There’s a word to describe political movements that emphasize ethnic, racial and religious solidarity over citizenship and pluralistic values, but it has unpleasant historical associations. Using it only causes political conversations to end in bitterness and name-calling.
So let us simply observe that what’s going on in today’s Republican Party represents the seeming fulfillment of Vladimir Putin’s ambitions for the Trump presidency. Undermining confidence in elections has long been Job One in the Kremlin: discrediting democracy to promote strongman rule. But Putin’s too cynical to understand America.
It matters not to him that the strongman in question is an incompetent blowhard, a clownish figure in elevator shoes. One of America’s two dominant political parties is in the process of losing its collective mind. Indeed the very preposterousness of Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” about being cheated out of an election he lost by seven million votes—claims rejected for lack of evidence in more than sixty courts of law—only enhances their allure for conspiratorial thinkers. Continue reading.