It’s been “up and running” since before the nation was founded. It controlled the Old South, it used to control the Democrats until they switched to the Republicans during the civil rights controversies of the 1960s. Then Trump showed up and effortlessly shoved aside the old leadership because he appealed so much more to the base than they did.
And again; Trump didn’t need to do much of anything to take over and probably didn’t even to intend to. The old leadership themselves did all the actual work recruiting the far right, allowing it to eat up their party from the inside, grooming their base to be the sort of people who would look at Trump as a messiah.
Not sure where you got that. Trump was just the catalyst, the proto-MAGA had reached the point of control where they could shove aside the old Republican leadership and support for Trump pushed them into doing so. But they aren’t going to give up power now that they have it.
The right wing has almost certainly won effectively permanently, at least for as long as the nation lasts. Eventually their incompetence will destroy it, but they’ll have killed everyone else long before then so it won’t matter to us.
My position is that there is still a Republican party that is acting independently of Trump.
Der Trihs appears to disagree with this, if I’m following his position correctly. He feels that Donald Trump took over the Republican party and that the Republican party now is Donald Trump.
It can happen. The Nazi Party, for example, became Adolf Hitler. The Soviet Communist Party in the thirties and forties became Joseph Stalin. The political organization is just a means for carrying out the leader’s orders.
But when a single individual makes himself this central to the political organization, the organization is in trouble when the leader dies. The Nazi party essentially died with Hitler. The Soviet Communist Party didn’t die with Stalin but it took years to recover, even in a system where all alternative political organizations had been exterminated.
So I asked Der Trihs is this is how he sees the relationship between Trump and the Republican party. And if the Republican party has become just a means of carrying out Donald Trump’s orders, then what will happen when Trump is dead and no longer giving orders?
If this is the situation, then they’re can’t be other strong leaders waiting to replace Trump. If the Republican party had these strong leaders within it, then Trump wouldn’t be in absolute control of the party.
Eventually somebody (or some group of people) will be raised up and assume the position of leader. But the Republicans have a disadvantage that the Nazis and the Soviet Communists didn’t need to worry about; those political organizations didn’t have any domestic rivals (although the Nazis obviously has external enemies in 1945).
But the Democratic party still exists in America. If the Republican party were to have a leadership crisis after Trump’s death and the party had nobody in charge, the Democrats would be there to step in and take power in the country.
I would say that the party has thoroughly embraced an ideology embodied by Donald Trump, their nominal leader, but that even though he apparently has some sort of bizarre charisma that only Republicans can sense, I don’t think he’s the classic charismatic leader. The next Republican leader will take the party in a slightly different directly, but I think post-Trump Republicans will more or less continue the current crazy. If I had to predict, I’d say less fiscally reckless, similarly racist, xenophobic, and anti-LGBT.
I’ve said that I don’t think the Republicans want to eliminate the Democrats. They just want to marginalize them. The Republican ideal, as I see it, would be for the Democratic party to keep existing (so they have somebody to blame for problems) while the Republican party wins the majority of elections.
If nothing else, there’s the spite factor. For most Republicans, it would be more fun to see the face of somebody they beat rather than to just be declared the winner without any competition.
The stable way to run an authoritarian post-democracy for the long term is to keep all the trappings of the previous constitutional democracy, but ensure the opposition party(ies) remain weak, divided, and somehow unable to win more than a pittance of representation. Over and over and over.
That approach greatly eases the succession problem for the authoritarian party in power. Doesn’t eliminate all the issues when their Dear Leader dies, but makes it a hell of a lot more likely the regime and most of its insiders get to continue to enjoy all that sweet sweet power while the Opposition remains in impotent disarray.
These are fascists who admire Hitler; their ideal would be to kill every last person who ever voted Democrat or spoke in support of them, then erase from history the fact they ever existed.
That might be an ideal / wet dream. But it’s real impractical. Impossibly impractical.
Hitler discovered that killing all the Jews was a project bigger than his government could handle, and the percentage of pre-war / pre-Holocaust Germans who were Jewish was much smaller than the percentage of Democrats and non-white non-cishets are in current USA.
Driving as many out of the country as possible and the rest into silent sullen head-down laboring in the lower rungs of society would be fine for them. Yes, with some fraction very showily rounded up and slaughtered. Pour discourager let autres.
Okay, you claim it’s their “ideal”. Can you back that up with a cite? Something from Trump or any other Republican saying they’d like to “kill every last person who ever voted Democrat or spoke in support of them”.
The Felon is not so much a leader as he is a louder. A leader works with the people he has to accomplish things. Felon-ONE just shouts, complains and fires people (I predict that he will “fire” Chief Justice Roberts for not doing his bidding). The Rs, along with many CEOs/boards, are afraid of him because he is such a loose cannon, so they do what he shouts at them. Shouting down the rest of the Rs is how he got where he is – he is more effective at spewing nonsense than the rest of the Rs put together.
Hence, when he is gone, the Republican Party will lose a lot of their momentum. He is the noisy glue that is holding them together, and many of them realize that when he is gone, the Party will start to deflate. Even Vance lacks the pure stupid to carry the Party onward the way the Felon has.