re: #238 Whack-A-Mole

I don’t think it’s likely that there will be a purge in the GOP ranks. Rather I think there will be an exodus of the sane away from the GOP. It’s already begun (see Lidane’s #171 and Wagner is not the first). It’s just a trickle for now but as the crazy train speeds up , I think the pace of the exodus will increase until all that’s left of the GOP will be raving wingnuttery.

IMO, the real question is where the exiles land. Do they go to the party that is centrist in reality but is still tainted by the the far left reputation of its past? Or do they try to form a new party in the middle?

I don’t think the Democrats have ever been far left, so that reputation is one of the many fictions inflicted on us all by the rise of the US extreme right.

We haven’t had a disappearance/emergence of a major political party in the US since the Civil War era. Since then, the Democrats and Republicans have both changed rather than become irrelevant. It will be interesting to see how this model breaks now that change is anathema to the GOP (unless said change is finding ever more creative ways to be rabidly ‘conservative’).