If it seems like Democratic Party politicians don’t understand the Republican Party, that’s because they don’t! An article from CNN confirmed this:
“It seems as though the Republican Party is trying to identify what it stands for and they’re in the midst of a significant sort of mini-revolution,” Biden said in response to a question to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins during a White House event.” … “I think the Republicans are further away from trying to figure out who they are and what they stand for than I thought they would be at this point,” he added.
The standard mainstream political view is that there are no fascists, and so politicians just need to work through their superficial differences to make some kind of progress toward a “more perfect union”. But in reality, the Republican Party has been increasingly fascistic since Nixon’s time in office and the beginning of the “Southern Strategy” and that change only accelerated during the Tea Party takeover; then, the Trump era cemented that change.
Still, there are politicians who just can’t accept that the Republican Party has gone full fascist. Most of those politicians are Democrats, but a few of them (like Liz Cheney) are Republicans. All those Republicans that retired during the Trump era figured it out; they retired because they saw it had become a fascist party and did not want to participate.
It’s really frustrating that Democrats have been so hard-headed in terms of accepting the facts that are right in front of their faces. It’s like watching a vampire movie where the protagonists refuse to accept that vampires exist. It was a humanoid with fangs, it bit you and sucked your blood, but you won’t call it a vampire. Interesting.
If Joe Biden or any other Democratic Party politicians are reading this, we can help you understand the Republican Party! They are fascists. If you are finding common ground with them, you are finding common ground with fascists. If you are trying to cooperate with them, you are cooperating with fascists. If you are compromising with them, you are compromising with fascists. If you agree with them regarding some detail, you should think really hard about why you agree. The Republican Party isn’t having trouble determining who they are and what they stand for. The Republican party has already figured out that they are fascists and that they stand for fascism. Liz Cheney represents the last of its members willing to fight to go back to neoliberalism, but she’s too late.
It is fascinating that analysists from both sides of the aisle often seem to think that the Republican party sliding into fascism is the end of the 2-party system in the US. I’d like to hear their thinking on that.
Can you have a 2-party system where one of those parties is fascist? It’s an interesting question. I think we can, but if the answer is “no”, then an even more interesting question is whether the Republican party cleansing itself of the last vestiges of democracy will mean that it is destroy or if, instead, the Democratic Party will be destroyed. You can imagine that those Republicans who fled the party might start a third party, and I suppose the assumption is that this third party would destroy the Republicans’ ability to win offices, but I think it is just as likely that a third party would pull donors and voters away from the near-right Democratic Party, and destroy it instead (after a period of electoral politics chaos).