Thread by @SethCotlar

Important piece by @SamAdlerBell on the cohort of young radicals who are pushing and will continue to push the GOP ever rightward into the illiberal fever swamps of apocalyptically reactionary identity politics. newrepublic.com/article/164408…

Most of these young "conservatives" seek to conserve or restore an order they know only through the lens of right wing history books or old movies, or through the self-serving tales of "the old days," spun over tumblers of whiskey, by mentors at Claremont or Heritage.

Reading this piece left me thinking how radically out of touch these ideologues are, & also how likely they are to be the "brain trust" of the future GOP should it succeed in using gerrymandering, courts, the Senate, lies about election fraud, & the EC to become a ruling minority

In 2012, almost ten years ago, the eminently centrist pairing of Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein tried to warn us, breaking with their past modes of analysis to point out just what a threat to democracy the Republican Party had become. ***2012*** npr.org/2012/04/30/151…

The lights have been blinking red on the anti-democratic slide of the GOP for quite a while now, and yet the general public awareness of the problem remains quite limited. There are many reasons for that...but regardless of the reasons, it's truly troubling.

I'm sure you remember this genre of story that followed the 2016 election. It just points to a common and unavoidable dynamic in which people vote for someone or something with only a limited understanding of what they're voting for.

Most Americans will read Sam's story about the future America imagined by those young right wing radicals and think "oh, that's nutty, that can't happen here." I'm sorry to inform you that no such guarantees are built into the fabric of the universe.

I would love to read a story about people inside the GOP who are working diligently to arrest the rightward, illiberal lurch of the party...but you don't see many stories like that today, because, well, there's not much material to work with.

A few weeks after the 2016 election I happened to be having dinner with some colleagues who write about democratic backsliding in Latin America. I asked them "so what's your take on Trump," and they just looked knowingly at each other, and then grimaced at me.

I hate to invoke "the founders" but here it goes anyway. Folks like Madison, Jefferson, and many of their peers thought informed "public opinion" was an essential dimension of any polity that rested upon popular sovereignty. Talk to your friends, family, and neighbors about this.

I mean, if the majority of my fellow citizens voluntarily want to choose to live in a theocracy or a monarchy, then I guess there's not a whole lot I can do to stop that. But call me naive, but I'm pretty confident that's NOT anything close to what a majority of Americans want.