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The Republican Devolution

July/August 2019 45

Even that harsh portrait now seems

mild, as the 

’s voters, activists, and

politicians rally around a leader who

engages in relentless race baiting,

shocking assaults on press freedom, and

nonstop denigration o the rule o
 law.

The problem is not simply that

Republicans have moved much further

to the right than Democrats have moved

to the leftan asymmetry evident not

just in congressional voting patterns but

also in the relative position o each

party’s presidential, vice-presidential,

and judicial nominees. The problem

is also that Republicans have proved

willing to play what the legal scholar

Mark Tushnet has dubbed “constitutional

hardball.” Since at least Newt Gingrich’s

House speakership in the 1990s, Repub-

licans in Washington have deployed

strategies designed to disrupt and

delegitimize government, including the

constant use o the Senate Œlibuster,

repeated government shutdowns,

attempts to hold the U.S. economy

hostage by refusing to raise the debt

ceiling, and the unwillingness to accept

Democratic appointments to key

positionsmost dramatically in the

case o‘ Merrick Garland’s failed

nomination to the Supreme Court.

Things are no better at the state

level, where anti-Democratic strategies

have often become antidemocratic

ones. In Texas, Republicans gerryman-

dered districts by reapportioning

House seats just Œve years after the last

line redrawing, rather than following

established norms and waiting for the

decennial census. In North Carolina

and Wisconsin, Republican-controlled

legislatures attempted to strip power

from state o•ces after elections in

which voters opted for Democrats. In

tional guardrails and emerge from the

collision not chastened but even

more determined to tear them down.

THE GREAT RADICALIZATION

Yet the diagnosis o polarization—true

enough as far as it goes—obscures what

makes that polarization so destructive.

Elite discourse frequently implies that

the two parties are mirror images o each

other, as i
 both were moving at the

same rate toward the political fringes,

shedding norms and principles as they

did so. But this is simply not what is

happening. The core problem is not equal

polarization but asymmetric polarization.

The Democratic Party has moved

modestly leftward, mostly due to the

decline in the party’s presence in the

South. But it still aspires to solve prob-

lems and so is relatively open to compro-

mise. (For example, Obama’s signature

health-care law, now so reviled by Repub-

licans, was built in considerable part from

past Republican proposals.) By contrast,

the Republican Party has moved dramati-

cally rightward and now represents a

radically disruptive force that the U.S.

political system is ill equipped to contain.

This trend well predates Trump.

Four years before Trump became the



’s champion, two respected observers

o
 Washington politics, Thomas Mann

and Norman Ornstein, reluctantly

concluded that the had become “an

insurgent outlier.” It was, they lamented,

ever more “ideologically extreme;

contemptuous o the inherited social and

economic policy regime; scornful o

compromise; unpersuaded by conven-

tional understanding o‘ facts, evidence,

and science; and dismissive o the

legitimacy o its political opposition, all

but declaring war on the government.”

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