The Nature of Today’s Republican Party

The Republican Party’s Extraordinary Pattern of Destructiveness emphasized patterns in its behavior: insatiable in its lust for wealth and power, makes a fight over everything, preys on the vulnerable, is deceitful in its communications. All the patterns have in common that they are destructive of the good of the nation.

Behavior never seen before in a system suggests that forces alien to the system are newly arrived within it. Hence, the record of unprecedented developments can serve as a kind of fingerprint of this alien force.

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party. The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition... Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem. - The Washington Post April 27, 2012

Our national discourse continues to grant this Republican Party the status of acceptability, even respectability, as if it were a normal political party, when it has clearly become something quite abnormal.

Imagine a list of all developments in America in the past twenty years that the national representatives of the Republican Party played some role in shaping. Then imagine a list of those developments in which the outcome was better for America because of the efforts of the Republicans.

By the standards of more than two centuries of American history, the political party that is most destructive and dishonest, among the American political parties, is the republican party.