“The Republican Party has become the insurgent outlier in American politics,” they write. “It is ideologically extreme. It despises compromise. It is unmoved by conventional understandings of facts, evidence, and science. And it delegitimizes political opposition. It pushes one party too far from the mainstream. , it becomes nearly impossible for the political system to constructively address the nation’s challenges.”
Mann and Ornstein–I should note that they are friends of mine and wrote subsequent books together–gave a lot of grief to their supposed partisanship. This criticism flies in the face of thoroughly balanced, highly regarded work by many Republican politicians, who have spent their entire professional careers deeply committed to making our nation’s political system work better. .
The events of the past week not only confirm what they wrote, but also suggest that, in their words, things are now even worse.
It is one thing for a party to object to the other party’s proposal on the basis of differences in principle. Small-d democratic politics should be a competition of ideas and a debate about which remedies are more effective.
It is quite another for political parties to reject their own ideas for dealing with a crisis simply because they do not want to interfere with campaign issues. This is exactly what Republicans did at the behest of former President Donald Trump after President Biden and Senate Democrats offered the best deal Republicans could hope for to strengthen the country’s southern border.
You have to feel sorry for Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.). His tough views on immigration were why he was chosen by Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to negotiate the border deal. Trump himself described Lankford as “strong on the border” in his 2022 endorsement.
But if Trump claims the right to break the law as president, he also claims the right to lie with impunity. He falsely claimed, “I didn’t support Sen. Lankford. I didn’t.” The former Trump University student is familiar with this kind of thing.
On the Senate floor, Lankford detailed what’s been happening recently with Republicans trying to pass legislation. He said a “popular commentator” threatened to “ruin” him if he tried to resolve the border crisis in an election year.
This episode illustrates how trends that Mann and Ornstein caught early on have metastasized. Power within the Republican Party is shifting away from elected officials and toward right-wing “commentators” on television, radio, podcasts, and online. The formation of an ideological media bubble strengthens its power. Instead of straight news reporting, many Republicans rely on partisan news outlets that freely spew lies about what Lankford’s compromise did and didn’t do.
The party’s hostile atmosphere can also be traced back to the Bush administration-era habit of distinguishing between “real America” (a place that votes Republican) and a supposedly unreal America. Declaring a large portion of the population to be less than American means that they are not worth dealing with and become increasingly despised.
Additionally, there are denigrations of science, dispassionate research, and technical knowledge. Author Tom Nichols, in his book The Death of Expertise, ruefully describes this as a “campaign against established knowledge.”
Of course, challenging experts is a democratic right, and it serves to denounce those who hide their interests behind claims of special understanding. But Republicans have used this practice for raw political purposes in their opposition to climate action, necessary regulation, and public health advice.
Something big happened in this field in the late 2000s. The Republican attitude toward climate is clear. In 2007, the Pew Research Center found that 62 percent of Republicans believed there was solid evidence of global warming. By 2009, only 35% of people did so.
Many Republicans, particularly John McCain, were active in the climate change debate at the beginning of this decade. After that, it is not so. This represents a significant retreat from solving the problem, reflected in the Republican Party’s flight from an immigration proposal they could have crafted themselves, which they largely did thanks to Mr. Lankford.
For those who are trying to hold out hope, there are some straws to grasp at. The Senate could approve aid to Ukraine, putting pressure on House Republican leaders to honor the nation’s commitments. Meanwhile, the House of Representatives passed a significant increase in the child tax credit, and Senate Republicans may follow suit.
But the way things are going, Republicans in each chamber are likely to ignore each other’s better instincts. There’s no such thing as “worst,” but that might be necessary if Mann and Ornstein publish a new edition.