Sunday, December 20, 2020

A Republican Party Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand | Brennan Center for Justice

A Republican Party Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand | Brennan Center for Justice
By Andrew Cohen (former legal analyst for CBS News and 60 Minutes)

Seems to me that good-faith conservatives and “Never Trumpers” have two primary choices in the wake of one of the most dismaying fortnights in modern American political history. They can stand taller in opposition to Donald Trump and try to force from the Republican Party the anti-democratic, anti-science, conspiracy theorists who have spent the past five weeks trying to overturn the results of a free and fair election. Or they can abandon what’s left of the GOP to the delusionists and the ignorant and the ill-meaning and create a legitimate third party that gives earnest, honest Republicans another viable option at the ballot box in 2022 and beyond.

What anti-Trump Republicans can no longer do in the wake of the party’s chilling embrace of Trump’s attempted coup is to pretend that their party can exist, “half free and half slave”, with its future held captive by a vengeful, unhinged ex-president and his many enablers and propagandists. If the events of the past five weeks have shown the reality-based world anything, it is that the Republican Party itself has been corrupted by Trumpism to the point where it endangers American democracy itself. The postelection period also has made clear that the Trumpists will never peacefully coexist with who’s left of reality-based Republicans.

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