Secular Café: Republican Party too "wacko"

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Republican Party too "wacko" May 27th 2012, 21:04 Republican Party too 'wacko' to still be considered mainstream - The Irish Times - Sat, May 26, 2012 Quote: Two prominent political scientists say the Grand Old Party has become more loyal to party than to country and is to blame for dysfunction in the US political system. They cited Mitt Romney's dismissal of global warming as a hoax, MR's extreme anti-immigrant policy, Allen West's claims of Commies in Congress, and a Republican audience cheering when someone stated that someone unemployed who loses medical insurance should be allowed to die. Quote: These examples are cited by two prominent political scientists, Thomas Mann of the liberal Brookings Institution and Norman Ornstein of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, as evidence the Grand Old Party is no longer mainstream. The GOP, they write, has become “an insurgent outlier – ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition”. Though the two gentlemen have long pointed their fingers at both parties, they have decided that it's the Republican Party that deserves most of the blame nowadays. Quote: Last summer’s debt-ceiling fiasco showed how Republicans “have become more loyal to party than to country”, Mann and Ornstein write. ... The authors quote Mike Lofgren, a Republican congressional staffer who resigned last year, after nearly three decades, saying the party “is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th-century Europe”. That article referred to ‘It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With The New Politics of Extremism’ by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein - The Washington Post Quote: Now Mann and Ornstein have decided that the time has come to abandon the evenhandedness still fashionable among political journalists (as opposed to the partisan talking heads and bloggers now so popular). The blunt result will be invigorating for some readers, and infuriating for others. Their principal conclusion is unequivocal: Today’s Republicans in Congress behave like a parliamentary party in a British-style parliament, a winner-take-all system. But a parliamentary party — “ideologically polarized, internally unified, vehemently oppositional” — doesn’t work in a “separation-of-powers system that makes it extremely difficult for majorities to work their will.” There's an additional problem. Quote: Mann and Ornstein chose not to explore the history of today’s voters’ cynicism, a powerful ingredient in the poisonous brew they describe. Doing so would have given them a chance to add some even-handedness to their story. In 1964, on the eve of the disastrous Vietnam War, 77 percent of Americans expected their government do “do the right thing” always or most of the time, according to opinion polls. Ten years later, after Vietnam and Watergate, 77 percent had become 36. Today it is less than 20 percent who have that confidence in the government. The Vietnam War, largely the work of Democrats, and Richard Nixon together destroyed Americans’ confidence in their governing institutions. It has never been restored. Several generations have grown up since reflexively distrusting their government.

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