Unless voters reject candidates who run on lies 2024 …

The Republicans are feeling liberated “to set the country on fire” because they know no matter what they do people will continue to vote for them.

Paul Waldman - Washington Post

“Opinion: Republicans are feeling liberated ― to set the country on fire”


Opinion by
Paul Waldman
Columnist
Today at 1:36 p.m. EDT


“When Joe Biden ran for president in 2020, he predicted that once Donald Trump was turned out of office, the Republican Party would become more reasonable. Republicans would have an “epiphany,” he said, even asserting that the GOP Senate would become “mildly cooperative.”

It’s unclear whether Biden genuinely believed that or simply found it useful to be seen expressing a hope for bipartisanship. But the common response at the time was that he was being naive. The GOP would not change.

Yet today, we can see that Repubicans have — but in the opposite way. They’ve gotten more radical, more determined to create destruction and division, more willing to set the country aflame if they think the conflagration will burn their opponents.

Here’s what they seem to understand: Being in the opposition offers a kind of liberation. Those running the country are the only ones for whom accountability comes calling — which means the opposition can be as reckless, as extreme and even as hateful as it wants.

It has always been true that political accountability falls most heavily on the president; it has been said for decades that he gets more credit than he deserves when the economy does well and more blame than he deserves when it does poorly. But ever-intensifying polarization means the opposition need no longer worry that it will be held responsible for what it does, because only the president and his party will be judged.

Or at least that’s the theory the GOP is operating from. Just look at what it has been doing of late.

Senate Republicans just filibustered a bill to keep the government running and suspend the debt ceiling so the United States does not default on its obligations. Judging them by their actions, there’s every reason to believe they’d be perfectly happy to allow either or both outcomes, plunging the country into crisis and potential economic catastrophe.

Their entire party seems determined to make sure that a pandemic that has killed 700,000 Americans will go on as long as possible.

In the states and the courts, they’ve set the stage to overturn Roe v. Wade, a spectacularly unpopular outcome that will snatch reproductive rights from tens of millions of American women. They’ve embraced lunatic conspiracy theories and are determined to overturn any election result that doesn’t go their way.
And in their immensely influential media outfits, naked White supremacism is now nightly fare.

In 2017 it was a scandal when then-President Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” of the Charlottesville rally where neo-Nazis chanted “You will not replace us!” But in 2021, “Great Replacement” theory — which posits a conspiracy to replace White people with dark-skinned immigrants — has become standard conservative rhetoric.

Let there be no misunderstanding: The Great Replacement is an idea created by White supremacists and promoted for years by White supremacists. Today you can hear it invoked on Fox News.

Its roots go back decades, but the term comes most directly from French writer Renaud Camus, whose 2011 book “Le Grand Remplacement” argued that White Europeans were being overrun by non-White immigrants from Africa and the Middle East. The term “Great Replacement” soon became a watchword for violent racists around the world; before killing 51 people at two New Zealand mosques in 2019, a homicidal racist posted an online manifesto titled “The Great Replacement.”

It is simply mind-boggling that in the last few months, the idea and the slogan have become just one more thing Republicans say. Tucker Carlson uses his nightly cable news program to explicitly endorse it: “This policy is called ‘the great replacement,’ the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries,” Carlson has said. Even the most simpleminded viewer knows exactly what Carlson means by “legacy Americans.”

Meanwhile, the rest of Fox News programming is brimming with hosts and guests warning viewers that the Biden administration is carrying out a secret plan to flood the country with immigrants who will overwhelm and disenfranchise them. Elected Republicans insist that immigration is a plot to change the demography of America so their own supporters will be shut out of power and oppressed.

This is a terrifying acceleration of conservative radicalism, and it’s happening precisely because they know their party is unlikely to suffer for it at the polls.
They do have recent memory of being held responsible for their misdeeds. Becoming the party of Trump cost Republicans the House in 2018, the White House in 2020, and then the Senate as well. But all that happened while Trump was president. He and his party were the target of voter displeasure and the focus of accountability.

But not anymore. Democrats might hope the 2022 midterm elections resemble 1998, when voters punished Republicans for impeaching Bill Clinton, but the political landscape is very different today. The number of voters who will cross party lines has grown smaller and smaller. Republicans are convinced that fear and hatred — amplified by the presence of a Democrat in the White House — will mobilize their base.

So they have clearly decided there is no line of recklessness or radicalism they should not cross. And we’re all suffering for it.”