approved sources, you’re probably in a cult.

3. The group delegitimizes former members

If you can’t think of a legitimate reason for leaving your group, you’re probably in a cult.

4. The group is paranoid about the outside world

If you believe the end of the world is near, you’re probably in a cult.

5. The group relies on shame cycles

If you need your group in order to feel worthy, loved, or sufficient, you’re probably in a cult.

6. The leader is above the law 

If you’re held to a different moral standard, specifically in regard to sex, you’re probably in a cult.

7. The group uses “thought reform” methods

If your serious questions are answered with cliches, you’re probably in a cult.

8. The group is elitist

If your group is the solution for all the world’s problems, you’re probably in a cult.

9. There is no financial transparency

If you’re not allowed to know what the group does with their money, you’re probably in a cult.

10. The group performs secret rites

If there are secret teachings or ceremonies you didn’t discover until after you joined, you’re probably in a cult.

I don't know about number 10, but the current GOP certainly has the first 9 elements. I find this sad. While I am not a conservative, I do think a democracy needs two or more parties with opposing philosophies. Democracy is preserved by voters having a choice between principled political parties. We are in trouble when one of those parties devolves into an unprincipled cult.

The Republican Party Must be Destroyed (For Its Own Good)

(Cartoon image is by Gary Varvel in The Indianapolis Star.)

Regular readers of this blog will know I am a progressive Democrat. I have never voted for a Republican, and probably never will. But that doesn't mean I think this nation only needs one political party. We have seen what happens to countries with only one party, and it isn't pretty.

Our traditional two-party system has worked pretty well. Having two parties acting as a check on each other prevents either party from turning the country into an authoritarian dictatorship. And it lets the citizens (through their vote) decide the path the country should take.

But today's Republican Party has lost its way. It is no longer a traditional conservative party. It has become a cult of personality -- following a racist, xenophobic, and misogynistic leader who has no respect for the traditional conservative principles of the party. It's now the party of Trump -- devoid of values or principles.

It needs to be decimated by voters in the 2018 and 2020 elections. That needs to happen so it can rebuild itself, and once again offer voters a real choice -- so it can shed its current cult status and once again become a real political party.

I'm not the only one who believes this. Consider this small part of an article by Max Boot in The Washington Post:

After a lifetime as a Republican, I re-registered as an independent on the day after Donald Trump’s election. . . .

I am more convinced than ever that I made the right decision. The transformation I feared has taken place. Just look at the reaction to President Trump’s barbarous policy of taking children away from their parents as punishment for the misdemeanor offense of illegally entering the country. While two-thirds of Americans disapproved of this state-sanctioned child abuse, forcing the president to back down, a majority of Republicans approved. If Trump announced he were going to spit-roast immigrant kids and eat them on national TV (apologies to Jonathan Swift), most Republicans probably would approve of that, too. The entire Republican platform can now be reduced to three words: whatever Trump says. . . .

Personally, I’ve thrown up my hands in despair at the debased state of the GOP. I don’t want to be identified with the party of the child-snatchers. But I respect principled conservatives who are willing to stay and fight to reclaim a once-great party that freed the slaves and helped to win the Cold War. What I can’t respect are head-in-the-sand conservatives who continue to support the GOP by pretending that nothing has changed.

They act, these political ostriches, as if this were still the party of Ronald Reagan and John McCain rather than of Stephen K. Bannon and Stephen Miller — and therefore they cling to the illusion that supporting Republican candidates will advance their avowed views. Wrong. The current GOP still has a few resemblances to the party of old — it still cuts taxes and supports conservative judges. But a vote for the GOP in November is also a vote for egregious obstruction of justice, rampant conflicts of interest, the demonization of minorities, the debasement of political discourse, the alienation of America’s allies, the end of free trade and the appeasement of dictators.

That is why I join . . . other principled conservatives, both current and former Republicans, in rooting for a Democratic takeover of both houses in November. Like postwar Germany and Japan, the Republican Party must be destroyed before it can be rebuilt.