The Reach To Impeach, Con't

The Republican party only exists to enable Donald Trump to do the things they've wanted to do for decades now, namely reverse the Civil Rights and Voting Rights era and to return the country back to the historical norms as a white supremacist regime.  Paul Krugman on the Death Cult of Trumpism:

Formally, the House of Representatives is holding an inquiry into the question of whether Donald J. Trump should be impeached. In reality, we’ve known the answer to that question for a long time. In a different era, when both parties believed in the Constitution, Trump’s abuse of his position for personal gain would have led to his removal from office long ago.

No, what we’re actually witnessing is a test of the depths to which the Republican Party will sink. How much corruption, how much collusion with foreign powers and betrayal of the national interest will that party’s elected representatives stand for?

And the result of that test seems increasingly clear: There is no bottom. The inquiry hasn’t found a smoking gun; it has found what amounts to a smoking battery of artillery. Yet almost no partisan Republicans have turned on Trump and his high-crimes-and-misdemeanors collaborators. Why not?

The answer gets to the heart of what’s wrong with modern American politics: The G.O.P. is now a thoroughly corrupt party. Trump is a symptom, not the disease, and our democracy will remain under dire threat even if and when he’s gone.

Even if Trump resigned this weekend, the damage he has done to the country will most likely outlive myself.  It will take us decades just to get back to the relative progressiveness of say, 2013.

The usual explanation you hear for G.O.P. acquiescence in Trumpian malfeasance is that elected Republicans fear being defeated in a primary if they show any hint of wavering. And that’s certainly an important part of the story.

Republicans haven’t forgotten what happened in 2014, when David Brat, a Tea Party insurgent, ousted Eric Cantor, at the time the House majority leader. Cantor was a hard-line conservative, but mild-mannered in affect, and perceived as soft on immigration. The lesson was that the G.O.P. base demands red meat, and these days that means supporting Trump no matter what.

But electoral fears aren’t the only thing keeping Republicans in line.

On one side, I don’t think most observers realize, even now, the extent to which many Republicans view their domestic opponents not as fellow citizens but as enemies with no legitimate right to govern.

William Barr, the attorney general, says that progressives are “militant secularists” out to “destroy the traditional moral order.” If that’s how you see the world, you’ll support anything — up to and including soliciting and/or extorting intervention by foreign powers in U.S. elections — that helps defeat those progressives.

I've been saying this for years.  Republicans want to make sure that non-Christians, non-whites, LGBTQ+ folks, women, and immigrants are second-class citizens, legally, morally, and socially. I keep referring to the Republic of Gilead, the fictional dystopia of the Handmaid's Tale, for a reason.

It's not fiction any longer.  It's a civil planning manual.

For those to the manor-born, the safety of being the right people.  For the rest of us, we are tolerated only as long as we support the system.  The second we speak out against the arrangement, we become enemies of the state.

We are only subject to rights as long as they are earned by being one of the good ones. Everyone else is a traitor.  The GOP wants this so badly they can taste it.  They'll never turn on Trump, because he is letting them do whatever they want, and they win as long as they continue to support him.

Tens of millions of Americans now support a criminal enterprise out of necessity, failure to do so means they will be destroyed by the monster they created.