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It’s remarkable, when you step back and think about it, how toxically maladapted the power centers in U.S. politics have become to one another.
A simple-minded idealist might like to live in a world where the two major U.S. political parties advance competing visions of the future, and the free press picks those platforms apart for the public, in a stable equilibrium. Sometimes Democrats win, sometimes Republicans win, but the process always repeats.
You don’t have to be a naif to notice that the actual relationships between these institutions have become unsustainably perverse. The dysfunction makes everyone who participates in the system miserable, and leaves everyone in the country worse off. But, amazingly, almost nobody in the mix shows any interest in trying to force a reset.
Today there is no equilibrium, because the GOP has become a predatory, rule-or-ruin party. Its purpose, rather than to remake the world in some appealing way, is to crush obstacles to its own power. It doesn’t interact professionally with adversarial media figures, it tries to destroy them. It doesn’t try to compete with the Democratic Party, it tries not to compete with the Democratic Party, by rigging elections and the rule of law.
The less said about this perfidy the better—at least until justice arrives.
Who has time for such crushing frustration? For juxtaposing ruminating on all the bad acts they’ve committed without consequence?
But this approach of theirs has not left them well poised for one-party rule. They may derive sadistic satisfaction from owning the libs, but lib-owning nourishes very few Americans. And that’s before anyone becomes repulsed by the party’s corruption and incompetence.
Republicans are trapped in a vicious cycle, with special emphasis on the root word “vice.” It is causing them to unravel.
