Republican lies have thrust America into its third revolution. We are a nation in crisis.

[Nevilledog]

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Tweet text:
Greg Sargent
@ThePlumLineGS
"It is no longer enough to characterize the present crisis as an internal party dispute. Instead, we are witness to a political revolution that will define American society and governance for decades."

@carriecordero goes big on the stakes of the moment:

Republican lies have thrust America into its third revolution. We are a nation in crisis.
The Republican Party won't give up like the Whigs. It is now a political movement that embraces fraud and deceit as key to its survival and success.
usatoday.com
10:10 AM · May 17, 2021

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/05/17/republican-lies-fraud-america-in-crisis-third-revolution/5070631001/

To read and listen to the headlines after House Republicans voted to remove Rep. Liz Cheney from her leadership post, one would think that the “turning point” in the Republican Party began with its denial of the 2020 election result after Nov. 3, or the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6. Neither of those moments, however, is or was the actual turning point. Instead, the transformation one of the nation’s two major political parties took place well before each of those events. And the longer it takes for the public conversation to recognize how dramatically the Republican Party has already shifted, the longer it will take to develop a coherent civic strategy to protect U.S. democracy going forward.

And we do need a strategy, because this political crisis is not just the internal machinations of a single political party; it is a political crisis of a nation. Indeed, it might not be hyperbolic to characterize our present national state as in the midst of the third revolution.

Tectonic shift in the Republican Party

What was at first an acquiescence to Donald Trump since his nomination at the Republican National Convention in 2016 slowly became a public acceptance, and then an entanglement. Some who were slow to realize the tectonic shift taking place in the Republican Party over the past five years have awakened from their slumber in the wake of the attack on the Capitol. They are a little late. Those who thought they could wait out Trump’s presidential term before getting on the right side of history were wrong; the time for choosing in a way to actually affect the trajectory of the modern-day Republican Party was earlier.

One explanation for this delayed acknowledgement could be that even sophisticated political participants forget how quickly political parties can completely transform or disappear. Some political actors perhaps thought that they had more time. In the 1850s, a decade before the Civil War, the relative balance that had lasted for a generation between the two political parties – the Democrats and the Whigs – collapsed. The Whig Party disintegrated between 1852 and 1856. As this historic transformation shows, fundamental change to a political party need not take decades. It can happen in just a few years.

*snip*