The G.O.P. Goes Full-On Extremist

spaceghoti@lemmy.one to politics @lemmy.world – 311 points – Opinion | The G.O.P. Goes Full-On Extremist
nytimes.com

There are no moderate Republicans in the House of Representatives.

Oh, no doubt some members are privately appalled by the views of Mike Johnson, the new speaker. But what they think in the privacy of their own minds isn’t important. What matters is what they do — and every single one of them went along with the selection of a radical extremist.

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Yeah duh. "Moderate Republicans" have been about as common as unicorns for a long time.

In my household we usually call those "Democrats".

I'd love real political parties, instead.

Or how about instead of multiple political parties with arbitrary distinctions across a central divide having a party that attempts to represent one standard deviation around the norm and uses data to decide its platform?

Essentially support nothing unless 68% of the country supports it in multiple reputable polls.

While it wouldn't yet support universal healthcare (only 5% away from that marker and trending towards it), the party would absolutely be against cuts to Medicare and Social Security.

It would have been supporting preventing people with mental illness from owning guns for years now, and increasing the age to purchase to 21.

Term limits and max age for Congress.

Preventing Congress's stock ownership and trading.

Giving Medicare the ability to negotiate drug prices.

Raising the minimum wage.

Weed legalization (as of last year).

Yet somehow when we break these up into competing parties where all that matters is that the other side doesn't get a chance to win because each side loudly focuses on wedge issues or expanded scope popular to their side and unpopular to the other, we end up with representatives that do jack to further any of the above issues.

I'd really love for a data driven party focused on the central majority. Because even though I'm personally more progressive than that party would represent, the battle becomes shifting public mindset on the topics I care about but in the meantime topics everyone cares about will at least be getting work done to advance.

Let's have a single party that wins every election because it appeals to a significant majority of the country rather than more small parties that represent less and less of the country, and have primaries for that party run with ranked choice voting.

yep ' liberal conservative' === ' conservative democrat'..

like, if these groups sat down they would realize they have the same agenda. but the 'party' gets in the way of actual discourse... of actually getting things that need to be done accomplished.

i know, cuz i hate them both. they fucked over bernie. im at the 'let the world burn' stage of my life after hoping for 40 years.

looking back, after what obama and pals did to usurp the last movement in bernie, the united states deserves the cluster fuck that is what trump hath wrought.

Yeah enjoy the civil unrest and insecurity. Remember the toilet paper nonsense when covid kicked off? There are members of congress who've openly talked about political violence being inevitable. Things will probably get much worse before they get better.

I've been legitimately telling my trans/PoC/whatever friends that now is the time to arm yourself and start networking with like-minded people because the right has been doing it for decades. They have connections and established support, both material and propaganda. They do not believe people different than them should exist or should exist as a "lesser" class.

I for one am not looking forward to going underground and trying to survive/resist the Christian Fascism that's trying to grow up in America. Go vote and take your friends with you. Agitate for change, the silent majority never existed, they're just a loud minority.

Yeah, fuck all those many, MANY people who will suffer terribly! I'm upset about Bernie so let it all burn. /s

That's horseshoe theory bullshit. Republicans just elected a speaker of the house who is proud to be an enemy of the first amendment. They are opposed to any effective use of political capital by the government. Wake the fuck up.

So long as you accept this is a shitty, selfish position. The kids who never voted don't deserve fascism. Even most fascists deserve better than that abusive, parasitic, ideology. I can't blame you for being conditioned into learned helplessness, but not helping when you can is not a virtue.

The fact that a fucking Cheney was one of the kind of sort of reasonable by comparison ones, and she was basically chased out, really says it all

"Moderate Republicans," "Good Cops," they're the same thing. If they do exist, they sure as hell are complicit.

They're the most important part of the conspiracy. They give cover to traitors.

Moderate Republicans are no more now. More Boebert/MTG types now.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Trying to keep your party in power after it lost a free and fair election, without a shred of evidence of significant fraud, isn’t just denial; it’s a betrayal of democracy.

For if you read that proposal carefully, getting past the often mealy-mouthed language, you realize that it calls for the evisceration of the U.S. social safety net — not just programs for the poor, but also policies that form the bedrock of financial stability for the American middle class.

As a result, some employers would probably just give their top earners cash, which they could use to buy expensive individual plans, while dropping coverage for the rest of their workers.

Back in 2017 the Congressional Budget Office estimated that Donald Trump’s attempt to repeal Obamacare would cause 23 million Americans to lose coverage.

So Mike Johnson is on record advocating policies on retirement, health care and other areas I don’t have space to get into, like food stamps, that would basically end American society as we know it.

Here’s my guess, based on previous experience: Many voters will simply refuse to believe that prominent Republicans, let alone the speaker of the House, are really advocating such terrible things.

The original article contains 916 words, the summary contains 199 words. Saved 78%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

There are no moderate Republicans American Fascists in the House of Representatives.

Anyone have a good paywall bypass for the nytimes?

Normally I'd post the full text of the article so you wouldn't have to worry about it, but they took down three of my posts and I had no way to fix them after they were removed. So I don't do that any more.

Thanks for doing that in the past. I understand why instances want to try to protect themselves from legal problems. I can usually find a way around the walls, but the NYTimes one has beaten me.

The way I get past it is to disable javascript to a site via uBlock Origin and tell my browser to accept cookies but to always clear them between sessions.

Goes? As in, like, just now? Not, I dunno, years ago?