The impending demise of the Republican Party in just two words

| 3:01 pm EST January 19, 2019
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When history looks back on the Republican Party, or at least the current iteration of the party, there will be plenty of pontificating about the reasons for its demise. I’m going to sum it up in just two words.

Sure, there are various two-word phrases that could describe the Republican Party’s impending downfall right now, such as “Donald Trump” and “NRA rubles.” But I’m going to give you a different two words, and bear with me on this: “Jeff Flake.” Yeah, nobody really likes him. But nobody really hates him either, and that’s the point. He was a reasonable moderate-conservative in the barely red state of Arizona. He was mostly loyal to the party, even at the end, when he voted for Brett Kavanaugh despite obviously not wanting to. Yet, for the handful of extremist far-right billionaires who now control the GOP, that wasn’t good enough.

The Republican money bags made a point of forcing Jeff Flake into retirement, and they ran corrupt and fully controllable far-right puppet Martha McSally in his place. This backfired spectacularly when McSally lost to liberal Democrat Kyrsten Sinema. The GOP should have seen this coming. But not only did the Republicans fail to see it beforehand, they failed to understand it after the fact.

When the Republicans had to appoint someone to fill the final two years of the late John McCain’s seat, they could have learned their lesson and appointed a reasonable moderate-conservative. Instead they simply appointed their far-right puppet McSally. The Democrats just finished beating her, so they’ll likely beat her again in two years, meaning the Democrats will control both Senate seats in a red-leaning state.

From a Republican strategic standpoint, there’s just no excuse for this kind of incompetence. But the far-right billionaires wanted an extremist puppet in Arizona or no one, and so they got no one. When you’re so eager to control your own faction, you turn into into something that can’t compete against the opposing faction, that’s when you lose. It’s not just that the GOP has become corrupt and extremist. It’s that it’s become more corrupt and extremist than it knows how to get away with – and that’s why the current iteration of the Republican Party won’t survive for long, even if it does temporarily survive Donald Trump downfall and ouster.