The Republican Party: "A malignant force in American life"

Osita Nwanevu in the New Republic:

...Bipartisanship has become a both particularly sacred and particularly destructive part of the American civil religion, a hollow and superficial virtue promoted by political elites responsible for the domestic and foreign policy failures the two parties have crafted together over the past 30 years—from the Iraq War and support for oppressive regimes abroad to the expansion of extreme poverty and the carceral state at home. 

But bipartisanship, as Biden knows, also remains appealing to the majority of the American electorate, including the majority of Democrats. 

The daunting task ahead for progressive activists is convincing ordinary voters that a major political party—prejudiced, venal, and unmoored from reason—can lose the right to govern. 

Because without a pressure campaign making it clear that Republican power is unsustainable for the country and the planet—that a party in thrall to a racist demagogue and aligned against the Voting Rights Act is not only disagreeable but dangerous—Democrats will never build the support necessary to structurally reform and rebalance the American political system...

...It’s left to the rest of us to face the truth squarely: Donald Trump is not a departure from the values defining the Republican Party, but the culmination of its efforts to secure power in this country. 

The question before us is not how much more the Republican Party might be willing to tolerate from the president but how much more we are willing to tolerate from the Republican Party. 

The GOP, founded by a generation of extraordinary men more committed to human freedom and the ideals expressed by our founding documents than the Founders themselves, has had a strange and improbable history. 

Built in opposition to the institution of slavery, the Republican Party is now a reliable opponent of equality and a malignant force in American life—a cancer within a patient in denial about the nature and severity of her condition. 

It should be not only defeated but destroyed—vanquished from the American political scene with a finality that can only be assured not by electoral politics or structural reforms alone, but by a moral crusade...

See also The Shelf Life of a Deplorable.

Rob's comment:

I disagree that the Republican Party should be "destroyed." 

After smashing it at the ballot box, better instead to have the Repug Party live on as the political home for our "deplorable" minority: racists, religious crackpots, mysogynists, homophobes, anti-Semites, gun fetishists, and anti-science flat-earthers. 

If all our rotten apples are in one barrel, they will be in public view and under open political quarantine.