Thread by @JuliusGoat

The reality is very simple: The Republican Party is no longer participating in democracy. They're running a series of ops against every election cycle, predicated on the notion that only their power is legitimate.

https://twitter.com/GregTSargent/status/1344982845463404547

This isn't a failed coup. This is a *continuous* coup that stretches back years. It includes Gingrich's scorched earth methods, Bush v Gore, the politicizing of the Bush DoJ, the judicial obstructionism and nullification of the McConnell Senate, and the entire Trump presidency.

It includes decades of tortured racist gerrymandering and disenfranchisement, Citizens United, the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, PACs, and deliberately colluding with foreign powers.

This isn't a failed coup. This is a *continuous* coup that stretches back years.

The Republican Party is not participating in democracy. They are quite obviously an organization dedicated to the destruction and overthrow of the government of the U.S. as we know it, and should be treated as such.

There are no legitimate Republican office-holders.

I think there's a distinction to be made. Democrats are often weak/ineffective, and many are complicit because they're those things by choice—but institutionally they aren't authoritarian, and they aren't fascist. They're a corporatist conservative party.

https://twitter.com/DukeGreene/status/1345006470358831112?s=20

Basically the Democrats are what the media-writ-large pretends Republicans are. They have a left-leaning wing the media-writ-large pretends is a far-left flank of the Democratic party, a party they also pretend is, on average, at least as far left as its most far-left members.

We'd have far less problems if the Democrats were what the Republicans are always saying they are.

But the Republicans are a far-right party of authoritarian extremists, who are actively demolishing democracy.

This is the trajectory the Republican Party has been on for my whole life. It's not sustainable. They're opposed to governance and even knowable reality, on principle.

We can't let this go on.

https://twitter.com/BrandyZadrozny/status/1345007621863071746?s=20

I understand that this sounds extreme. It *is* extreme.

140 House members and at least 1 Senator are going to object to the peaceful transfer of power the grounds that they should not be allowed to lose power.

Anti-democracy is the mainstream GOP position. That's extreme.

They're doing so on behalf of an openly authoritarian, openly white-supremacist, openly corrupt president who aligns with them on almost all policy points, including the notion that 320,000 dead Americans and counting is no responsibility of theirs.

That's extreme.

The president's National Security Advisor was an undeclared foreign operative who went to prison for lying to the FBI about his dealings with Russia.

Trump pardoned him and he returned to the White House in recent weeks to urge him to stage a military coup.

That's extreme.

Trump was impeached for using his office to offer bribes to the Ukranian government in exchange for helping destabilize the 2020 election. Republicans refused to even hear testimony. Trump's attorney made the case nothing the president does can be illegal.

That's extreme.

126 Republican congresspeople signed on to a meritless suit brought without standing by Texas to overturn the result of the Pennsylvania election, basically on the grounds that Republicans should not lose elections.

Anti-democracy is mainstream Republicanism.

That's extreme.

Weeks before the 2020 election, the Republican Senate forced through an inexperienced far-right ideologue who couldn't name the rights protected by the First Amendment, specifically because Trump intended to use the courts to decide the election. He SAID that.

That's extreme.

That is just the shit that happened LAST year.

No—it's just SOME of it.

It's just the stuff that's occurred to me as I write. It barely touched on the deliberate sabotage of our pandemic response.

There's nothing you can say about mainstream Republicanism that isn't extreme.

If you're not *deeply* concerned, you aren't being the realist. You're not being the adult in the room. You aren't facilitating unity. You're enabling unreality.

Very simply, you're wrong.

They aren't participants in our democracy. They should be understood as such.

God, I didn't even mention that they literally sabotaged the postal service during a pandemic.

I didn't even mention the armed white supremacist terrorist occupation of a government building.

If you sit and think it just keeps coming. It's relentless.

Update: The Republican Party is *still* not participating in our democracy, and should be treated as an organization dedicated to the overthrow of the U.S. government.

This is an *ongoing* coup stretching back decades.

https://twitter.com/sahilkapur/status/1345423296544829441?s=20

Republicans aren't participating in democracy. It's fundamentally authoritarian, and should be treated as an organization dedicated to the overthrow of the U.S. government.

This is an *ongoing* coup stretching back decades.

https://twitter.com/ryanlcooper/status/1346541822395473920?s=20

This is an *ongoing* coup, stretching back decades, strategically waged by Republicans.

Republicans are not participating in our democracy. They should be treated as an organization dedicated to the overthrow of the U.S. government.

Any Republican who holds office is engaged in an *ongoing* coup, because the entire premise of the Republican Party is that the government should fail.

Which anyone can clearly observe. Where Republicans hold power, we simply do not have a functioning government—by design.

This is an *ongoing* coup, a part of a civil war that is currently being won by the side that declared it, because they're the only side that's fighting it.

https://twitter.com/iarnsdorf/status/1433404798649393160?s=20