United States | News & Politics

I'm cautiously hopeful that this all signals a fundamental shift in politics. The Reagan (or perhaps even starting with Nixon) policies that blatantly began saying fuck you to the non-wealthy led inevitably to Trump, a grifting narcissist incapable of telling the truth. The grifts and lies were always part and parcel of the GOP, but eventually when you deny reality hard enough you're going to end up with a "strong" man cult.

Democracy doesn't always survive that (and it may not yet), but the cult puts on full display, with no room to hide (except to the cultists themselves), how absolutely insane the policies are. The point where the low-info voters and normal people couldn't ignore things anymore was Roe going down, and the insanity following that out of SCOTUS like making the president a king doesn't help their image.

Now add in the Harris campaign getting support from even nodding toward more left policies, and theoretically this signals that centrist positions are no longer what carries elections. I have no delusions that this will get us even in the realm of Bernie, but the GQP is the broken party at the moment. The cult will only accept the most extreme of christofascists, yet the "normal" repub voters have seen that those policies end up in the Handmaid's Tale (or at least about half of them are rightfully worried about that).

The orange one put the full weirdness of the party on display, and there's no going back. Lindsey Graham is a grifter but not an idiot, and he was prescient when he said "If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed... and we will deserve it."