The Republican Party Is Now in Its End Stages – The Atlantic

David Graham: Trump thinks hes found a new defense

The party itself was not a party in any Western sense, but a vehicle for a cabal of elites, with a cult of personality at its center. The Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was an utterly mediocre man, but by the late 1970s he had cemented his grip on the Communist Party by elevating opportunists and cronies around him who insisted, publicly and privately, that Brezhnev was a heroic genius. Factories and streets and even a city were named for him, and he promoted himself to the top military rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union. He awarded himself so many honors and medals that, in a common Soviet joke of the time, a small earthquake in Moscow was said to have been caused by Brezhnevs medal-festooned military overcoat falling off its hanger.

The elite leaders of this supposedly classless society were corrupt plutocrats, a mafia dressed in Marxism. The party was infested by careerists, and its grip on power was defended by propagandists who used rote phrases such as real socialism and Western imperialism so often that almost anyone could write an editorial in Pravda or Red Star merely by playing a kind of Soviet version of Mad Libs. News was tightly controlled. Soviet radio, television, and newspaper figures plowed on through stories that were utterly detached from reality, regularly extolling the successes of Soviet agriculture even as the country was forced to buy food from the capitalists (including the hated Americans).

Members of the Communist Party who questioned anything, or expressed any sign of unorthodoxy, could be denounced by name, or more likely, simply fired. They would not be executedthis was not Stalinism, after allbut some were left to rot in obscurity in some make-work exile job, eventually retiring as a forgotten Comrade Pensioner. The deal was clear: Pump the partys nonsense and enjoy the good life, or squawk and be sent to manage a library in Kazakhstan.

This should all sound familiar.

The Republican Party has, for years, ignored the ideas and principles it once espoused, to the point where the 2020 GOP convention simply dispensed with the fiction of a platform and instead declared the party to be whatever Comradeexcuse me, PresidentDonald Trump said it was.

Read: The hole where Donald Trump was

Like Brezhnev, Trump has grown in status to become a heroic figure among his supporters. If the Republicans could create the rank of Marshal of the American Republic and strike a medal for a Hero of American Culture, Trump would have them both by now.

A GOP that once prided itself on its intellectual debates is now ruled by the turgid formulations of what the Soviets would have called their leading cadres, including ideological watchdogs such as Tucker Carlson and Mark Levin. Like their Soviet predecessors, a host of dull and dogmatic cable outlets, screechy radio talkers, and poorly written magazines crank out the same kind of fill-in-the-blanks screeds full of delusional accusations, replacing NATO and revanchism with antifa and radicalism.

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The Republican Party Is Now in Its End Stages - The Atlantic