Several years ago, former GOP House Majority Leader John Boehner bluntly stated: “There is no Republican Party.”
Apart from the traditional Republican establishment represented by Sen. Mitt Romney and a score or two of other GOP legislators, Republicans comprise a loose confederation of factions. These factions are united in their opposition to one-person-one-vote democracy and/or in their pursuit of White-identity politics.
James Madison defined a faction as “a number of citizens … who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”
As is evident from the following list, factions within the Republican confederation often have overlapping memberships:
Retirees whose chief concern is their 401(k) accounts; understandably disgruntled members of the White working class; White Christian fundamentalists; conspiracy theorists, including devotees of QAnon; Second Amendment gun-rights extremists; Bundyite sovereign citizens; Whites who fear the loss of their majority status due to demographic shifts; White supremacists and nationalists, including ultra-right-wing unregulated militias such as the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys.
How long before the GOP reforms itself? How long will a vote for a Republican candidate, more likely than not, be a vote against government of all the people, by all the people and for all the people? How long will the former Party of Lincoln remain the Confederation of Anti-Democracy Factions? How long before America once again has two major political parties?
Andrew G. Bjelland, Salt Lake City