It’s pretty striking how many genuinely radical and crazy people are climbing to prominence in the GOP.

A little context. It’s not exactly that Republicans officially embraced crazy. It’s more the party is completely broken so crazy people can exploit the vacuum left behind.

Whenever an American party system starts to break it creates a vacuum. The parties stop working as their coalitions start to shatter. Their ideologies no longer politically work.

And they don’t know what to do.

Normally the parties are effective machines that keep out crazy people. Now there is just empty space and crazy people and radicals. take the opportunity presented to rise up.

Think the Know Nothings

The Know Nothings were the worse major political part America ever produced. They were based around a conspiracy theory out of nutty secret societies that the Pope was trying to overthrown American democracy by flooding it with Catholic immigrants.

Yeah. Nuts.

They actually claimed Catholic priests were kidnapping Protestant women to force them into nunneries to rape them. Series Q vibes.

Then the Whigs blew up over slavery and the Know Nothings took over Congress.

These secret societies ran as the American Party on big patriotic themes about saving the Constitution. Originally it was the Native American party, meaning the “real Americans.” Anglo Protestants. They won a bunch of seats and Congress and in the chaos became the new majority.

The new house speaker was elected as a Know Nothing.

It didn’t last of course. Eventually America got its act together. A new Republican Party grew and gradually pushed the Know Nothings out over the next few years. But for a while the American Party was a major party.

This is what I think is going on. The Republican Party is dying. It’s so damaged it can’t keep out crazies. And the crazies are seizing opportunity. There is no effective political system to push back because it’s totally falling apart.

The solution as always is new politics.

I suspect the Republican Party is dead and never coming back. I see no good way to reverse this process before it’s too late, turning it into an effective vehicle for series debate and ideas. We will have to replace it.

The Democrats will have to find a way to start dealing with our problems seriously if they don’t want to be next. I think Biden and his folks get it. But it’s going to be harder than it appears.

Two years after the Whigs died the Democrats got battered and almost imploded too.