The Democratic Party doesn’t really have any core beliefs that are flatly insane. There are Democrats who are hard core socialists, which is fringey, but the Republican Party is home to a number of simply ludicrous belief systems and a huge degree of conspiracy theory than amongst Republicans is mainstream. You’ll find nut cases in the Democratic ranks who are antivaxxers or flat earthers but that’s considered silly even among Democrats. Among the Republicans there is very serious, we’re-not-shitting-around support for creationism, birtherism, and belief in ridiculous conspiracy theories that were literally made up from whole cloth months ago, like the nonexistent Uranium One scandal or the recently invented belief that the FBI is a hopelessly corrupt Clinton-police. These are NOT fringe beliefs to Republicans. They are mainstream. The FBI’s nonexistent corruption problem is the subject of most of the clicks at the top of the Fox News webpage right now.
Imagine if most of the top of the CNN webpage was dedicated to debating if vaccines work? You can’t, because it’s preposterous.
The USA is in a position where one of its two major parties is struggling with the concept of objective reality. This ain’t good.
I think there are several processes and issues at work that converge to produce what we are seeing.
There is the US running what is basically a two-party system, where replacing a party is almost impossible. Helped by high levels of partisanship where a large section of the public will vote for a child molester as long as he is from the right party. This means that a party can descend fairly deep into insanity, and still be competitive in an election.
There is the low level of engagement from the voting public, leaving more power in the hands of motivated fringe groups, and a primary system that enhances that power. There are probably issues that I am not aware of, such as how Fox profits of feeding this process, but it all comes back to circumstances that mean that the normal feedback system of elections isn’t working like it does elsewhere.
And you get an increasing frequency of candidates whose personal perception of reality only overlaps with the mainstream one at the edges.
On one hand you have reactionary, proto-fascist, white nationalist voters. They feel America is meant to be a tradcon, white Christian patriarchy and they are enraged that people who don’t fit this definition are moving here and growing in economic, political and cultural influence. Blacks, Latinos, gays, women, atheists, Muslims, etc. Anyone who doesn’t fall into the narrow definition of a tradcon Christian white patriarchal is a threat if they gain power or influence. They don’t seem to mind as long as these groups are submissive and invisible, but once they stand up for themselves or gain any power or influence, watch out. They didn’t mind blacks so much as long as they didn’t vote, run for president, protest police brutality or do anything to stand up for themselves.
Also calling them proto fascist is perfectly valid. This group was behind the kkk and jim crow, which used violence and intimidation to keep ‘their’ society pure by limiting any power and influence of anyone who didn’t fit into their definition of ‘America’.
The other branch is plutocrats and libertarians. They want to abolish government spending on the social safety net and infrastructure to fund supply side tax cuts. They also want to abolish most regulations protecting workers and the environment.
Neither is moderate. Wanting to prevent blacks from voting isn’t moderate. But neither is wanting to eliminate social security and Medicare so the money can give millionaires a tax cut.
Will this lead to a massive fissure or gop civil war? Who knows. Ideally it’ll split the party, and two parties is easier to beat than one. We will see.