What happens when Republicans don't have Democrats to fight?

[Lonestar]

A Tale of the Idaho Republican Party


This is a pretty healthy-length article and it isn't clickbaity Buzzfeed, promise. It's tracing the path of a rural county Republican party committee as it gets more and more rightwing and starts eating itself. One of the things I found fascinating is that all the trouble makers are rich Californians rather than natives.

[The Romulan Republic]

This sounds like how extremists in general operate, I think. They demand ideological purity, push out anyone not extreme enough, and then, because their movement is defined by fear and hatred of an enemy, begin turning on each other.

If this way of thinking ever won out, and one of these groups managed to destroy all their current "Others", I have no doubt that they would cannibalize their own movement with ever-more vicious infighting, until the last man on Earth was a thrice-inbred lunatic, babbling in his bunker or fox hole behind a wall of explosive booby-traps and assault weapons.

[Zaune]

Good to know it's not just the left that has a problem with Fanatacism Top Trumps. (No pun intended.)

[The Romulan Republic]

Good to know it's not just the left that has a problem with Fanatacism Top Trumps. (No pun intended.)

If anything, the Right is much "better", and more experienced, at this particular game.

I mean, the worst the Left has had so far is a bunch of Bernie or Busters trying to throw the country to Trump because they can't get over a primary loss (behavior explicitly contradicting Sanders' own message).

We haven't come close to having a Left-wing equivalent of the Tea Party insanity yet, thank God. Get back to me when the mainstream position of the Democratic Party is that anyone who ever compromises with a Republican is a Nazi, and only True Socialists can win a primary.

And yet, the Left has still suffered more from its internal divisions than the Right. Because if the Right in America is "good" at one thing, its that no matter how hard they fight each other in the primaries, they tend to toe the party line hard at the end of the day. Less so now, thank God, but still too little too late.

I think that's a big part of our problem. The Right needs to be more willing to disavow its own idiots, lunatics, and sociopaths, and the Left needs to be better at standing shoulder to shoulder and holding its ground. Because right now, we have one party that knows how to win, and one party that knows how to govern. And they ain't the same party.

Edit: In short, the Left needs to stop bickering over petty shit, find its common ground, and stick to it. And the Right needs to stop giving a free pass to anyone with an (R) next to their name.

[Simon_Jester]

This sounds like how extremists in general operate, I think. They demand ideological purity, push out anyone not extreme enough, and then, because their movement is defined by fear and hatred of an enemy, begin turning on each other.

If this way of thinking ever won out, and one of these groups managed to destroy all their current "Others", I have no doubt that they would cannibalize their own movement with ever-more vicious infighting, until the last man on Earth was a thrice-inbred lunatic, babbling in his bunker or fox hole behind a wall of explosive booby-traps and assault weapons.

What usually ends up happening is one of the following after an ideological extremist party triumphs:

1) The party is taken over by whoever is the most viciously effective at "politics for keeps" of the "you win or you die" variety. Statistically, such a person is usually but not always 'moderate' by the standards of the party at the time (i.e. Stalin was neither part of the right nor the left wing of the Communist Party of the USSR at the time that he secured supreme power).

OR

2) The party is held together by a single highly charismatic leader, and this leader draws the party further down the path of insanity as they grow more deranged/hardened in their old age (i.e. Mao Zedong was a lot nicer to the peasantry in 1935 than in 1965, Hitler was a lot less in touch with reality in 1944 than in 1934 or '24).

Basically, the process does self-limit if the extremists actually manage to win, but only because by the time they win, they've already broken down the norms of democratic government. Without freedom of speech and with a brutal secret police force already in place, the ideologues can fight among themselves, yes... but the degenerate end state of the process isn't "war of all against all," it's "victory not to the most rabid ideologue, but to the most talented arch-gangster."

["Gangster" was a common term used by those intellectuals of the democracies who recognized figures like Hitler and Stalin for who and what they were. The reason being, the politics of totalitarianism had few precedents in civil society of the 19th and very early 20th century. Without a vocabulary for what they were dealing with, all observers could say is that to them, it looked a lot like what you might expect if a huge organized crime ring muscled in on a country. No rule of law, summary executions on no grounds besides "you're a threat to the Leader's power base," and so on.]

[Raw Shark]

Edit: In short, the Left needs to stop bickering over petty shit, find its common ground, and stick to it. And the Right needs to stop giving a free pass to anyone with an (R) next to their name.

"I don't belong to an organized political party. I'm a Democrat." --Will Rogers

[SolarpunkFan]

So a party in which the only plank is: "if the democrats are fer it, ahhhm against it!" begins eating itself when there are no democrats to demonize? Fetch me my fainting couch.

Honestly though, let them tear at each other. These are people who think people like me should be hanging from the end of a rope. Telling these guys to drown in their own shit is the nicest thing I can do to them.

[TheFeniX]

Honestly though, let them tear at each other. These are people who think people like me should be hanging from the end of a rope. Telling these guys to drown in their own shit is the nicest thing I can do to them.

While I take immense personal pleasure in watching the GOP eat itself, I don't much like how this could possibly end up. The GOP becomes a joke (again) and Democrats score elections by nature of not being a total trainwreck that burned any goodwill it has. This means they have no incentive to reorganize as a party that represents the electorate outside those that give them money.

This means the GOP, left with no other group to action (read: they already dug past rock bottom with the Tea Party > Alt Right), they would have to be the ones to reorganize as that well dries up. However, I think we'd be much better off starting with a moderate right party (Democrats) shifting into "not bullshit partisan politics" than a far-right one.

I mean, it's possible we get another complete political shift between the parties where Republicans become the champions of civil liberties again, but I'm not betting on it. Instead, unless I'm way off base, Democrats are (as said) going to make up their loses as people realize that "you should have voted, Hippie" and actual progressive Democrats are forced to the back or told to keep their mouths shut.