Why The Republican Party is Dead To Me, and Why It Needs To Crash and Burn Forever

As the revelations into the Ukraine scandal expose more of the depths of trump's eternal corruption, it's also exposing why a once-respected political party has devolved into the cranks, conspiracy nuts, thieves, and violent extremists eager to promote any act of evil.

There's a reason why trump flourished as a con artist in the Republican Party: The GOP was already consumed by its own rot. Let me refer to Adam Serwer's piece in the Atlantic (warning, they use a paywall now):

What the Framers may not have contemplated, however, is the extent to which a demagogue is capable of convincing his supporters that the president and the people are one and the same, and therefore, the president is incapable of betraying the people, because he is their purest expression made flesh. Trump is but a crass distillation of this anti-democratic idea, but if it were not deeply rooted in the Republican Party, he could never have ascended to its leadership.

Already, Republicans have sought to dismiss Trump’s explicit attempt to extort a foreign leader into criminalizing a political rival by denying that the summary of the call shows what it shows. Republican legislators believe there is nothing the president could do to lose the support of the people who put them in office, and so there is no political benefit to acknowledging his misconduct, even though they would immediately demand the impeachment or resignation of any Democratic president who did the same thing. In the 1990s, Republicans impeached Bill Clinton over his false denials of sexual impropriety; they would not hesitate to impeach a Democratic president who withheld foreign aid to extract a smear of his Republican rivals.

This is the "If Obama Did X, Republicans Would Go Apeshit" theory. Republicans don't mind their own committing crimes and sins that the GOP would accuse Democrats of committing. The hypocrisy of it reeks but Republicans seem to enjoy the smell. Back to Serwer:

But behind this unfailing submission to Trump also lie more troubling influences. As the parties have become more racially polarized, and the Republican Party has become more exclusively white and Christian, Republicans have begun to think of themselves as the only genuinely legitimate actors in the polity. This is why Republicans draw districts that hand them more offices even when they fail to win a majority of the votes; it is why Republican legislatures strip Democratic executives of their powers when the electorate foils their efforts to rig elections in their favor; it is why the Trump administration attempted a fraudulent scheme to use the census to diminish the influence of minority voters relative to white voters; it is why Republicans seek to pass laws intended to suppress minority votes; it is why every night on Fox News, viewers hear one host after another outline deranged conspiracies about how Democrats want to steal America from its rightful white owners through demographic change...

The Republican belief that their opposition is inherently illegitimate is one reason it does not matter to many Republicans that Trump’s allegations that Biden sought to get a Ukrainian prosecutor fired to prevent his son from being investigated are baseless. As CNN’s Daniel Dale has documented, there is no public evidence that Hunter Biden was ever himself under investigation; the prosecutor whose firing Biden called for as vice president was widely considered corrupt; the investigation Biden supposedly shut down was “dormant” at the time Biden expressed the view of the Obama administration that the prosecutor should be fired; and the reason world leaders, including Barack Obama, were demanding his firing in the first place was that he was failing to investigate corruption in Ukraine, not that he was being prevented from doing so. As my colleague David Graham writes, “Biden’s pressure to install a tougher prosecutor probably made it more likely, not less, that Burisma would be in the cross hairs.”

Attempting to use one’s official powers for private gain is the most basic definition of corruption. Yet because the base of the Republican Party believes itself to be the only legitimate expression of popular will, whether or not its members constitute an actual majority of the electorate, it does not matter what Trump’s motives are. Much of the Republican base believes, as Trump does, that loyalty to the country and loyalty to himself are one and the same. Therefore, nothing Trump could do is corrupt, and even using his official powers for personal gain is an act of selfless patriotism. In this warped view, attempting to extort foreign countries into attacking his political rivals is not a betrayal of his responsibilities as president; it is the fullest expression of them.

Unless Republican support for Trump craters, Republican legislators will not turn against him. And Republican support for Trump cannot crater as long as many Republicans view their political rivals as illegitimate political actors rather than fellow citizens...

This - the failure to recognize and accept all Americans as part of this wide and diverse nation, the hatred for minorities and dread Other that consumed the GOP's collective heart - is one of the big reasons why I fled the Republican Party after 2000... Well after 1992 actually, but it took awhile to move myself to change voter affiliation. McCain during the 2000 primaries was the last Republican I ever supported.

This is why I've been screaming for more than a decade now for people to stop voting Republican. You're not voting for am honest political party when you do. You're not voting for an ideology worth supporting. You'll be voting for a corrupt criminal conspiracy of its own, raised on its own self-serving desires to seize all it can and punish everyone else through rage and destruction.

Gods help us. Until a majority of Americans wake up to the fact that Republicans are corrupt and at war with fellow Americans, this will get worse.