Published in the October 2013 80th Anniversary issue

We have a problem with our Republicans. They don't much want to govern anymore, and we can't govern without them. This has been a long time coming, but at some point in recent years, America's Republicans, especially elected officials but also a large part of the rank and file, stopped seeing Democrats and many other Americans as their political opponents and started viewing them instead as the enemy, a nemesis bent on destroying the country.

Certainly a significant factor underlying this phenomenon is white insecurity in a changing world, especially in the old Confederacy, in which the 21st-century Republican party has bunkered itself. But whatever the reason, given the symbiosis between the only two political parties we have allowed ourselves, this extremism endangers the governing arrangement that has held for the last century or so — and by and large worked spectacularly well. It's as if one of a pair of Siamese twins suddenly became suicidal. If he harms himself, the other dies as well.

And it is harming itself. The energetic right wing of this new Jacobin Republican party (which has swallowed the party whole) lately has been going through a purification ritual, turning on conservative stalwarts deemed insufficiently radical. In this atmosphere, merely participating in the essential acts of democracy — negotiation, compromise, legislating — becomes suspect. Worse, and perhaps the root of this phenomenon, is the party's now decades-long habit of trying to win elections not on the basis of its governing strategy or vision for the country but rather on scandal-mongering and defamation, the two biggest targets being Bill Clinton, who was impeached by the Republican House, and Barack Obama, whom a majority of Republicans, according to some polls, consider to be an illegitimate president because they believe he was born in Kenya.

There are obvious problems with pursuing scorched earth as a long-term strategy. First, movement conservatives have become so ill-equipped to govern that when they do win elections (as with the Gingrich revolution of 1994), they don't know what they are doing; second, and more important, what started as a tactic to win elections became, over time, a literal belief in the actual evil of their opponents. The party's committed constituencies became conditioned to ascribing the very worst motives to people who in saner times would merely have been their political opponents. A poll conducted in the spring found that 20 percent of Republicans believe Obama could be the actual Antichrist.

The seeds of this malaise were planted in the late 1970s, when some elements of the conservative wing of the party realized that polling data and demographic trends showed the country increasingly identifying with the Democratic party's legislative platform across a full array of issues. Republicans were electable at the presidential level, especially after the disaster of McGovern in 1972, but if the Republicans ever hoped to become the majority party in Congress and in the country, they would have to try something new. That something new has since become known as the "politics of personal destruction," meaning that it wouldn't be enough to try to win on ideas; instead Democratic candidates would have to be attacked as human beings.

For this effort, a then-little-known instrument called a political-action committee was formed in order to legally evade the campaign-finance limits then on the books. The National Conservative Political Action Committee's preferred weapon was direct mail, tons of it, run by the notorious Richard Viguerie, who once sought the presidential nomination of George Wallace's American Independent party, only to lose out to Lester Maddox. NCPAC's chairman, Terry Dolan, candidly revealed the organization's agenda when he said that "a group like ours could lie through its teeth, and the candidate it helps stays clean."

Dolan wouldn't live to see his vision fully realized. Deeply closeted, he died of AIDS in 1986. We now live with his legacy. We now have legions of conservative legislators who are convinced their opposition is unfit or malevolent. We now have the Antichrist.

How do you negotiate the fine points of the Antichrist's health-care plan? Well, you don't. You can't. In fact, many Republicans have come to feel righteous in their willingness to cripple the government rather than accede to governing with evil. They imagine themselves as oppressed, as warriors in league with the Founders, and they feel justified in opposing this evil by any means necessary.

Hence the menacing talk from some prominent Republican politicians in the past few years of "Second Amendment solutions" and armed rebellions and watering the tree of liberty with blood. Leaders of the Republican party indulge this lunacy for fear of losing their influence or their jobs. And unable to govern, the party has collapsed into nihilism. For this moment, at least, America's Republicans have become hopelessly lost, a contracting regional party, overwhelmingly white, appealing to the bitter and angry, fearful of the future, mistrustful of science, believing darkly in its own victimhood — aliens in their own country.

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