It’s disingenuous to accuse the Republican Party of responsibility for the dysfunctional reality show that is our current government. The prevailing wisdom suggests that the Republican Party controls the House, Senate and White House, but I would argue that this is an incorrect assumption.
In the House, there exists a secretive cabal known as the Freedom Caucus, which is closer to early 20th-century anarchists than any ideological model of the traditional Republican Party.
Add to those three dozen representatives the likes of Sens. Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Tom Cotton, Charles Grassley and Mike Lee and you quickly see that the so-called Republican majority is actually much more like a parliamentary coalition.
It is sheer hubris to connect Cruz and Jeff Flake, or Cotton and John McCain, with anything more than the letter after their names.
In a letter about two years ago, I predicted the impending dissolution of the Republican Party, mostly because of their opportunistic and short-sighted choice to support racist and nationalist policies as a means of winning the executive branch (despite the well-known fact that their presidential candidate was posing as a Republican merely out of expediency and opportunism rather than any deeply held beliefs). But what I overlooked was just how many of their members were not being politically expedient.
As long as the Republican Party is splintered between ideological fascism and political pragmatism, there is no hope of rational debate and compromise.
The 2018 election cycle will be a major shift. By 2021, if the current schism prevails, I predict a new third political party comprised of the most rabid and totalitarian members of the Republican Party, making any future Republican congressional majority a mathematical impossibility.
Nathaniel Parkinson
Monmouth
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