The Republican Party needs to be soundly thrashed, or maybe even euthanized, believes Esquire’s Charles Pierce. In a Friday post, Pierce wrote that “for the good of the nation, the Republican Party as it is presently constituted has to die,” and that “it long has been the duty of the Democratic Party to the nation to beat the crazy out of the Republican Party until it no longer behaves like a lunatic asylum. The opportunity to do this…never has been as wide and gleaming as it is right now.”
For Pierce, “crazy” is just another word for “conservatism”: “Ever since the late 1970s…the Republican Party has been reeling toward catastrophe even as it succeeded at the ballot box, and taking the country along with it. Crackpot economic theories were mainstreamed in the 1980s. Crackpot conspiracy theories and god-drunk fantasies were mainstreamed in the 1990s. Crackpot imperial adventures abroad were mainstreamed in the 2000s. And all of these were mainstreamed at once in opposition to the country's first African American president over the past eight years.”
In Pierce’s view, Donald Trump took advantage of an ideologically intoxicated GOP:
Modern conservatism has proven to be not a philosophy, but a huge dose of badly manufactured absinthe. It squats in an intellectual hovel now, waiting for its next fix, while a public madman filches its tattered banner and runs around wiping his ass with it…
Trump doesn't need an intervention. His party does.
