"They could not find Mr. Schumer’s office. He said they asked a Capitol Police officer, who" — get this — "tried to direct them. But they appeared to have gotten nowhere near the minority’s leader’s office. They ended up smoking a few cigarettes inside the building … and one of [them] joked that he had gone to the bathroom and not flushed."
These are the now-visible subterranean fanatics who have devoted their mental vacancy to the Trumpian Cause, but under their rocks you'll find swarming colonies of the equally brainless. A YouGov poll found that nearly half (45 percent) of Republican voters support the recent insurrection and invasive defilement of American decency. A Harris poll found that 64 percent of Republican voters support the chief instigator's handing of the insurrection.
No longer is the question, Will the radical, pseudoconservative Republican Party survive? The question now is, How long will it take for the party to divide like a human cell, spawning
a third, credibly conservative party — then a return to two?
The answer is in the offing.
At the Republican National Committee's winter conference in Florida, one attendee said "people are freaking fed up. Repeatedly, what I kept hearing over and over again was that the president is responsible for the loss in Georgia and the president is responsible for what happened [Wednesday]." The RNC's communications director tweeted a formal statement "calling the riot 'domestic terrorism' and denouncing as 'unfounded conspiracy theories' the false claims of election fraud peddled by Trump."
This too, however: An RNC member from Nevada rose and declared that Trump must stay integral to the GOP and pleaded that his voters are not "disenfranchised," an extravagantly meaningless entreaty. "The crowd applauded loudly after her comments," reports the Washington Post. What's more, Trump "was showered in adulation when he called in to" the meeting.
As an honest-to-God Republican once said, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." Fifty-four years later, another Republican divided the party — in a manner in accord with the 16th president's progressive-conservatism — railing against the ruling GOP's corporate and booboisie ultraconservatism. That, too, could not stand. The party survived, but only in a peevish, malcontented, no-to-any-progress fashion, which has managed to stumble its way into the 21st century.
That same GOP will undoubtedly survive a bit longer, but only with about half its numbers, which means no more will it be a major political party in a two-party system. A third will scramble for its spread-wide refugees. And when the original partisans are too scattered and pathetically few to bother noticing, the third will have finally swallowed what was once the Grand Old Party.
That, anyway, is how I see it.