Republican extremism has overtaken the former Grand Old Party

"We are also comforted by the words of the Book of Isaiah: “Do not fear, for I am with you. Do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you. I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.” We thank you and pray for the continued safety and well-being of your family. Sincerely, NANCY PELOSI

Echo opinion essay by E.J. Dionne, published in The Washington Post:

"balance! looks awfully good when it’s put up against an extremism"

There was a time when an assault on the spouse of the speaker of the House with a hammer to the skull would have brought the country’s politicians together in horror. We don’t live in that country anymore.

Our politics are deformed, degraded and disgusting, but the problem is more specific than that. One of our major parties has given extremism free rein because the leader of the extremist forces is a former president whose support the party’s candidates desperately need in next week’s midterm elections.

Donald Trump was at it again on Tuesday, spouting lies to feed conspiracy theories about the attack last Friday on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, at their home in San Francisco.

“Weird things going on in that household in the last couple of weeks,” Trump said on a talk show. “The glass, it seems, was broken from the inside to the out — so it wasn’t a break-in, it was a break-out.” This was repulsive, deceitful nonsense.

The assault on the Democratic leader’s husband that was intended as violence against her should have been an opportunity for cheap grace in a GOP whose advertising makes Pelosi a favored punching bag. A dose of empathy would have signaled that politics aren’t everything.

A fair number of old-line politicians in the party understood this, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), who was unequivocal in his condemnation. 

But even Republicans who said the right things won’t go to the root of the party’s problem. They lack the courage to break with Trump, Trumpism and the fanatics who continue to lie about the outcome of the 2020 election and, in the case of the growing ranks of QAnon devotees, cast Democrats as Satanists and child molesters.

That’s because the Republicans’ strategy depends on heavy turnout among Trump’s most fervent supporters while getting moderate voters to ignore the ghoul in the room and cast their ballots to protest inflation. Never mind, as my Post colleague Catherine Rampell pointed out, that the GOP offers no solution to the problem and would, as former president Barack Obama has been arguing, make life more difficult for workers and retirees.

In fact, the accent on anger, resentment and wild falsehoods is closely linked to the party’s lack of a comprehensive program.

Solving public problems requires taking government’s role seriously: in making investments, lifting the incomes of the jobless and low-paid, and creating systems of social insurance that help those who fall on hard times. Some in the GOP admitted as much by supporting President Biden’s infrastructure bill and the Chips and Science Act.

But an open embrace of an active public sector within a market economy would fly in the face of the party’s long-standing claims that government is always the problem and never the solution. Republicans paper over their contradictions by walking away from policy talk. In this vacuum, conspiracy theorists roam free.

There was always a better way for the GOP, and few articulated it as well as President Dwight D. Eisenhower when he outlined “the need to maintain balance” in his remarkable 1961 farewell address.

Ike detailed what he had in mind: “balance between the private and the public economy; balance between cost and hoped-for advantage; balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between action of the moment and the national welfare of the future.”

“Good judgment seeks balance and progress,” he concluded. The alternative, he said, was “frustration.” A corollary: If you’re not seeking balance, you exploit the frustration you sow.

If you look at the campaigns actually happening on the ground, it’s Democrats who are hewing closer to the great Republican president’s vision. A prime example: Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) is running for the Senate by reaching out to the parts of the Trump electorate who backed the former president not to endorse lunacy but to protest their economic conditions. A Ryan victory would send a powerful signal that a different kind of politics is possible.

Appeals to balance are obvious in other Democratic campaigns. In New Hampshire, incumbent Sen. Maggie Hassan has practically made the word “bipartisan” her middle name. In North Carolina’s Senate race, former state Supreme Court chief justice Cheri Beasley emphasizes controls on pharmaceutical prices in the Inflation Reduction Act, as well as the Chips and Science Act’s investments in manufacturing and high tech. In Pennsylvania, Reps. Matthew Cartwright and Susan Wild — contrary to claims that Democrats are playing down the economy — focus almost entirely on bread and butter.

“Balance,” unfortunately, is not much of a rallying cry — one reason Eisenhower’s speech is not as widely remembered as it should be. But balance looks awfully good when it’s put up against an extremism that can’t even commiserate with a politician whose husband has been grievously assaulted.