Crepitus
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- Mar 28, 2018
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That's right, they were warned, but nobody paid attention.
From 2012
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From 2012
"Let's just say it: The Republicans are the problem."
Published in 2012, that Washington Post piece demonstrates more than the foresight of its political scientist authors, Tom Mann of the center-left Brookings Institution and Norm Ornstein of the center-right American Enterprise Institute. It shows the disease within the Republican Party had spread long before Trump metastasized it.
Their conclusions -- that the GOP had become "ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition" -- did not gain wide acceptance then. Many journalists joined leading Republicans in dismissing them.
"Ultra, ultra liberals" whose views "carry no weight with me," sneered Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell.
"I thought they overstated things," Republican Charlie Dent, then serving his fourth term in the House from Pennsylvania, recalls now.
"People like me were thinking, 'Yeah, there are some kooky people around, but c'mon,'" says William Kristol, who was then editing the conservative Weekly Standard magazine. With John Boehner as House speaker and Mitt Romney winning the GOP presidential nomination, Kristol saw the Republican mainstream still in command.
Facing reality
All have since gotten slugged by reality. What ailed the party in 2012 has worsened.
Kristol's magazine, having diverged from Trump-era orthodoxy, no longer exists. Of his earlier sources of reassurance: Boehner fled Congress to author a book decrying his colleagues' dysfunction; Romney has become a pariah as the only Republican senator who twice voted to convict Trump on impeachment charges.
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Analysis: Dismissed in 2012, this diagnosis of GOP ills has now become undeniable
The essay described congressional extremists, their rejection of truth, a party turning into authoritarians or "an apocalyptic cult." It bore a striking headline:
www.cnn.com